Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema 9780748692347

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Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

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EDINBURGH STUDIES IN EAST ASIAN FILM Series Editor: Margaret Hillenbrand Forthcoming titles Alternative Visions, Alternative Publics: Independent Chinese Documentary Dan Edwards Ozu, History and the Representation of the Everyday Woojeong Joo www.euppublishing.com/series/eseaf

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Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

Qi Wang

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© Qi Wang, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Adobe Chaparral Pro by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9233 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9234 7 (webready PDF) The right of Qi Wang to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1   Understanding Postsocialism on a Personal Scale 4   Two Siblings or Generational Subjects of Chinese Postsocialism 7   The Forsaken Generation and Historical Consciousness 10   Material, Structure and Methodology 13 Part I From the Past: Subjectivity, Memory and Narrative 1  Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject 25   Subjectivity and Spatiality in Yangbanxi and 1980s Cinema 28   A Ship on a River: The Historical Space in Night Rain in Bashan 36   The Figure of a Forsaken Child 44   The Forsaken Generation: Take It Personally and Historically 50 2  For a Narration of One’s Own 55   Wilful Chance and Futile Subjects in To Live and Farewell, My Concubine 56   To Figure New Subjects: Independent Cinema and Personal Filmmaking 61   Self-narrative I: I Love XXX and a Radical Recollection of History 64   Self-narrative II: Fractured and Fragmented In the Heat of the Sun 71   The Delirium of a Fool: Narrative Excess and the Subject’s Alter Ego 77   Self-portraits of New Cinematic Subjects out of the Dirt of History 86 Part II In the Present: Camera, Documentary and Performance 3  Surface and Edge: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye 93   Jia Zhangke: A Subjective Metanarrative Vision 95   Platform: Cinematic Space and Multivalent Subject Positions 97

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vi  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema   Superficial Time: Writing on the Wall 103   Superficial Space: Debris, Wanderers and Vehicles 109   Lou Ye: Dwelling on the Edge of the Camera 114 4  Personal Documentary 124   Chinese Verité and Duan Jinchuan’s Invisible Gaze 127   Personal Documentary 133   I Graduated: Subject-ing the Past to the Present 139   West of the Tracks: Subject-ing the Present to History 146 5  Performing Bodies in Experimental and Digital Media 155   Nightingale, Not the Only Voice: A Performance of Inter-subjectivity 156   Shi Tou: Women, Bodies and Herself 164   Cui Zi’en: Embodying Realities and Performing Identities 168   Play with the Body of History: Experimental and Digital Media 176 Conclusion: China’s Luckless but Hopeful Angels of History

184

Notes 195 Selected Filmography and Bibliography 223 Index 237

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Figures

Figures  1.1 Night Rain in Bashan: The open spatial structure inside the cabin 38  1.2 Night Rain in Bashan: Revolutionary (Liu Wenying) and counter-revolutionary (Qiu Shi) change positions [i] 41  1.3 Night Rain in Bashan: Revolutionary (Liu Wenying) and counter-revolutionary (Qiu Shi) change positions [ii] 41  1.4 Night Rain in Bashan: Revolutionary (Liu Wenying) and counter-revolutionary (Qiu Shi) change positions [iii] 42  1.5 Night Rain in Bashan: A forsaken child – Juanzi 44  1.6 Night Rain in Bashan: A forsaken child – Juanzi wandering alone on the ship 45   2.1 Avant-garde play I Love XXX: A collective monologue 66  2.2 In the Heat of the Sun: The mysterious fool 78  2.3 In the Heat of the Sun: Ma Xiaojun floating in the pool, an image of both death and birth 84  2.4 Dirt: Ye Tong’s flashback of a childhood game playing revolutionary and counter-revolutionary 88  2.5 Dirt: Ye Tong begins her new journey 90  3.1 Platform: The second opening shot of Platform 99  3.2 Platform: The third opening shot of Platform restages the revolutionary skit ‘Train Heading for Shaoshan’ 102  3.3 Xiao Wu: Xiao Yong looks at the writing on the wall 105  3.4 Xiao Wu: Xiao Wu looks at the writing on the wall 105  3.5 Platform: Non-diegetic writing on the wall 108  3.6 Still Life: Superficial relationship between figure and place 111   3.7 Platform: Ending scene – superficial relationship between character (a slouching Cui Mingliang) and history (the world outside hometown) 113  3.8 Purple Butterfly: Situ – an innocent sidekick character receives a formal, frontal introduction 116

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viii  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema  3.9 Purple Butterfly: An image of doomed lovers in archival footage 118 3.10 Purple Butterfly: Jump cuts on Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) [i] 120 3.11 Purple Butterfly: Jump cuts on Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) [ii] 120 3.12 Purple Butterfly: Jump cuts on Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) [iii] 121 3.13 Purple Butterfly: Jump cuts on Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) [iv] 121  4.1 I Graduated: An unofficial entry onto the documentary scene 141  4.2 I Graduated: An elegiac ending 143  4.3 I Graduated: An elegiac ending – closing image of the documentary 143  4.4 West of the Tracks: A ‘ritual entry’ into the historical space of Tie Xi Qu 148  4.5 West of the Tracks: Following the workers in their space [i] 149  4.6 West of the Tracks: Following the workers in their space [ii] 150  4.7 West of the Tracks: Central perspectives [i] 153  4.8 West of the Tracks: Central perspectives [ii] 153  5.1 Shi Tou and That Nana: Shi Tou in front of her paintings 166  5.2 Shi Tou and That Nana: A haptic camera 167  5.3 Night Scene: Queer identities and fish skins [i] 171  5.4 Night Scene: Queer identities and fish skins [ii] 172

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For my sister Wang Qiong (10.7.1966–10.13.2003) and her generation

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements This book formally began as a doctoral dissertation at the Department of Film and Television, University of California, Los Angeles. My deep gratitude goes to Nick Browne, who supervised my work, and to Vivian Sobchack, John Caldwell and Yingjin Zhang (UC San Diego), who also read it and made innumerable invaluable suggestions. I would also like to thank Henry Jenkins, William Uricchio and Jing Wang for being inspiring advisors at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, where the idea of this book saw its first seed in the form of a Masters thesis. My gratitude for having had the incredibly good fortune of studying and working with all these wonderful mentors remains endless.   From 2005 to 2006, I did a six-month field research in China for this book. On that extended trip, I have benefitted immeasurably from conversations with Chinese filmmakers, producers, artists, scholars and film festival organisers. They are: directors Cheng Yusu, Cui Zi’en, Jia Zhangke, Lu Chuan, Lou Ye, Meng Jinghui, Shi Runjiu, Wang Chao, Wang Quan’an, Wang Xiaoshuai, Wang Guangli, Zhang Ming, Zhang Yang, Zhang Yuan, Zheng Dasheng; documentary filmmakers Duan Jinchuan, Ji Dan, Jiang Yue, Wu Wenguang, Li Yifan, Li Xiaoshan, Li Xin, Liao Yibai, Yan Yu, Zhou Hao, Chen Xinzhong, Huang Weikai, Huang Wenhai; artists Shi Tou, Ou Ning, Cao Fei; screenwriter Cheng Qingsong; producers Ms Lola of Yunnan New Film Project and Ms Zheng Qiong of Beijing Channel Zero Media; Prof. Lin Xudong and Ms Xiao Lili of Beijing Communications University; Prof. Liu Yibing, Huang Shixian, Hao Jian, Cui Weiping and Zhang Xianmin of Beijing Film Academy; Dr Guo Jing of Yunnan Social Sciences Academy; Mr Jia Zhijie of Zhang Yuan Film Studio; Mr Zhu Rikun of Fanhall Films; Mr Zhuang Songlie of Sculpturing Time Café and Ms Leng Yi of Box Café; Mr Cui Yongyuan and Ms Hu Jincao of China Central Television; as well as the wonderfully friendly and helpful gentlemen from ‘South of the Clouds’ (Yunnan) – He Yuan, Yang Kun and Yi Sicheng of Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival. I also want to thank Mr Huang Weikai and Mr Liang Zhaoyang for their wonderful hospitality during my research in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Very special thoughts go to Yang Kun, who passed away unexpectedly in 2010, at the age of forty-three. On our meandering walks in the streets of Kunming, I had the precious opportunity of witnessing his effortless love for his hometown and its unique history.

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xii  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema   I also want to thank Robert Sung and Patsy Sung for their generous support throughout my study at UCLA. The endowment of the 2007 Edna and Yushan Han Award, which was made available under their supervision, has played a major role in allowing me to finish an important part of my dissertation without financial worries.   At the Georgia Institute of Technology, the indefatiguable and precise criticism of Vinicius Navarro has played an utterly central role in helping me transform my dissertation into a real book. My hearty gratitude remains endless for that incredibly generous and inspiring support. I also want to use this opportunity to thank my deeply respected senior colleagues, J. P. Telotte and Angela Dalle Vacche, for their professional guidance on my first job and for their generous faith in my work. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, the award of a course teaching release in the fall of 2012 was immensely helpful for the completion of revision on this book.   I presented earlier versions of various parts of this book and related research in other aspects of independent Chinese cinema at UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, New York University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Hong Kong Baptist University, as well as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference (SCMS), the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies conference (NECS) and the Visible Evidence conference. I thank my hosts, audiences and co-speakers on all these occasions for their critical dialogue and generous hospitality.   I also want to thank my series editor, Margaret Hillenbrand, and the anonymous readers of my manuscript for their insightful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful for the incredible fortune of working with my editor Gillian Leslie, who has stayed wonderfully responsive and supportive throughout the publication process. With impressive professional support from the editorial and production staff at Edinburgh University Press, including the extremely helpful and sweet copy-editor Elizabeth Welsh, my book enjoys an utterly pleasant process of going into publication.   Last but not the least, warmest loving gratitude to my lovely family: my father Wang Yusheng, mother Wang Shiying, sister Wang Ling and nephew Li Shitao. It is always because of you that I have come this far and will continue on the journey extending before me.   An earlier version of part of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Navigating on the Ruins: Space, Power and History in Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentaries’, in Asian Cinema 17: 2 (Spring/Summer 2006), pp. 246–55.   Part of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Embodied Visions: Chinese Queer Experimental Documentaries by Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en’, in positions: asia critique 21: 3, pp. 659–81 (Copyright 2013, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press).

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Introduction

Introduction In the summer of 1966, a young Chinese worker makes a decision that is going to change his life and that of his family. He swims down the Yangtze River, calculating his strokes in such a way that he would arrive in the waters of Wuhan on 16 July. Chairman Mao, at the age of seventy-three, had his swim there that day as a famous message to the world: he was still robust and strong enough to be the leader of the state. Three weeks later, the Cultural Revolution started. However, the pious young worker arrives one day too late and misses the Great Leader. At around the same time, his wife gives birth to their son. After returning to Sichuan where he works and lives, the man lies about his experience, elevating it to an enviable tale of his meeting with Mao. He soon becomes the head of the local ‘rebel faction’ (zaofan pai) in the Cultural Revolution, which in his city deteriorates into armed fights between factions that all claim to be Mao’s devoted followers and guards. Bullets fly, weapons strike and limbs thrash about, killing and injuring many. The man becomes increasingly violent at home as well, submitting his wife and son to frequent abuse. The young boy grows up with accumulating hatred and pain.   Such is the background of Born in 1966 (Shengyu 1966), an unrealised screenplay by the film critic Cheng Qingsong1 (b. 1968), who edited My Camera Doesn’t Lie (Wo de sheyingji bu sahuang) – a quintessential dossier of Sixth Generation filmmakers of China.2 In my interview with him in November 2005, Cheng spoke in particular about the ending of the story. The son, also the first-person narrator, finds himself aboard a ship on the Yangtze River. The year is again 1966, but the narrator is at the same age as his father when he made his fateful swim. The ship is about to depart. A young man yells from the bank, ‘Wait, please wait!’ The narrator, recognising the man as his father, helps him to get onboard. Unaware who the helper really is, the young father offers him a cigarette. ‘Are you going to Wuhan?’ asks the narrator. ‘No. Why would I go to Wuhan? I’m on a business trip to Chengdu’ is the reply. Knowing exactly why he asks the question, the narrator turns around, emotions welling up. The ship is departing. He sees his mother, pregnant with him, standing on the pier and watching the ship leave. In Cheng’s own words, the ship is leaving on the Yangtze and at the same time on Lethe – the river

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2  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema of oblivion in Greek mythology. The pained and spiteful son finally reaches reconciliation and starts forgiving his father. Before his fateful pilgrimage in 1966, the father was once apolitically ordinary and fundamentally human.   Coincidentally, Cheng’s story resonates with a scenario by Wang Guangli (b. 1966), the filmmaker of I Graduated (Wo biye le, 1992), which inaugurated China’s contemporary independent documentary movement together with Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing (Liulang beijing, 1990). Wang envisions a science fiction film that also involves time travel between the present and the Cultural Revolution. An extremely successful Chinese businessman, also born in 1966, finds himself with access to all the resources ever dreamed of as regards money and power. Marvelling at the perfection of his existence, he becomes enamoured by the idea of creating someone who would live exactly like himself, from birth and every step along the way. He immediately puts this fantasy into practice: finding the most fitting woman, getting her pregnant and calculating the pregnancy so that his son will be born under the same zodiac signs as himself, thirty-six years before. Everything happens just the way he plans it. For the son, who is never to know or meet him and for whom a surrogate father will be arranged instead, the businessman buys the village where he himself grew up and remodels it in meticulous imitation of what it was like in his own childhood and adolescence. The village is furnished with all the elements of socialism and the Cultural Revolution: tractors, Maoist slogans on the walls, propaganda broadcasts, the Red Guards, the sent-down educated youth, open-air screenings of revolutionary opera movies and so on. Satisfying the man’s monitoring, his son turns out exactly like him. Every experience in the boy’s life replicates his own, thirty-six years before. However, the businessman forgets something very important. It is something that has to do with feelings, a missing memory that proves fatal. Because of it, his son, while as intelligent and perfect as himself, grows into his exact opposite and undertakes evil deeds powerfully and successfully.3   Although narrated in very different tones – one dreamy and melancholic, the other sarcastic and humorous – these two anecdotes of cinematic imagination demonstrate a number of intriguing parallels. First, both stories accommodate a double temporal frame of past and present, with the past specifically located in the Cultural Revolution that is at once a historically real time and an imaginative background for fictional relationships. Plus, the autobiographical resemblance between the protagonists and the authors – Cheng and Wang were born in 1968 and 1966, respectively; Cheng came from Sichuan and Wang grew up in a village – means that past and present acquire an even more unsteady aura in the quivering waves of fiction and non-fiction.   Second, both stories demonstrate a desire to return to the past and ‘correct’ something at its origin. To do that, both assign narrative centrality to the trope of memory (and its opposite, forgetting), which is mobilised as a powerful yet tricky tool for relating to the past. Specifically, memory of a very personal and revisionist kind becomes a crucial means for the birth of a new self. By imagining a different past where his father has never left on a political pilgrimage and

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Introduction  3 subsequently never inflicted such harm on him and his mother, the narrator in Born in 1966 is able to break free from the damage that time has done to him through the father figure. While the megalomaniac in Wang’s magical realist tale appears much less reflexive in his desired relationship with the past, the slipperiness of his memory proves iconoclastic and liberating, as his son, like the father figure in Cheng, is able to break free from the inertia of history (and, perhaps, becomes truly renewed and reborn).   Third, besides the figure of a returned and reborn self, the historical vision implied in both stories recognises cycles and searches for an opportunity to break these cycles. For example, both feature an intergenerational relationship that is characterised by a shared and intertwined victim/victimiser status. The father as a victim of history is bound by his experience; as a victimiser, he imposes violent authority upon his family. The son suffers from his father’s violent authority; he also becomes a victimiser when relaying the kind of violence he suffered. In Born in 1966 the son strikes a woman who loves him and drives her to attempt suicide; in Wang’s story the manipulated son is described as an evil scourge.4 The parallel victim/victimiser status is also relayed and returned, and father and son seem like comparable and recycled subjects of socialist history, until the son returns to rewrite the past and give a new birth to himself (as well as a new beginning for his father). Wang’s futuristic imagination has a much darker and more cynical twist, but his narrative arrangement of the son going against the father’s intention (as a result of the latter’s forgetfulness) also evidences a break away from slavish memory and the need for imaginative revisions of the past.   It turns out that the coincidence in Cheng’s and Wang’s cinematic imaginations is not an isolated case in the visual culture of contemporary China. From the early nineties on, a large body of cinematic and other media creations – mostly independently produced – demonstrate a similar keen interest in the trope of personal memory, the intricate relation between past and present, and the inscription of the self in the representational text that sets to write history differently. Cutting across feature films, documentaries, experimental videos and digital media, this practice of what I call ‘personal filmmaking’ often boldly experiments with narrative and film form. With its highly stylised and frequently idiosyncratic imaging of Chinese life, it forms a stunning contrast to official and commercial media that rely on conventional classical narratives and star appeal in visualising Party state endeavours and creating communist or martial arts heroes.   Why is there such a phenomenon at this moment in Chinese history? Apart from the technical reason that independent productions became allowed in the reform era and personalised digital media (especially DV) was increasingly available for individual expression and creativity, what other factors – particularly historical, cultural and psychological – need to be considered for a precise understanding of the ideological content and aesthetic forms of this personal cinema and media? What kind of new historical subjects do they give birth to? And toward what kind of new relation to history and representation do they contribute? These are some of the questions this book ponders and answers.

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4  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema   Specifically, through a study of selected texts of personal filmmaking and related media, particularly focusing on works that are created by generational cohorts of Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli – whom I identify as the ‘Forsaken Generation’ of postsocialist China, including figures such as Meng Jinghui, Jiang Wen, Guan Hu, Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, Cui Zi’en and many others – this book provides a critical narrative of the development and manifestation of a peculiar historical consciousness that is postsocialist and millennial, generational and individual, imagistic and representational. Experimenting with various forms and functions of memory, narrative and subjectivity, these works not only engage the viewer in an epistemologically conscious relationship with the text, but also in the process produce – or give birth to – their creators, characters and subjects, as well as their audience as self-made, conscious subjects of history in the postsocialist era.

Understanding Postsocialism on a Personal Scale Much like the characters in their stories, Cheng and Wang were born in the sixties and came of age at a time when China started moving away from socialism into the contemporary reform era. In 1976, Chairman Mao died and the decade-long Cultural Revolution ended. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping implemented economic reforms and introduced a market economy. The 1980s ushered in liberation, exhilaration and confusion in many aspects and culminated in the Tiananmen democratic movement (and its crackdown) in 1989. From the early 1990s on, the past was further submerged under the fold of reform and development that spread as the country’s new skin and identity and that, most recently, received intensive facelifts through the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. A lot has happened within a very short span of time. Yet because of official control of speech and media, unofficial interpretations of the past and alternative observations of the present remain at the margins of society and history.5 When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, it was concluded as ‘ten years of great disaster’ (shinian haojie) to be hastily turned over as an embarrassing and painful chapter.6 The official strategy of forgetting and moving on, while indeed having success vis-à-vis economic reforms, leaves its toll in the realm of personal memory as inconclusive mourning and in the realm of the social psyche as a continued wound, because the system of oblivion is operating on a principle of neglect and injustice in the name of progress, stability and, most recently, harmony. While the world gasped at China’s miraculous economic body-building, what cultural critic Liu Xiaobo observed in 1994 holds true, dismally evidenced by the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s recent incarceration for his dissident speech and petition for political reform: [E]conomic takeoff has not changed the one-party dictatorship created by Mao Zedong; the improvement in the standard of living has not led to increased human rights; the market economy is not predicated on a legal structure based on private property; eerie political movement strikes terror

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Introduction  5 in the hearts of the new rich; the popularity of karaoke bars and the flood of violent and pornographic literature has not enhanced the status of freedom of speech; industrial reform that has led to the separation of Party and industrial management and the conversion of state industries into companies has not given the masses any greater opportunities or rights to participate in the political life of the nation.7 The staggering national economic leap to a capitalist market economy with Chinese characteristics is accompanied by massive unemployment, inept health care, rampant corruption, a deepening gap between rich and poor and continued disrespect for civil rights. While a sense of national success and nationalistic pride is obvious and understandable, the many reports of Chinese citizens being subjected to self-immolation, fruitless petitions, obscure detentions, arrests, trials and imprisonment for trying to negotiate individual rights with the state bears horrific evidence of a pervasive spiritual milieu that feels anything but secure and content. The imbalance between national prowess and civilian undergrowth urges one to pause and ponder what exactly has happened in the name of change when socialism transformed into postsocialism at breakneck speed and how legacies of the past need be reassessed for a truly smoother transition to the future.   Thus, as a temporal indicator, postsocialism is an open frame whose beginning indicates less a clean end of socialism than a conflict-ridden move away from it as an absolute organising principle of political, economic and social life. This is what happened in the Soviet Union, several Eastern European countries, Cuba and China. The closing side of the postsocialist time frame, if there is such a thing at all, is even less definite as the various countries and societies came face to face with the task of moving toward, in the words of Martin Jay, ‘an amorphous and still-unsettled something else’.8 That undecided something else – to put a twist on a much-used term – has been shaped into various versions of ‘actually existing postsocialism’.9   In the case of China, which distinguishes itself with the continued reign of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this indefinite character of postsocialism manifests itself even more saliently as a confusion of continuity and discontinuity and as an intriguing question about the ideological flexibility (or longevity) of socialism and capitalism in regard to modernity. Arif Dirlik, broaching the subject before 1989, uses it as a description of the CCP’s reform ideology (as represented by Deng Xiaoping’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’), which resorts to capitalist remedies for certain (mainly economic) deficiencies without cancelling out socialist legitimacy.10 Different from Dirlik’s critical tendency for continuity, Paul Pickowicz chooses to view the matter ‘from the bottom up’ in the domain of 1980s popular culture. There he discovers signs of cultural diversity, ambiguity and confusion that, for him, essentially evidence a dystopian perception of socialism’s essential bankruptcy.11 Sheldon Lu and Xiaoping Lin, enriching the discussion with analyses of newer films and avant-garde art, emphasise the felt effect of Chinese postsocialism as an uneasy and traumatising

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6  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema move toward its ideological opposite: capitalist economy and its incumbent consumer culture.12   Other scholars try to inject greater hope (or urgency) for agency and expand the familiar binary set (of socialism versus capitalism) to view Chinese postsocialism – its tension and treachery, as well as its potential and even strength – in terms of modernity and globalisation. Lydia H. Liu, criticising a lack of serious attention to China’s socialist legacy that characterises typical Western discussions of transnationalism and capitalist globalisation, argues that postsocialism and transnationalism are actually ‘simultaneous’ and ‘mutually embedded’ processes.13 A particularly useful message we can take from Liu’s discussion is a sense of activeness and capacity that postsocialism exercises. Rather than occupying a passive role and waiting to be filled up (or conquered, however ‘peacefully’) by Western capital and its incumbent ideology, China as a postsocialist society engages with fitting opportunities and displays an ability to be a co-player and co-definer of itself, as well as transnationalism. The capacity for engagement and even change, according to Liu, comes from the ‘residual elements of socialist discourse’ (such as the ideology of class struggle) that promise to enable China to find ‘liberatory alternatives beyond the logic of capital’.14 In his fight against the ideological supremacy implied in the view of ‘capitalist globalization for the totality of human history and its future horizon’, Xudong Zhang also advocates possibilities of reinterpretation and change in ‘the resilient and the residual, the heterogeneous and the uneven’ elements that constitute energies of resistance against ‘the total truth-claim of capitalist globalization’.15 Jason McGrath presents a similar proposal, that we understand postsocialism as ‘an integral part of global postsocialist (capitalist) modernity’ (that is, rather than as a mere minor alternative), emphasising the current condition as a ‘dynamic process of becoming’ that provides a precious opportunity to rethink capitalism itself.16   Whether using high or low angles (to use a term in cinematography) in approaching the subject of postsocialism, these various theorisations all acknowledge the fact and the importance of the socialist legacy. Residues of the past might be experienced as discomforting and painful due to their drastic contrast with the present, but they can also be mobilised in the search for new proposals and inspiring strategies for the future of China and global society as well. Both in experience and theory, the postsocialist condition in China is not a transitional stage to be quickly and neatly passed over before the nation takes a full leap into the embrace of capitalism. Rather, the current moment acquires a spatial character and is an open and uncharted site where diverse powers, intentions, desires and possibilities converge and negotiate with each other.   Indeed, if we visualise the image of China refusing to be a territory conquered by an expanding global capitalism and consider the historical specificity of Chinese modernity originating in a defensive response to Western powers and cultures, art critic Gao Minglu’s understanding of Chinese modernity as ‘a consciousness of space’ even more than of time seems highly applicable to the current moment of postsocialism.17 And if we imagine (and image) history in

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Introduction  7 spatial terms, as Henri Lefebvre famously establishes in a theoretical trio about the production of space, postsocialism, like all historical social formations and particularly as an integral part of global capitalist modernity (as McGrath has explicated), also has its own particular ‘spatial practice’ (for example, rural versus urban; the phenomenon of migrant rural workers working in the city and that of local Chinese white-collars working at foreign companies and bearing English work names, while being possibly Communist Party members at the same time), conceptual ‘representations of space’ (such as designed and executed by the state and capital) and, most relevant to our discussion here, an actually lived and experienced category called ‘representational spaces’.18 This last refers specifically to the affective and symbolic spaces, such as memory and art (including moving image).19   This brings us to the subject at hand. As an ongoing spatial formation, postsocialism is being negotiated and shaped at many levels, ranging from the global and national to the personal and representational. Depending on the angle of perception, our perspective of a landscape might be quite different and sometimes even bring drastically contradictory impressions. Whereby state, capital and even theory might feel confident at moving forward and shaping the world, individual experiences and artistic creations might demonstrate suspicion, reluctance and, at the same time, cautious hope and grounded approaches to the unknown sphere that is postsocialism. As a daily experience and a lived space, postsocialism can be big, spacious, national and global; it is also small, intimate, personal and private.20 It enters the interiority and shapes the subjectivity of human factors that function in its midst and generate infinite mini-spaces, such as those of memory, desire, imagination and creativity, which, in their turn, change the overall spatial formation of postsocialism through their infinitesimal moves.

Two Siblings or Generational Subjects of Chinese Postsocialism If on a grander scale postsocialism is a space between an inconclusively wrapped national past and a tendentious yet undetermined global future, the question left for us to explore then is: how can the human factors, as minispaces harbouring memories and desires, position and navigate themselves on this open landscape, without being manipulated and lost in the whirlwind of opportunities and traps? Unlike ideology, individuals cannot be easily named as capitalist, socialist or postsocialist. They deal with the historical space of postsocialism in concrete and heuristic ways. The particular shape of their navigating itinerary is the result of negotiations between intention, circumstance and the specific condition of their luggage or equipment (such as the residues of the socialist past filtered by personal experiences). In turn, their diverse itineraries and moves would illuminate previously unvisited corners of the landscape and chart out paths that lead to territories invisible to a bird’s-eye view. As Xudong Zhang envisions, in this ‘process of reflection, articulation, and emergence’ that is postsocialism, ‘new social subjects are bound to come into being, with their

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8  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema political agenda and cultural vision defining the historical substance of Chinese socialism’.21   For example, perhaps the most salient group of social subjects produced by recent Chinese history is the ‘educated youth’ (zhishi qingnian, often abbreviated as zhiqing) generation.22 Mostly born in the fifties, this generation made their (in) famous debut into Chinese history between 1966 and 1968 as the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. As a solution to the resultant nationwide chaos and the increasing severity of unemployment for the high school graduates (or graduatesto-be) in the cities, they were sent ‘down to the villages and up the mountains’ (shangshan xiaxiang) for re-education by the peasants, workers and military.23 Their glorious dream of joining the socialist cause through rustication and devotion met with a harsh reality and resulted in disillusionment and awakening, which in turn turned them into highly articulate and important enunciators of a distinct experience of socialism, as well as postsocialism.24 In a comprehensive and insightful historical study on the educated youth and their literary productions, Yang Jian distinguishes five stages of this generational cultural phenomenon, charting this through to the late nineties, at which point he observes an apparent finale of the autobiographical contents of the educated youth.25 Yang’s study is particularly valuable and relevant to our discussion in two senses. First, it pays emphatic attention to the ‘non-official’ (minjian) and more independent strands of the educated youth literary activities and productions, such as the hand-copied literature, underground poetry and ‘personal narratives’ (siren xushi) that emerged at different stages in juxtaposition with, and frequently in critical contrast to, those writings more readily accepted by, or incorporated in, official narratives. While this subject calls for a separate research project, it is valuable to see such independent and personal creative efforts as literary precedents – in an age where (moving) image making was dominated by the state – for what would come forth in personal filmmaking in the nineties, in terms of an independent and alternative engagement with official history.26 Second, Yang criticises the grand narratives of ‘heroic youth’ (beizhuang de qingchun, represented by writers such as Liang Xiaosheng and Zhang Chengzhi) and their commercialised and televised continuation for the dissolution of human suffering in glorious tales of sacrifice and the resultant cancellation of critical engagement with the past.27   Yang’s critique strikes a peculiar cord with what takes place in contemporary Chinese cinema. In the film circle, the educated youth generation has a ready equivalent in the Fifth Generation and its less famous cohorts.28 As the first group of postsocialist filmmakers that won international acclaim for Chinese cinema, early features by the Fifth Generation like Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, dir. Chen Kaige, 1985) and Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, dir. Zhang Yimou, 1987) doubtless engage with the past from refreshing perspectives, placing peasant figures and natural landscapes in a historical and cultural framework beyond the power of Party guidance. However, the directors’ reliance on cultural allegories and isolated spaces in critiquing the centuries-old patriarchal system – evidenced more explicitly by the stylistically secluded traditional Chinese households in Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou (Ju Dou, 1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong

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Introduction  9 denglong gaogao gua, 1991) – tends to lose the historical contingencies of the past in an old and almost mystified tradition.   Other Fifth Generation pictures that directly deal with a revolutionary China – famous examples of which include Farewell, My Concubine (Bawang bie ji, dir. Chen Kaige, 1993) and To Live (Huozhe, dir. Zhang Yimou, 1994) – offer some of the most elaborate non-official tales of the past by screening national history through the life vicissitudes of ordinary civilian characters, such as Peking Opera singers, an ex-courtesan and a gambler turned shadow play entertainer. However, the alterity of these stories stays on the thematic level and fails to produce more sophisticated and liberating visions through which historical trauma can be explained beyond the consequences of fate and chance. In these pictures, individuals appear insignificant, powerless and doomed in the face of historical forces and political violation. Obviously, the Fifth Generation’s treatment of historical representation deserves a much more elaborate discussion than can be accommodated here.29 However, I would like to point out that, despite the Fifth Generation’s laudable experiments with contemporary social reality – for example, Zhang Yimou energised cinematic realism to a new level with films like The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiu Ju da guansi, 1992), Keep Cool (You hua haohao shuo, 1997) and Not One Less (Yige dou buneng shao, 1999) – their career trajectories over the past decade or so have revealed an eclecticism in subject matter and style that might also suggest their loss of rigorous personal visions not so much as masters of film language than as conscious critics of history. Besides a couple of martial arts blockbusters and a comedy adapted from Blood Simple (1984) of the Coen brothers, Zhang Yimou was also the director of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremony. In his cinematic spectacles Hero (Yingxiong, 2002) and Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng jin dai huangjin jia, 2006) – the former, a martial arts piece; the latter, a period drama – the endings have the rebels willingly succumb to or fail in self-destructive manners in front of an imperial patriarch, reminding one of the same kind of fatalistic vision in his early pictures that now looks even more defeated and tragic.30 With all the breathtaking beauty illustrative of Zhang’s extraordinary aesthetic vision for mise-en-scène and cinematography and realised through commercial blockbusters’ high production values, the historical vision in his cinema is nevertheless dishearteningly passive.   It is against such a background of contemporary Chinese cinema and culture that another (and younger) generation – identified here as ‘the Forsaken Generation’ of postsocialist China – stands out as new social subjects who take up the postsocialist situation as the nurturing ground of an unprecedented historical consciousness.31 As we shall see, this historical consciousness originates in reflections on their unique relationship with socialism that has a peculiarly mediated and removed character, compared to the experience of the Red Guards/educated youth/Fifth Generation. It is through the questioning and exploring of that mediated relationship with history and its representation that this group arrives at insights in the treacherous nature of representation and history writing (in visual terms or otherwise).

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10  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

The Forsaken Generation and Historical Consciousness In her discussion on the role of history in the mid-nineties American moving image culture, Vivian Sobchack is appositional with her definition of ‘historical consciousness in the face of moving image representation of the phenomenal world’: [Historical consciousness is] viewers’ awareness of, interest in, and tendency to question the boundaries, meanings, and place of history in their daily lives, as well as their own possible place in history . . . [It is] a peculiarly novel ‘readiness’ for history among the general population. That is, people seem to carry themselves with a certain reflexive phenomenological comportment toward their ‘immediate’ immersion in the present, self-consciously grasping their own objective posture with an eye to its imminent future possibilities for representation (and commodification) as the historical past . . .32 In the context of our current discussion, the Forsaken Generation ‘filmmakers’ and ‘artists’ can readily join the ‘viewers’ in Sobchack’s definition, because the cultivation of such critical awareness starts with these creators’ exploration of the concrete ties between their lived experience and its media representation. I particularly want to emphasise and invoke Sobchack’s observation that being a historical subject is essentially being conscious of ‘one’s comportment as an historical actor’ who realises ‘a vibrant connection of present to past and a sense of agency in the shaping of human events’.33 That realisation and the resulting sense of agency are exactly what the Forsaken Generation filmmakers and artists have been striving for throughout two decades of work already.   This generation’s vibrant connection to the past is identifiable at the roots of their experience, which is the reason why Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli both design a scenario for their protagonists to go back to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Mostly born in the sixties, the Forsaken Generation grew up in the waning days of high socialism as a generation whose historical experiences had been forcefully mediated by government propaganda and were destined to be constructed, at first, as collective and impersonal. Chinese film and cultural production, distribution and exhibition during the Cultural Revolution were under the absolute control of the state. Communist ideology of the day emphasised the necessity of continuous, relentless class struggle and condemned almost all forms of unregulated, apolitical and individual entertainment as capitalistic or bourgeois – that is, corrupt, despicable, dangerous and counter-revolutionary. In such a context, the very few sources of mass entertainment, such as the ‘revolutionary model operas’ (geming yangbanxi) and their cinematic reproductions, became cherished by a people tired of class politics and hungry for any form of relief from the hyper-political tension of the day. The few propaganda operas and films were staged and screened nationwide repeatedly during those years. Despite their propagandistic messages and unified styles, a Chinese audience bereft of private entertainment embraced them enthusiastically. Subsequently,

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Introduction  11 memories of these operas and films, along with their promotional images, music tunes, lyrics and embedded political messages were etched into their young audience’s hearts and minds. Furthermore, in addition to the exhibition of the model operas and their film adaptations, public and personal spaces in China in the 1960s and 1970s were inundated with images and messages of Mao and the various hero and heroine creations of the Communist Party: posters, calendars, statues, busts, buttons, children’s picture books (xiaorenshu), picture stories (lianhuanhua), nursery rhymes and radio broadcasts, many of which would doubtless enter the magic realist world of the past that Wang Guangli envisions for his megalomaniac character.34 Cheng Qingsong also remembers the omnipresence of Mao through multiple channels of media and locates a precise representation of the era in a low angle shot of a larger-than-life statue of Mao, with which the film director Jiang Wen opens his debut hit In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi, 1994).35 The Forsaken Generation grew up amidst this highly mediated and politicised environment, where state collective education virtually replaced individual acculturation, and personal experience and memory became intertwined with official political imposition.   Yet compared with their elder siblings who had been active in the political heat, first as Red Guards and then as ‘heroic’ intellectual youth sent to the rural backlands, the Forsaken Generation – mostly born in the sixties, but sometimes also encompassing the late fifties and early seventies – seems insufficiently equipped with revolutionary experiences to proudly call themselves ‘God’s [or more precisely, Mao’s] children who died as sacrifice for the cause’.36 Instead, this younger generation is like actors for whom the anticipated stage suddenly vaporised, therefore the preparation for, as well as expectation of, any trained action to further the revolutionary cause appeared pointless and absurd. Literary and film critic Cui Weiping (b. 1956) recalls, vis-à-vis her own spiritual journey over the decades: They [referring to the Red Guards and sent-down intellectual youth] have been up on the front of history’s façade, we have been on its back lot; they have found themselves with full awareness in ‘history’s conscious,’ and we have to stay in ‘history’s subconscious;’ they started from ‘history’s strongest note,’ while we began from a weak moan.37 Cultural critic Xu Hui speaks about a similar Janus-faced sentiment: We were born in the sixties. When the world was in the middle of revolutionary change, we were too young to understand. After we grew up and learned about the exciting events and scenes in that big era, our regrets were unspeakable . . . The generation before us has its weighty historical fragments to chew on, and the younger generation who was born after the seventies is already pressing on our heels. Between the fifties and nineties, we are a generation that appears the most insignificant and most readily forgettable.38

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12  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema In his turn, Zhang Hongjie (b. 1972), a slightly younger writer who is both popularly and critically acclaimed for his alternative biographies and histories, says: We missed the greatest existence of this century after rubbing shoulders with it. When we were still obscure-minded infants, Chairman Mao had already left us, leaving us wanting in vain to hear his teachings with our own ears. In the early seventies when we were born, the revolutionary passion had already subsided. Countless incidents of cheating and treachery gave rise to a huge wave of suspicion within society. Distrust became our infant education.39 While such individual statements might not be taken as blanket conclusions for all those falling in this age group, it is not to be denied that their connection suggests an exemplar or even essential collective ethos. Due to the tender age of the Forsaken Generation at the crucial moments of socialist history, the first significant incidents that they experienced were not revolutionary highlights but anticlimaxes or endings such as Mao’s death and the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. These ‘infants of Mao’ inevitably display countenances characterised by puzzlement, helplessness, poignancy and distance that find expression in a variety of media and art forms.40 As the human capsules harbouring the faint memory of socialism as something intimate yet removed, inundating but distant, this generation has a dubious and unsure relationship with history from the very beginning. Born out of that peculiar relationship is a desire to re-image, re-imagine and refigure not only the past, but also oneself; also born out of this process of self-searching is a heightened awareness of the treacherous nature of history and representation.   That is why the creative genesis of the postsocialist works featured in this book needs to be understood in the context of this peculiarly haunting experience of socialism. What drives the Forsaken Generation to a personal approach to (moving) image making and to creating narratives and images of past, present, self and others according to their independent perception is a desire to reassess the place of socialist history in their lives and re-establish their own place in (post)socialism. This trailblazing search for independent position and individual agency – that is, for one’s identity as a consciously self-made historical subject – in the face of official and national history, however, necessarily meets challenges from two issues. First, the past cannot be singled out as a straightforward epistemological object, because the highly controlled and heavily mediated nature of socialist historiography prevalent in their early lives necessarily permeates and ‘contaminates’ their personal memories with collective, official and national discourses.41 Second, the Forsaken Generation’s subject position is far less than integral, solid and secure, because their peculiar involvement with the past shapes their relationship with the present into something that is characterised by interruption and breakage, rather than smooth transition and effortless renewal. Their path to a more tenable position as an independent and conscious postsocialist subject necessarily involves many shifts between past and present, frequent exchanges of visions between self and other and constant attention to,

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Introduction  13 and wariness about, the habitual dividers between content and form, fiction and non-fiction, image and phenomenon, history as a text and history as a process of writing and rewriting. It is my main argument in this book that this highly reflexive attitude toward image making, representation and the writing of history grows precisely out of their peculiar sense of disillusionment and disjunction in regard to contemporary Chinese history. I also argue that this critical spirit of theirs is the most valuable result of a gradual, painful and thoughtful process of them finding and inscribing themselves as conscious and responsible historical subjects who work to realise greater agency, not only understanding the past and documenting the present, but also writing for the future.

Material, Structure and Methodology As a critical narrative of the Forsaken Generation’s search for their identity as postsocialist historical subjects, this book examines some definitive achievements of that journey over the past two decades. The temporal distinction between past and present provides the general framework for organising the book, but this by no means dictates that the discussion follows a strict chronological order. Rather than providing comprehensive annals of Chinese independent cinema, I chose to focus on representative texts and forms that highlight important moments and shifts in the generation’s growth as both filmmakers and historical subjects. Apart from necessary references to, and occasionally detailed discussions on, selected works of theatre, literature, painting and (digital) photography, the analytical focus of this book is on the moving image, particularly independent films and videos. The moving image has no doubt been increasingly accepted as a highly legitimate and valuable source of historical knowledge, because of the undeniable fact of its role – through film, television and, increasingly, digital media – in ‘shaping the public imagination and (mis)conceptions of history’.42 While accountable as historical testimonies, as Michael Berry impressively illustrates in his book on the representation of trauma in Chinese literature and film, moving image works also qualify as historical narratives in which we find specific angles for reconstructing and understanding the past.43 Hayden White famously theorised about the central role of narrative as that which gives a written history its particular verbal structure and form of presentation.44 History informs media, but the particular mode of media – in this case, visual, cinematic, independent and then digital – also shapes the narrative about history and reality. In the case of the various films and videos analysed in this book, they not only join works of other genres (such as oral history, literature, painting and theatre) in offering testimonies of alternative historical experiences, but also exercise formal innovations and theoretical inquiries that significantly challenge accepted distinctions between fiction and non-fiction and between document(ary) and performance. Besides providing valuable historical data on the societal change and social psyche in the postsocialist decades, these works carry out vigorous critical thinking on the nature of history and representation.   In a delineation of the concept of postmodern history, Robert A. Rosenstone

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14  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema foregrounds moving image representation as the site where unprecedented creative interventions in history writing take place. He lists the following eleven features that characterise the practice of this new historical thinking and writing through film and video. Interestingly, almost all of them also apply to the postsocialist independent moving image works that this book is set to discuss: What do these (real) postmodern history films do to the past? Lots of things, including some or all of the following: (1) Tell the past self-reflexively, in terms of how it has meaning for the filmmaker historian. (2) Recount it from a multiplicity of viewpoints. (3) Eschew traditional narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end—or, following Jean-Luc Godard, insist these three elements need not necessarily be in that order. (4) Forsake normal story development, or tell stories but refuse to take the telling seriously. (5) Approach the past with humor, parody, absurdist, surrealist, dadaesque, and other irreverent attitudes. (6) Intermix contradictory elements: past and present, drama and documentary, and indulge in creative anachronism. (7) Accept, even glory in, their own selectivity, partialism, partisanship, and rhetorical character. (8) Refuse to focus or sum up the meaning of past events, but rather make sense of them in a partial and open-ended, rather than totalized, manner. (9) Alter and invent incident and character. (10) Utilize fragmentary and/or poetic knowledge. (11) Never forget that the present is the site of all past representation and knowing.45 A filmmaker who intervenes in history writing by way of moving image needs to explore the potentials, subtleties and risks of both narrative and imaging in representing history. Postmodern or postsocialist, such a filmmaker–historian seems almost necessarily associated with the following characteristics and commitments: reflexivity; multiplicity; a deliberate and productive disorder in narrative structure; an irreverent attitude informed by attention to, and concern for, one’s necessary yet limited relation to the past; an extremely flexible and democratic understanding about traditional generic contradictions; an honest and unflinching footing in his or her own creative self as the starting point of meaning production that is partial yet open; a ready reference to the emotive and/or psychological order of knowledge; and a solid investment in the here and now. All of these characteristics are exactly what we detect in the practitioners of personal cinema and media in contemporary China. The moving image should be regarded as not only a legitimate but also a rather necessary and desirable means through which new sorts of historical knowledge can be probed and produced. We can no longer do without it. What we are witnessing in the practice of personal filmmaking is not an ephemeral phenomenon, but the most recent development of a persistent line of personal historiography in recent Chinese history. It may well be the beginning of a major paradigmatic change in historical writing with (moving) image-based media.   Strongly inspired by New Historicism’s imaginative yet concrete engagement with history, this book searches for fresh and effective ways of making visible

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Introduction  15 the intertextual engagements between and among cultural texts and historical contexts. In the process of mapping out the itineraries by which the Forsaken Generation film and media makers navigate the land of postsocialism, several key terms – memory, narrative, subjectivity, spatiality, performance and the body – emerged as the multivalent theoretical nodes of my critical journey. At the textual level, in order to investigate the various strategies that are employed to construct alternative and personalised relationships to history and time, I undertake close analysis of selected works focusing on their narrative structure, the construction of cinematic space and its relationship with human figures, the confusion between fiction and non-fiction, the issue of performance and embodiment and so on. At the intertextual level, I demonstrate parallels and interconnections between texts of different media or genres and their historical cultural contexts. Weaving together textual, intertextual and contextual readings, this book seeks to invoke a cultural poetics for postsocialist China through the kind of montage technique found in the work of New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt: Starting with the analysis of a particular historical event, he then cuts to the analysis of a particular literary text. The point is not to show that the literary text reflects the historical event but to create a field of energy between the two so that we come to see the event as a social text and the literary text as a social event.46 That ‘field of energy’ is what I work to evoke and illuminate in following the figures of the Forsaken Generation filmmakers between text and context, experience and representation, past and present. Their heightened historical consciousness has developed precisely from their tensioned relationship with the socialist past and official history. And that hard-earned knowledge of their own status as historical subjects, when translated into an agenda of action for the present such as documentary filmmaking, proves enlightening for greater reflexivity and agency in history and identity negotiations.   Specifically, the book is organised into two parts. Part I, ‘From the Past: Subjectivity, Memory and Narrative’, starts with vestiges of the socialist past, particularly those of the Cultural Revolution, and delineates the figure of the Forsaken Generation child, before entering into discussion of their proper works. The key concepts under examination include memory, narrative and the question of the subject, both as a textual (especially cinematic) construct and as an epistemological position from which to conduct critical interventions in the nature of history and representation.   Chapter 1 starts by establishing memory, particularly personal memory, as an important epistemological trope through which to contest and implode a teleological official history of socialism and modernisation. As studies of the literature and cinema of the eighties and nineties show, postsocialist writers and directors frequently invoke personal memories, private experiences and intimate dimensions in their construction of alternative narratives of the past. The

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16  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema subjects – textual and often authorial ones as well – of such creative accounts of history tend to occupy a dual status as both victims and agents of the narrative (which is, indeed, history going through the process of narration and representation). Such an intriguing formal propensity for the mutual implication of text and subject evokes the compelling image of a figure layered in text, involved in narration, spatialised in time and at the same time conscious and critical of its own (con)text. That figure is what we will see, in varied forms and updated versions, in the texts and moving images from the nineties onwards that are under analysis throughout this book. To offer a necessary historical context as well as pretext for the entry and evolution of new narratives and subjectivities in the postsocialist era, I provide a succinct account of the representational mechanisms of subjectivity and spatiality found in the famous model operas (along with their contemporaneous cinematic reproductions) of the Cultural Revolution. To rewrite the past from a personal and humanist perspective, new films of the late seventies and the eighties, such as those directed by Xie Jin and members of the Fifth Generation, tried to bring onscreen subjectivities and spatial figurations that negotiate for a position capable of critical dialogues with history. As my own dialogue with the critical writing of Chris Berry, Nick Browne and others who write on this subject and this period shows, however, new screen subjectivities in the eighties seem both dynamic and inconsistent, forming what turns out to be a transitional stage in the development of Chinese cinematic, as well as historical, subjectivity in the postsocialist era.   In this rich yet unstable period, I rediscover Night Rain in Bashan (Bashan yeyu, dir. Wu Yigong and Wu Yonggang, 1980), a gem of a film whose peculiar spatial construct and figurative subject – namely, a cruising ship on a river and an orphaned child wandering onboard this ship – offer a most revealing ‘angle of incidence’ followed by a most imaginative ‘angle of reflection’, from which we are able to not only participate in an alternative relation with the past (that is, the Cultural Revolution), but also engage in a subtle yet vital process of subject formation, both on- and offscreen.47 Apart from locating a perfect case of the Foucaultian heterotopia in the ship as a space of alterity that sidelines official history and accommodates marginalised character positions, Night Rain in Bashan features the figure of the orphaned child as narrative excess whose significance is actually registered beyond the plot as an embodiment of historical commentary. Furthermore, this independent and searching child uncannily evokes the historical image of the Forsaken Generation (both in terms of their actual age and symbolic representation), thus qualifying as an unexpected yet wonderful ‘angle of reflection’ pointing beyond the text and revealing the uncanny but thought-provoking connection between then and now and between representation and history. Following the prescient singular sketch of the Forsaken Generation, Chapter 1 then presents the generation properly by way of their own creative efforts at self-portraiture across media, such as literature, music, painting, theatre and cinema.   To offer a revealing glimpse of the early nineties, which marks another important stage in the development of postsocialist subjectivity in dialogue with the

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Introduction  17 past as realised in some conflated efforts of historical representation and subject construction, Chapter 2 closely examines selected narratives presented by the Fifth Generation and the Forsaken Generation, with emphasis on those from the latter group. Revisiting two Fifth Generation epic classics about China’s modern and socialist decades – Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1994) and Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine (1993) – from the angle of narrative pattern and subjective volition, the chapter identifies their structure as characterised, respectively but comparably, by chanceful illogic, debilitating cyclicality and ineffective subjective intervention. The characters, being historical subjects presented as narrative elements, respond to and negotiate with narrative situations and historical circumstances with varying degrees of obedience and volition, yet end up with similar outcomes marked by futility and punishment. Such scenario arrangements involving the characters or subjects absorbed, consumed, rejected and wasted by (and in) the narrative structure, in my view, embodies the Fifth Generation’s understanding of history and subjectivity as something communicating a deep sense of distrust and powerlessness.   Interestingly, at around the same time in the early nineties, the Forsaken Generation began producing its own visions and voices regarding history and subjectivity. Provocatively different from those depicted by the Fifth Generation filmmakers, the subject–history relationships constructed in the Forsaken Generation’s narratives – cinematic as well as theatrical – implicate the subject in the representational text as a conscious, self-foregrounding and active (sometimes cunningly so) agent of enunciation and narration. Rather than being absorbed by official history, they put up a determined though difficult fight against narrative, text and even themselves, as narrators already contaminated with learned habits of official discourse. Although never emerging completely free of the past as freshly reborn subjects, the narrating ‘selves’ of the Forsaken Generation point to a more critical and conscious historical subjectivity at work in the early nineties. Following a discussion of the advent of independent cinema at that time in the light of a subjective turn in approaching historical representation and formal reflexivity – summarised by the term ‘personal filmmaking’ – Chapter 2 then looks closely at two quintessential self-narratives of the Forsaken Generation that came out at around the same time as To Live and Farewell, My Concubine: Meng Jinghui’s avant-garde play I Love XXX (Wo ai XXX, 1994) and Jiang Wen’s independent feature In the Heat of the Sun (1994). Employing a number of provocative strategies, such as first person narration (in singular as well as plural), radical recycling of fragments of history, memory and dream and inserting a Foucaultian crazy figure as a narrative excess, the two narratives depict generationally distinct memories of socialism and, more importantly, enact highly effective critiques of their own memory and narration as unreliable means to truly understand history. Though being a non-cinematic example (while mobilising moving image of socialism at crucial moments of presentation), I Love XXX not only evidences in a highly convincing and interesting manner the ‘generational’ character of these historically conscious narratives, but also demonstrates parallels and dialogues going

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18  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema on between the moving image (that is, independent cinema) and other sections and forms of culture. Alongside Meng Jinghui and Jiang Wen, practitioners of personal filmmaking such as Guan Hu, Zhang Yuan, Wu Wenguang and Wang Guangli worked in both fiction and non-fiction and developed a number of experiments with self-figuration as independent subjects rising out of obscure ruins of history and memory – a representative imaging of which is found in Dirt (Toufa luan le, dir. Guan Hu, 1994).   Part II, ‘In the Present: Camera, Documentary and Performance’, turns to cinematic works of the Forsaken Generation from the mid-nineties on. These later works particularly stand out with their critical interventions in the mechanism of (moving) image-based representation and its possibilities, as well as problems in constructing subject positions (including directorial/authorial, cinematic and spectatorial ones). Three chapters offer successive close examinations of a rich range of works that include fiction films by Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye; documentaries by Duan Jinchuan, Wang Guangli and Wang Bing; experimental non-fiction films by woman poet Tang Danhong; queer artist Shi Tou and writer Cui Zi’en; and new media animator Feng Mengbo. Organised around theoretical issues, such as the placement of the camera, modes of performance in both fiction and non-fiction films and the configuration of (human) figure and (visual) field, these intensive analyses have at their converging point a deep interest in the very complex and often subject-implicating nature of history and visual representation in contemporary times.   Chapter 3 focuses on Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye – two directors from the Forsaken Generation who are arguably the worthiest of auteur status, due to the impressively distinct and consistent formal system in their films. Jia Zhangke is often praised for his neorealism-inspired presentation of neglected small town existences left behind and sidelined following China’s growth towards capitalisation and globalisation. While acknowledging the importance of Jia’s apparently ‘objective’ style of realism that consists of location shooting, long takes, long shots, a static camera, slow pace and reliance on non-professional actors, I approach this important auteur from two refreshing angles. One is directed at the complex mechanism of multivalent and metanarrative subject positions in and beyond the frame, compelling the spectator to a highly active and conscious process of engaging with history and image critically. The other angle attends to the concept of ‘surface’, pointing at the texture of Jia’s highly stylised cinema that embodies a rich range of figural, tactile, spatial, temporal, literal and symbolic significations. Figured across Jia’s classics, such as Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu, 1997), Platform (Zhantai, 2000), Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao, 2002) and Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006) with emphasis on the first two, the concept of surface, for example, manifests itself literally in two self-referential ‘writings on the wall’ (in Xiao Wu and Platform, which, however, tend to bypass an unprepared Western viewer’s attention as negligible, minor mise-en-scène elements written in Chinese). There it plays out as a ‘superficial time’ suggestive of the conflation of story time, historical time and real time. In figural and spatial terms, the surface also exists in a constant interplay of ‘superficial’ elements, such as debris,

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Introduction  19 wanderers and vehicles, which together evoke a uniquely ‘superficial space’ in which motion becomes flat and stagnant.   In apparent contrast to Jia, Lou Ye’s highly expressionist works are more readily inspired by classical genres such as film noir and melodrama, as well as by Alfred Hitchcock and the French New Wave, enacting a very different aesthetic system that consists of the blurring of fiction and non-fiction, kinetic handheld cinematography, jump cut editing and a tendency for subjective narration that explicitly conflates screen subjectivities with directorial and spectatorial ones. My analysis of these aspects in Lou’s Suzhou River (Suzhou he, 1998) and especially Purple Butterfly (Zi hudie, 2003) will demonstrate that the epistemological motivation behind such drastically different styles of the two auteurs is a very similar theoretical concern for the relationship between history, (cinematic) representation and subjectivity.   Chapter 4 turns to the unprecedented phenomenon of Chinese independent documentary that also began in the early nineties and examines its nonfictional exercise of the subject-driven intervention in historical thinking. In preparation to distill a line of ‘personal documentary’ – the distinct non-fictional component of personal filmmaking – that somehow became submerged in the earlier directorial, as well as critical, excitement over the refreshing beginning of observational verité practices in China (as an effective alternative to official documentaries), I foreground the documentary practice of Duan Jinchuan, a quintessential practitioner of the non-interfering observational documentary in the spirit of Frederick Wiseman.48 Drawing on Western criticism (from Bill Nichols and others) of the rhetorical structure of Wisemanian documentaries, which, while socially significant and undeniably valuable, should be recognised as nothing short of manipulative arrangement of information in order to construct a specific spectatorial relationship to the image, I examine important works by Duan Jinchuan, such as The Square (Guangchang, co-dir. Zhang Yuan, 1994), South Bakhor St. 16 (Ba kuo nan jie shiliu hao, 1995) and especially The Storm (Baofeng zhouyu, co-dir. Jiang Yue, 2005) for their structuring of cinematic space. I argue that the director’s invisible, non-interfering gaze actually displays a meaningfully intended, yet insufficiently reflected, vision on representing history and memory.   Chapter 4 then moves on to a proper definition of the concept of ‘personal documentary’, laying out its formal features as well as theoretical implications and situating the Chinese practice in connection to concepts and practices of subjective non-fictional filmmaking in the West. Indeed, the rich and varied examples of personal documentary and subjectively driven experimental nonfiction of the Forsaken Generation – elaborate analyses of which span from Chapter 4 to Chapter 5 – form very important and fresh contributions to this important phenomenon of contemporary moving image culture worldwide.49 For example, Chapter 4 presents two monumental independent documentaries – often thought of as observational pieces – in the new light of personal documentary: I Graduated (Wo biye le, dir. Wang Guangli, 1992) and West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu, dir. Wang Bing, 2003). Both documentaries are revealed to employ a

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20  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema historically informed narrative structure, subjectively inflected cinematography and editing and a motif of the return of the filmmaker to a site replete with history and memory. In the process they not only observe and document, but also embody and perform an epistemological task of connecting past to present and subjectivity to field. It is the presence and performance of the filmmaker that renders the visual field in front of the camera a historical one.   Chapter 5 demonstrates to the reader other, more radical forms of personal cinema and media that expand the discussion of memory, history and subjectivity in the fields of identity and performance. Through analyses of a plethora of experimental non-fiction videos and new media projects, such as those created by a woman poet (Tang Danhong), queer filmmakers (painter Shi Tou and writer Cui Zi’en), artist (Wang Qingsong) and animator (Feng Mengbo), I investigate these innovative explorations on the treacherous relationship between representation and subjectivity in terms of their creative use of the body in crafting and realising identities and relations. Whether appropriated to confront and console a memory-ridden traumatised childhood in Nightingale, Not the Only Voice (Yeying bushi weiyi de gehou, dir. Tang Danhong, 2000) or mobilised to realise interventions in the social issues of women and queer communities in 50 Minutes of Women (Nüren de wushi fenzhong, dir. Shi Tou, 2005), The Narrow Path (Wuyu, dir. Cui Zi’en, 2003) and Night Scene (Yejing, dir. Cui Zi’en, 2003) or even played with by Feng Mengbo and Wang Qingsong in animation and movieinspired, staged digital photography to radicalise both the socialist past and the postsocialist present, the performing bodies of the various subjects – or their embodied performances – prove to be an extremely dynamic and empowering channel for critical interventions in a number of issues. Their varied, creative blurring of the boundaries between self and other and between camera and performance makes it clear that subjectivities are not simply observed and documented, but actually imagined, contested and produced in close and conscious relation to representational media and the particular historical moment – in this case, postsocialism – that informs a certain subjective use of media. Shaped from this complex interplay of historical energy, media appropriation and subjective intervention are some of the most interesting, sophisticated and critical subjects of contemporary postsocialist China.   Thus, the chapters start with vestiges of Cultural Revolution propaganda and official socialist representation, trace their lingering and transformed presence in the works of the Forsaken Generation and examine the generation’s gradual and deepening efforts to find a tenable position from where they not only better understand the past, but also are able to exercise conscious agency in participating in the present. In the process, I also hope to produce the portrait of an important denomination of contemporary Chinese whose unprecedented body of independent moving image works registers some of the deepest and subtlest impacts of China’s transition from socialism to postsocialism. It is still open to question how we might view this period in the long run, as the latest stage of China’s century-long transformation into a modern nation. It is the humble but sincere ambition of this book to offer some timely observations on this

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Introduction  21 important and intriguing moment in the history of Chinese cinema, culture and consciousness.   In his contemplation on photography, John Tagg speaks about the limited, concrete and lively relationship between representation and history: Histories are not backdrops to set off the performance of images. They are scored into the paltry paper signs, in what they do and do not do, in what they encompass and exclude, in the ways they open on to or resist a repertoire of uses in which they can be meaningful and productive. Photographs are never ‘evidence’ of history; they are themselves the historical.50 So are the creators of such images and texts. The value of the personal film and media of the Forsaken Generation goes beyond providing alternative accounts of history and reality. Their narratives of the past and documentations of the present are not automatically accurate or authentic. Their visions, like all visions, are necessarily deflected by the particular historical context from which they look backward or forward. The personal and subjective mode of their remembrance and representation does not serve to give them a fixed footing. Rather, it constantly reminds them – and us – of the specificity and relativity of their/ our subject position in history. Thereby, they/we become more conscious and, hopefully, more conscientious historical beings.

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Chapter 1 Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject

Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject Memory has been an increasingly familiar trope in academic discussions on modern Chinese history, literature and culture. With Rubie S. Watson, Xiaobing Tang, Yomi Braester, Ban Wang, Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang, memory and its representation in literary and visual media has been invoked time and again as a powerful tool to argue against a simplistic, teleological sense of a ‘forward-going, change-driven’ process that prevails as the master narrative of modern history and time.1 In recent Chinese history, this master narrative specifically goes hand in hand with an official historiography that assigns a predominant role to socialist revolution and development, conducted on a mass scale and sweeping individual and specific experiences under the cloak of Party-guided national movements. History in modern and particularly socialist China becomes a hegemonic concept that amasses records of past events and occurrences in accordance with official considerations. Toward the last quarter of the twentieth century, this consistent line of envisioning socialist development was broken at the end of the Cultural Revolution, but immediately mended by an adaptable and smart logic with Chinese characteristics: under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, the country shifted to a market economy, while still retaining the name and political practices of socialism. After this point, with a rapidly built economic physique, China became an important player in the global economy. This latest part of official mainstream historiography seems to find itself in line with an overall teleological historiography of modernity that sees the twentieth century driving along a single-minded ‘course of human civilization through time’ as if guided toward progress by an immanent force.2 To effectively question this discursive hegemony and pry it open to other perspectives and forms of the past that were once silenced, scholars invest in various projects of excavations and reinterpretations through which writings of ‘discords’ ‘against the grain’ of history are identified, recovered and mobilised for an alternative, if not readily consistent but certainly insistent, line of experiences and testimonials.3   In this search for distinctive evidences and fresh methodologies in order to achieve a more accurate understanding of past and present, memory as an

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26  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema epistemological trope assumes a particular significance, because of its association with those realms of knowledge and opinion that lie outside of, if not in direct opposition to, official historiography. For example, the category of repressed and traumatic memory seems particularly fruitful in producing such alternative knowledge about the past. Given the fact that the twentieth century was a constantly tumultuous experience for China, during which the country bid adieu to its last emperor, entered the modern age, went through wars, revolutions and movements and transitioned to one imported system (capitalism) after another (Marxism and socialism), experiences of painful laceration are no novelty to the Chinese. However, official history in line with state socialism determines what should be remembered, how it should be remembered and what should be forgotten.4 As demonstrated by the rich spectrum of a ‘heterogeneous social memory’ in their revisionist volume Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution, Ching Kwan Lee, Guobin Yang and others try to bring back what used to lie in the realm of negligence, if not total amnesia. In the meantime, they emphasise the innate fragmentation characterising such alternative memories – for example, different generations of workers remember socialism differently – in order not to lose sight, once again, of the irreducible richness of history and memory.5   In this process of revising and rebuilding the once officially emaciated memory archive – that is, official national history – the task at hand seems to inevitably involve relocating previously repressed realms of experience and memory – namely, the many opposites and counterparts of the national and the official: the personal, private, grassroots, experiential, oral and bodily aspects of remembrance. For example, in postsocialist trauma literature (shanghen wenxue) and ‘searching for roots’ literature (xungen wenxue), writers such as Su Tong, Mo Yan, Zhaxi Dawa, Ge Fei, Jia Pingwa, Zhang Wei and Han Shaogong all resort to private and marginal memory and, by way of ‘personal incidents, family sagas, local traditions, and regional lore’, search for ‘new ways of recovering and recreating alternative, livable histories’.6 However, although it is relatively easy to identify where such alternative data are posited, how to access and mobilise them is neither straightforward nor easy. Often violated and painful, such repressed memories tend to appear rejecting or even unintelligible if approached by normal means. Instead, narrations need to travel far, take circuitous routes and be approached in roundabout manners through paradoxes, incoherent and/or ‘open-ended narratives [,] absurd parables, unresolved moral dilemmas, unfinished confessions, and an excess of interpretation’.7 As we shall see, such indirect and convoluted narrative tendencies also characterise the moving image representation of the socialist past coming from independent Chinese cinema, pointing to the latter’s status as a legitimate component of social memory and as an important mode of history writing.   In their analyses of literary and cinematic productions coming out of China in the eighties and nineties, Xiaobing Tang, Yomi Braester and Ban Wang all observe the dual status of the authors of such alternative narratives both as victims and agents of history, evoking a group of layered authorial figures that we not only observed in Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli in the introduction,

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  27 but also will identify throughout this book. This emphasis on the dual identity of the writers – or filmmakers – as both victims and agents points to their status as individual carriers of memory and independent critics of history. Regardless of the type of media they use (although mainly through the moving image), the filmmakers and artists discussed in this book occupy the position of a fin-de-siècle writer who, astride socialist memory and postsocialist reality, demonstrates an intriguing tendency of self-abandonment in the narrative he produces about the two temporalities. Where scholars identify their dual status as a result of being caught between forces of ‘the heroic and the quotidian’, ‘history and testimony’ or ‘history and memory’, this propensity for self-implication – narratively, visually and even haptically, as demonstrated in the last two chapters of this book – is more than the result of reacting to conflicting historical and epistemological forces.8 Rather, it is an active attempt and a conscious strategy that, by way of weaving a narrative out of oneself and weaving oneself into the narrative, produces a sophisticated and unsettled self-image as a layered text, a spatialised temporality and a conscious subject of history aware of the contingencies of his particular representation of history, as well as of all representation and all history.   While the overall tendency of the twentieth century seems to drive toward an elevated goal of progress, whether socialist utopia or global mega economy, there are always resistant forces that pull that high-flying drive toward the ground of everyday life, private experience and personal memory. The unique position of a fin-de-siècle Chinese historical subject places him in a space characterised by dynamic tension between parallel and competing lines of historical energy, from the midst of which he tries to find a way out through his own volition, if not to completely break free, at least to achieve some critical distance with which he will be able to better see and understand his position in respect to that historical space. Driven by this desire to comprehend the contingency and agency of oneself as a historical subject, the fin-de-siècle postsocialist writer – or filmmaker – rises out of a complicated mess of lived experience and previous writing, his feet covered by texts, images and histories not of his own account, but out of which he was born nonetheless. He looks back and under, writes and counter writes, in order to arrive at an alternative biography and history. He writes against and about and around and into and out of that vortex of the past, while in the process necessarily cancelling some of the old writing as well as part of his own roots, as the origin of his experience partly belongs to that old writing, despite the absence of his own volition in it. This enmeshed relationship between subject and history, writer and text, experience and representation, adds tension, complexity, noise and density to the single line of development in the master historical narrative, thickening and complicating it into a fuller, fuzzier and more colourful spectrum composed of specific experiences.   This fin-de-siècle writer’s intimate investment in history and representation predicates that his relationship with both is neither innocent nor detached. His attempts to represent history, whether in writing or through (moving) image, prove no less challenging than the task of trying to pull oneself out of a gulping

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28  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema marsh or quicksand by grasping one’s own collar or neck.9 Only by experiencing such self-willed reopening and laceration of the contact zone where one encounters history can he acknowledge and restore that which has been wounded, damaged, abused and repressed. Only then can he find himself more real and independent in however an incomplete and partial state. In other words, this fin-de-siècle rewriting of the past is an effort to restore human agency against the inhuman power of modern political economy and technology. Such is the situation, as well as opportunity, that the filmmakers and artists of this book are presented with and thereby independent cinema develops as a particularly powerful form of critical engagement with Chinese history.

Subjectivity and Spatiality in Yangbanxi and 1980s Cinema Before we examine how personal memory processes official history and how that journey of going back into the past and arriving at the present gives birth to a particular form of postsocialist historical subjectivity, it is necessary first to register a few salient features of official representations from, and of, the socialist past. The official cultural productions, due to their unquestionable dominant status in distribution and exhibition, had become arguably the most salient (if not necessarily reliable) memory archive of socialist China. This is particularly true of the Cultural Revolution, during which cultural output further shrank to a small number of concentrated showcases of Maoist ideology. Examples like the geming yangbanxi or simply yangbanxi – the eight ‘revolutionary model plays’ – submitted its audience to a system of signification that spatially opposes good/revolutionary to evil/counter-revolutionary and constructs for the public an impersonal subject position at the receiving end of the Maoist ideology.10 It is in conversation with, and in rebellion against, these two aspects of official representation that, from the late seventies and early eighties on, filmmakers and artists set out to explore new spatial and subjective relations.   The very beginning of the Cultural Revolution featured cultural and art productions in the frontline. On 10 November 1965, a Shanghai-based intellectual, Yao Wenyuan, published ‘A Critique of the New Historical Play Hai Rui Ba Guan (Hai Rui’s Dismissal from Office)’ in Wenhui News, the most important newspaper under the direct administration of the Shanghai Municipal Government. Twenty days later, the article was reprinted in People’s Daily. The author of the play, Wu Han – then the Vice Mayor of Beijing and a renowned historian of the Ming Dynasty – was severely criticised for his 1961 play on Hai Rui, a legendary Ming official deeply respected for his fearless redressing of injustice, such as returning forcefully taken land to its original owners. In Yao’s analysis, Wu’s rewriting of the past is a severely incorrect interpretation, because it not only elevates the individual heroism of the historical figure in accordance with capitalist values, but also replaces the necessity of class struggle with a harmful substitution of class reconciliation. More immediately relevant to the historical context of the day, Yao calls Wu’s praise of the ancient official a move, ‘consciously or unconsciously’, against the justified ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in favour of those class elements that had

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  29 been toppled and cleansed in the previous decade, the most recent example being some ‘bull monsters and snake demons’ (niu gui she shen) requesting restoration of individual-based market economy (dan’gan feng) and redressing of past wrongs (fan’an feng) in 1961.11 The editorial accompanying the reprint of Yao’s critique in People’s Daily on 30 November 1965 encourages further debate and criticism in regard to historical research and artistic representations of historical figures and events, emphasising that, quoting Mao, such open communication is the best way to overcome erroneous thoughts, expose problems and defend Marxism.12 With the debates and criticisms deepened and expanded upon, a few months later, the stage drapes of the Cultural Revolution were formally raised.13   From 1966 to 1969, the first three years of the Cultural Revolution, schools, libraries and all other cultural institutions were closed in China. As early as 1942, Mao Zedong, in his Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, had laid down the official guidelines for cultural and spiritual life in socialist China: all literature and the arts should serve the interests of the people and help accomplish or promote the Chinese revolution, which goal was to free all the repressed classes in China and the world.14 Under the direct supervision of Jiang Qing (aka Madame Mao, herself once a small-time actress in the 1930s), the eight revolutionary model plays constitute a concentrated dose of Maoist ideology.15 These works include five revolutionary Peking Operas: The Red Lantern (Hongdeng ji), Sha Jia Village (Sha Jia Bang), Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu wei hu shan), Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi bai hu tuan) and On the Dock (Haixia); two revolutionary ballets: The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun) and White-Haired Girl (Bai mao nü); and one revolutionary symphony: Sha Jia Bang Symphony.16 After 1969 several more operas were produced, including Azalea Mountain (Dujuan shan) and Ode to the Dragon River (Longjiang song), all following the original revolutionary model in both content and form.   Being the only theatrical entertainment permissible for 800 million people (the population of China at the time), these dramas have come to be among the most entrenched popular memories of the Cultural Revolution.17 At the height of the decade, almost everyone was compelled to see these plays for the sake of political education. Sometimes performances preceded or concluded political meetings.18 Apart from the stage presentation, the model plays were also adapted to films that proved even more effective in promulgating these productions beyond the cities to reach audiences in the vast expanse of rural areas and other remote regions of the country.19 These officially approved dramas also occupied many other media platforms. Excerpts or entire scenes of them were broadcast on the radio, sold on records and taught and sung in various public or institutional spaces. Images of the revolutionary heroes and heroines as well as representative scenes were published in various sizes and on a range of media, including calendars, envelopes, journals, notebooks, posters, postcards and stamps. They also appeared on everyday items, such as alarm clocks, buttons, candy wrappers, cigarette containers, cookie boxes, matchboxes, mirrors and washbasins, forming an aggressively fantastic textuality in the everyday life and social psyche of the Chinese during this period.

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30  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema   The central message of the Cultural Revolution is the correctness of Maoist Thought that advocates the necessity of continued revolution and relentless class struggle. With workers, peasants and soldiers identified as the real masters of history – all led by Mao and the CCP – and hence calling for ‘a new era in the history of art’, the model theatre serves to simplify and transform the national past into a consistent grand narrative woven from a series of class war scenarios set both before and after 1949 and to which the Cultural Revolution is seen as the latest installment.20 In these stories, enemies need to be constantly redefined and exposed so that the fruits of proletariat revolutionary China will be protected from corruption of any sort. What the people did not see exposed and represented is the fact that, behind the narrative distortion and stylistic excess of the model theatre, the country was suffering severe economic problems, because of dysfunctional government policy during this period.21   Kirk A. Denton offers an exhaustive analysis of the semiotic system of this official genre and demonstrates it as a perfect combination of icons from socialist ideology and traditional Chinese culture such as the Peking Opera.22 For example, both in the Peking Opera and the model plays we find the traditional distinction between yin and yang at work in meaningful associations – that is, yin is often related to the moon, night, darkness, female, silence and hearing, while yang is linked with the sun, day, light, male, sound and vision. Translated into the model operas, ‘signs traditionally associated with yang are exploited to promote and characterize the roles of the positive characters (workers, peasants and soldiers) while those associated with yin are used to denigrate negative characters (bandits and KMT soldiers)’.23 In addition to the various ‘gestural, musical, rhythmic, terpsichorean, facial, acoustic, literary and linguistic’ signs that Denton discusses in the theatrical form of the genre, we can also detect a continuance and deepening of such formal strategies in the cinematic reproductions of these works, also an extremely important channel of exhibition in Cultural Revolution China.24   Spatially, the mise-en-scène in the film reproductions follows the theatrical presentation and shows the stage on which the performance takes place. In accordance with the stage presentation, positive figures such as members of the proletariat are often shown to be standing tall, wearing brightly-coloured costumes, illuminated by key lighting and enacting more kinetic movements, all fitting the famous principle of perfection or ‘gao-da-quan’ (tall-grand-complete) that Madame Mao suggested in the depiction of proletariat heroes.25 Such aesthetic strategies put the proletariat in control of the space that is not only theatrical and cinematic, but also narrative and historical. The figures who are characterised as the ‘enemy’, in contrast, often are confined to spaces associated with interiority, lowness and darkness. For example, in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, whereas the KMT Army are hosted in a murky cave, the office of the communist soldiers is brightly lit and warmed by a stove in the centre of the room to the extent that the door stays open to the snowy northeast China environment outside. Similarly, in Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, the US/South Korean headquarters are located semi-underground into which the communist soldiers descend and penetrate through a high window. Sha Jia Village features

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  31 a KMT office in a closed chamber with all the windows tightly shut. When a scene ends on the meeting between the KMT officers, the light goes off and their sinister silhouettes are set against the closed windows that are only lit from outside. The spotlight or key light rarely falls on the bandits, except when they are killed. The communist heroes also have chances to perform liangxiang (‘show face’) and present themselves emphatically, facing to the front, towards the audience. A term in traditional Chinese opera, liangxiang is a still, statuesque pose assumed for a brief moment by the actors upon entering or leaving the stage, sometimes after a dance or an acrobatic feat, in order to create an intense impression of the spiritual outlook of the characters.26 When translated onto the movie screen, a cinematic liangxiang allows the heroes to enjoy more close-ups. The enemies, mostly shown in long shots, do not have such a chance to fully introduce themselves.   When the heroes sing arias and express loyalty to Mao and the Party, their gazes are often raised upward, looking offscreen at a higher place where the invisible but omnipresent authority of the Maoist Thought dwells. If Mao’s own political writings, as Xiaobin Yang observes, assume the confident mode of telling, rather than showing, and allow the representational subject (in this case, the authorial subject) of Maoist discourse to speak for all and rationalise an indisputable totality of history, then in the model theatre that lies at the subservient end of Maoist discourse, the representational subjects (for example, the heroes) are characters and actors placed in passive positions as ‘model’ recipients of ideological guidance, which in turn invite the audience to similarly occupy and copy.27 In the autobiographical paintings of Yu Hong, a female artist born in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution started, we find a contemporary reflection on that equation between the subject positions of the positive character and the viewer. Yu’s painting series Witnessing Growing Up (muji chengzhang) reproduces exemplar moments in her personal life as she grew up in the era of high socialism. For example, one painting, entitled ‘Age 6: At Home in Beijing Institute of Aeronautics’ (1990), features Yu as a Young Pioneer – the youngest product of the socialist mechanism in cultivating future inheritors of the revolutionary cause. A six-year-old Yu Hong is seated at a table, daydreaming about something. On the wall behind her hangs a poster inspired by the revolutionary model opera The Red Lantern. In the background of this poster is Li Tiemei, a young female revolutionary who is the protagonist of the opera. With a determined look on her face, Li Tiemei is holding up a red lantern, a symbol of the leadership of Mao and the Party. A red flag is spread behind her. In front of the image of Li Tiemei on the same poster, a student-like young woman, possibly a Red Guard, wears a similar expression of determination and holds in front of her chest what looks like the famous red book – a collection of Mao’s sayings on class struggle. The obvious parallels that we can detect between these two figures, such as the same expression of determination and the same upward direction of their gazes, suggests a modelling and educational structure at work: inspired by the model opera character Li Tiemei, the Red Guard is thinking about class struggle and the revolutionary cause. On top of this parallel structure within the poster, Yu Hong

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32  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema adds one more layer of modelling or copying to the painting to emphasise the relayed effect of the political education at work. As Yu’s six-year-old self, the little girl seated in front of the poster is also looking upward in the same direction, much as the two figures on the poster do, as if she were dreaming wistfully of what they look at and what they represent. The gazes of all the three female figures are parallel and uniformly point outside the frame of representation at an invisible omnipotent authority. With one figure placed in front of another, the apparent layered structure of the trio’s placement in the painting nevertheless communicates a very limited depth of field, because of the black, white and grey palette of the painting and the overall barrenness of the room in which the girl and the poster are placed. The poster is the only decorative item on a white wall. The little girl is seated in a rather narrow space between the poster and a desk that fills up most of the foreground, due to its dark colour and bulky size, further emphasising her and the other two figures’ uniform status as passive subjects of ideological schooling.   As a result of such an extremely limited definition of permissible subject positions and their regimented separation of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary elements, the model plays and films produce an extremely flattened representational space, in which the characters have limited depth as regards personality, become characterless and are invariably rendered symbolic buttons illustrative of political ideals or counter-examples. Unless useful as evidence of the correctness of Maoist Thought, the characters, hero and enemy alike, possess no personal histories or stories within the narrative structure and are certainly not allowed narrative trajectories or outcomes outside of what is permitted by the ‘classical’ narrative of class struggle and proletariat supremacy. Ultimately what is embodied in such treatment of spatiality and characterisation is an official historical vision that denies the complexity and diversity of history and experience, therefore non-ideological plot lines and personal temporalities are discouraged, in order to create a uniform narrative of revolutionary march and socialist progress.   In this light and perhaps predictably, the films produced after the end of the Cultural Revolution and in the eighties, in their efforts to narrate and restore experiences that were previously suppressed, set out to create new types of relationships between representational space and figuration. They do so particularly by way of introducing personal memories and private or nonpolitical natural spaces, thus complicating and thickening the tempo-spatial structure of the narrative. For example, first person narration and flashbacks are often combined with a greater number of close-ups, domestic spaces and landscape shots. Troubled Laughter (Kunao ren de xiao, dir. Yang Yanjin and Deng Yimin, 1979), Night Rain in Bashan (Bashan yeyu, dir. Wu Yigong and Wu Yonggang, 1980), The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (Tianyunshan chuanqi, dir. Xie Jin, 1980), On the Narrow Street (Xiaojie, dir. Yang Yanjin, 1981) and the banned Bitter Love (aka Portrait of a Fanatic, Kulian, dir. Peng Ning, 1981) are all prominent examples in point to various degrees. Starting from the mid-eighties, the Fifth Generation, albeit demonstrating a different creative temperament than that of their predecessors,

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  33 has certainly created highly meaningful cinematic subjects and spaces (including symbolic interiors and meaningful landscapes such as evidenced by the films of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige).28   In this light, it is interesting to see that subjectivity already drew the attention of Chinese cinema scholars in the eighties and nineties. In his study of the post-1949 classical socialist cinema, Chris Berry delineates what he variably calls a ‘transcendent’, ‘objective’, ‘nonindividualized’ or ‘communal’ subject position constructed for the viewer in this cinema’s essentially anti-individualising signifying system.29 Like what we see in the model plays and films, the editing techniques and figural representation of the classical socialist film are so organised that the viewer understands the events in the film from an apparently ‘privileged’ but actually slavish position designated by the enunciating Party authority.30 In the films of the late seventies and early eighties following the end of the Cultural Revolution, there seemed to be a brief moment of heightened subjectivity in examples such as On the Narrow Street and Bitter Love. Both films use flashbacks and subjective narration to contemplate the damage inflicted by the Cultural Revolution from a personal perspective. More indicative of their criticism of the past and their suspicion (although not without hope) of the future are perhaps the ambiguous endings. On the Narrow Street concludes with three possibilities resulting from the blinded protagonist’s search for his lost love: he finds her and she has become corrupt and disillusioned; he finds her in her old house and they are reunited after a small misunderstanding; they run into each other on a train. Each of these endings is framed as his imagination, with no guidance or aid from a higher Party power, and the protagonist directly addresses the audience, inviting them to imagine the ending each according to his own life experience. In an even bolder manner, Bitter Love ends with the artist protagonist dying in wilderness and isolation, his body shaped into a huge question mark on a snowy field as a shocking indictment of the past. These are no facile endings that reassure the credibility of the Party or convince the viewer in his familiar submissive position as in the classical socialist film. However, such a distinctive cultivation of more individual and independent subjectivities seemed quickly discouraged. The banning of Bitter Love and the accompanying critique campaign against its screenwriter Bai Hua led to a halt of similar film productions that attempted boldly alternative perspectives about the Cultural Revolution.31   In the rest of the eighties, according to Berry, Chinese cinema produced a series of overlapping, contrasting and sometimes self-contradictory subjects.32 This characteristic absence of ‘a single, coherent viewing subject’ seems to be the result of ‘the tension between the communal and the individual as generated by recent social change and felt by mainlanders’ in this first postsocialist decade.33 Berry’s observations across the articles are invaluable in their capture of a dynamic moment in the development of Chinese cinematic subjectivity. Although unstable and even self-contradictory, cinematic figures in the late seventies and eighties demonstrate an undeniable tendency to move away from the ideologically designated framework of official representation. However innately fragmented and existentially incomplete, they embarked on an

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34  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema important journey that would lead to an increasing degree of sophistication and reflexivity of their status as both diegetic characters and historical subjects, the most recent examples of which would come from the independent practices from the nineties onwards.   The issue of subjectivity also interests other scholars of Chinese cinema of the 1980s, particularly exemplified by the collectively edited volume New Chinese Cinemas, published in 1994.34 While this critical convergence is partly ascribable to the availability of contemporaneous theoretical models of gender and identity studies, the scholars are aware of the risks of a rigid application of Western theoretical models and of the problems involved in cross-cultural methods.35 Instead of applying an abstract subject position, their analyses make significant note of the films’ specific historical and cultural context. This acute awareness of the specific historical contingency of the struggling and negotiating cinematic subjects seems to translate into the scholars’ theoretical, as well as methodological, interest as the issue of spatiality. For example, Ma Ning specifically discusses the screen placement of the female characters in Xie Jin’s cinema, seeing their various relocations and dislocations as strategies to negotiate a more coherent social subject position for the ‘new period’ following the end of the Cultural Revolution.36 Nick Browne, besides pointing out the spatial marginalisation of social and political outsiders such as Rightist Qin Shutian and New Rich Peasant Hu Yuyin in Hibiscus Town (Furong zhen, dir. Xie Jin, 1986), resituates the socialist political economy of the film in a larger and older framework of Confucian ethical culture. The relocation of the socialist political order alongside the traditional social order not only reveals Chinese socialism’s reliance on, and mobilisation of, traditional culture in exercising (in)justice, but also highlights the existential contingency of the human factor – the humanity and subjectivity of the characters – in the double frame of the socialist and traditional order. The genre of melodrama, when mapped onto the postsocialist cinema of Xie Jin, expands spatially from the familial scope and individual victimisation in its Western prototype to accommodate a more immediate and frequent interaction with the political and social order. As Browne observes: At stake in this form of [Chinese] melodrama is a definition of the self and of the relation of the individual to the social as a fully public matter. Melodrama is the mode of representation of a historical experience that inscribes ‘subjectivity’ in a position between the expectations of an ethical system (Confucianism) and the demands of a political system (socialism), a condition that typifies the Chinese dilemma of modernization.37 What is discriminated against and persecuted in the political order – exemplified by the marginal status of Qin and Hu in Hibiscus Town – is partially restored and comforted by the traditional order when the two characters justify their human right for love and privacy in the name of marriage and family. Browne’s observation is most resounding when he points to the historiographical function exercised by this type of transposed political melodrama. By re-placing the

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  35 human factor in the double frame of the socialist/traditional order, it enables a commentary on the revolutionary past that, while not possibly as daringly individual-based as attempted by On the Narrow Street and Bitter Love, does offer an alternative angle to that of official interpretation. In that sense, cinematic subjectivity of the eighties is in need of spatiality for its cultivation, realisation and communication, mobilising spatiality as a visual component of the miseen-scène and as a symbolic reference to specific cultural coordinates. Thus, with the spatial factor in support of, and in conversation with, the human factor, Chinese cinema is able to practice a historical reflection that is both effective and subtle (so as not to incur official censorship). Such figural, spatial, narrative and cinematic concoctions all point to a historical matter: why and how did certain characters appear in a certain cinematic frame and light at that point in Chinese culture and history?   In a manner comparable to Browne’s analysis of the double socialist/traditional framework in which Xie Jin’s historical narrative oscillates and tries to maintain an edgy balance between comprehending and doubting the past, Chris Berry makes an appositional observation about the male as well as female subjects in Chinese cinema of the eighties: they always seem to arrive halfway between stagnation and change. This recurrent cinematic construction possibly reflects the fact of the eighties: personal memory and independent critique had not been fully sanctioned to assess the past; the socialist system has reformed economically, but stays stagnant politically.38 The apparent self-contradiction of cinematic subject positions available to the cinema of the eighties doubtless holds a mirror to ‘the instability and dynamism’ of this first decade of postsocialist reform, in which the West-informed cultural liberalism was punctuated biannually by socialist political curdling.39 The picture of Chinese cinematic subjectivity, at that point of scholarly discussion, seemed to be awaiting further ‘shifts . . . twists . . . and turns’ before a more coherent understanding could form.40   Now, after approximately two decades have passed following those discussions, that earlier critical convergence on subjectivity seems strikingly relevant and even prescient, as numerous independent works have poured forth since the early nineties, widening and deepening the cinematic exploration of postsocialist subjectivity. Taken with the benefit of retrospect, those valuable earlier questions and observations illuminate a confusing but significant moment in the development of postsocialist cultural identity. The inconsistency of subjectivity in the cinema of the eighties seems to form a necessary transitional stage in a gradual and increasingly conscious construction of a more pronounced historical subjectivity. The seeds of a wakening postsocialist historical consciousness have already been sown.   In the following discussion, I will revisit the 1980 film Night Rain in Bashan, because, in terms of both cinematic spatiality and subjectivity, it presents a most intriguing and suggestive alternative to many of its contemporaries’ engagement with recent Chinese history. While still fitting into the genre of post-revolutionary trauma film that criticises the insanity and injustice of the Cultural Revolution, Night Rain in Bashan stands out with a unique aesthetic of

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36  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema distance and alterity that embodies an unusual level of reflexivity in exercising historical reflection and an extremely important attitude that would see a much more conscious development in independent Chinese cinema.41

A Ship on a River: The Historical Space in Night Rain in Bashan Eschewing the usual evocation of the contrast and mutual imbrication between private space and public politics prevalent in cinematic representations of the Cultural Revolution, Night Rain in Bashan places its main plot in a borderline space beyond that familiar dichotomy. The entire film unfolds aboard a ship on a river – a remarkable ‘floating piece of place . . . without a place’, to borrow Michel Foucault’s words. Foucault associates the boat with the concept of heterotopia, a kind of physical and symbolic space that allows components and relationships in the real world (such as the Cultural Revolution) to be ‘simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.42 Heterotopias, including diverse examples such as the cemetery, the library, the prison, the boarding school, the army and even the honeymoon (train, ship or hotel), are essentially spaces of alterity (though not necessarily marginalised or discriminated against) identified by their full but eschewed relevance to the ‘normal’ society in which the latter deposits and exercises its desires, fears, problems and imagined solutions in a concentrated and symbolic manner. The particular context of Night Rain in Bashan – the critical acclaim it received in May 1981, its different and subtly more ambiguous treatment of historical baggage than its co-winner of the Golden Rooster Award, The Legend of Tianyun Mountain, and the critique of Bitter Love and screenwriter Bai Hua that was unfolding at around the same time in the country throughout 1981 (resulting in the subsequent ban of Bitter Love) – all provides a specific historical grounding for Foucault’s inspired formulation.43   As a cinematic heterotopia of an early moment of postsocialist China, the ship space in Night Rain in Bashan accommodates a matching cast of sideline characters among which even the classic pair of conflict between good and bad – now reversed fittingly between a heroically persecuted ‘counter-revolutionary’ intellectual and a revolutionary guard – has its usual rigid edges rounded off and subdued. Most curiously and even more directly relevant to our discussion of the Forsaken Generation and independent cinema, literally on the edge of this atypical collective cast hangs around a wandering child figure. Her role in the film, while being actually a piece of narrative excess, reinforces the ship heterotopia with a parallel figure of alterity that operates independent of the other characters. More importantly, she fulfills a highly evocative function as an embodiment of historical commentary by way of her absent but desired relationship to her father – the persecuted intellectual protagonist of the film. In retrospect, Night Rain in Bashan as a key but critically neglected text of the 1980s appears as an uncanny harbinger of contemporary independent cinema in terms of its implied historical vision – one that is marked by a deep interest in alterity, an attitude of discreet removal and an aesthetic of distance. The age of the child figure – around six – also suggests that she stands, both realistically and poetically, as an early cinematic and allegorical figuration of the generation of independent filmmakers

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  37 we will discuss. Thus, she not only forms a perfect early sketch of the collective portrait of the Forsaken Generation filmmakers and artists, but also joins the latter to the ongoing figuration of subjectivities on the Chinese screen.   Night Rain in Bashan is set in the final years of the Cultural Revolution. Taking place on a ship leaving Chongqing for Wuhan, the film depicts the journey of Qiu Shi, a poet who has been imprisoned for six years for his free speech and liberal poetry against the absurdities of the Cultural Revolution. Currently, he is being secretly transported to Wuhan to be, as suggested in the film, illegally tried and possibly executed. Qiu travels with two guards, one of them being a young woman named Liu Wenying (Zhang Yu), whose transformation from being an adamant supporter of the Cultural Revolution to an awakened, independent mind is the second main theme in the story. Joining them in the same cabin onboard are five passengers who, interestingly, are all negative or ‘middle-of-the-road’ characters disavowed in the revolutionary model theatre, as they fail to side adamantly, or even speak against, the Cultural Revolution. They include an intellectual who criticises the deplorable prevalence of ignorance in schools; an artist who was famous (and persecuted) for his depiction of clowns in Peking Opera; a worker who was once a Red Guard and now becomes the loudest dissident voice, not hesitating to criticise the anomaly of the era or conceal his sympathy for Qiu Shi. There are also two peasants (both of whom are women), but one has to sell herself through an unwanted marriage in order to pay back family debts and the other is old and desolate, having lost her war hero of a son in an armed fight at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. With such an unusual cast, the dictated divide between the proletariat and class enemies becomes dissolved, as now all are accommodated in a ship cabin whose standard arrangement of bunker beds makes no differentiation between the occupants. What is more, as exemplified by the two women peasants and the worker, even the proletariat is capable of ‘ignorance’ – or worse, disapproval – of the revolutionary cause.   The story of the young peasant woman presents an interesting parallel, as well as contrast, to that of the ‘White-Haired Girl’ – the famous protagonist of the titular model opera. Differing from its later, widely known, typical representation of Maoist ideology, the original play of White-Haired Girl (1946) was paradoxically accused of portraying ‘middle-of-the-road characters’ (zhongjian renwu) who are neither proletariat heroes nor bourgeois or counter-revolutionary enemies.44 The repressed peasant Yang Bailao, as the play’s early attackers or critics maintained, takes his own life without rebelling after being forced to sell his daughter Xi’er to the vicious landlord Huang Shiren, thus smearing the heroic image of the revolutionary peasant. Even more wrongly, in the original folk opera, the white-haired girl Xi’er is characterised as so naïve that she even fantasises about marrying the landlord and giving birth to his child after being raped by him. This fantasy sequence disappears from both the revised film version in 1950 and the model theatre ballet version in 1966. In the 1966 version, Yang Bailao is full of defiance and is heroically beaten to death, and Xi’er finally joins the Party’s revolutionary army after being rescued from exile. In Night Rain, however, rather than enjoying freedom and support from the revolutionary rule of the proletariat, the young

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38  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema peasant woman seems to be living a pre-1949 life. The revolution apparently fails to deliver her family from poverty, thus adding a scathing but realistic footnote to the grandiose revolutionary discourse. Unsurprisingly, such unflattering testimony implied in the film led to vehement criticism for its atypical characterisation.45 Even more daringly, the captain and the policeman, although uniformed as the political as well as legal overseers aboard the ship, also sympathise with Qiu Shi and eventually help him to freedom. Toward all this, Liu Wenying, initially one of Qiu’s unsympathetic guards, makes an unwittingly trenchant observation early in the film: ‘The Cultural Revolution has been going on for such a long time, yet this ship looks as if it were not sailing under the sky of the proletariat.’

Figure 1.1  Night Rain in Bashan (dir. Wu Yigong and Wu Yonggang, 1980): The open spatial structure inside the cabin   Liu is quite right. The ship, along with the river landscape as another prominent visual constant in the film, constructs a very unique, alternative space in both narrative and historical terms. A river flows; a journey transports one from one place to another and in the process involves constant change and renewal of view. As if aided by such facts that are also highly symbolic, the ship in Night Rain travels on the Yangtze River and becomes an independent space floating outside the politics on the riverbanks. As indicated by the cabin’s composition, ideology here is returned to the midst of social life and revealed to be not only less important, but also less creditable, its senselessness being testified by the pained experiences and observations of the ‘atypical’ social cast of passengers.   Besides the non-differentiating design of the cabin with uniform bunker beds, the mise-en-scène onboard the ship generally is free from revolutionary iconography. Instead of highly saturated and contrasting colours such as red, green, black

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  39 and white, the costumes, props and interior design in Night Rain feature a mild and muted colour palette consisting of off-white, creamy earthen, washed-out pink and violet, grey and blue. Matching this muted colour palette of the mise-enscène onboard are river and mountain scenes, which also tend to be presented in muted yellow and earthen colours. The few brighter touches offered by wild flowers (picked when the ship makes a stop) are mostly violet. Only the outspoken and cynical worker occasionally wears a red sweatshirt, such as in the scene where the cabin occupants voice critiques of the era’s absurdity in outlawing cultural valuables like literature, legends and poetry. The female intellectual – a schoolteacher – explicitly questions the revolutionary colour scheme when confronting Liu: ‘How can anything be simplistically divided between red and black?!’   Aside from the revolutionary-minded Liu Wenying, who is going to be transformed by this journey, the only direct reference to the official ideology is the diegetic broadcast of a model play, Battles on the Plains (Pingyuan zuozhan). However, the worker turns it off upon his entrance in the cabin, saying: ‘Let’s have some peace here. It’s been noisy enough.’ Accordingly, the film’s mise-enscène also rejects ideological busyness and visual loudness. The walls of the ship are free of big-character posters, revolutionary banners and Mao’s images. Although passengers are handed political flyers as they wait to get onboard the ship, the film provides a cutaway shot showing a flyer being thrown into the river. No one onboard wears a badge of Mao on their chest, including the two guards of Qiu Shi. The few appearances of such well-known icons of the era are depicted in a negative light, occurring in Qiu Shi’s flashback, within which a Red Guard armband flashes by, accompanied by sounds and scenes of damage and violence when the Red Guards undertake a house raid on Qiu’s home.   With familiar ideological signs lifted, character relationships in such an ‘atypical’ space reveal a rich network of exchanges without a dominant point of view. The multi-pivotal structure inside the cabin, equipped with bunker beds and multiple characters that have distinctive backgrounds and different personalities, predicates that camera placement frequently changes position in order to present a different aspect of an exchange in point (see Figure 1.1). When Liu Wenying becomes involved in a verbal confrontation with the young worker on the model opera and later in a similar conflict with the schoolteacher about ideological dictation of cultural classics, the conventional shot/reverseshot structure is characteristically interspersed with medium shots or medium close-ups of the other characters, who express their puzzlement, indignation and support through silent but concerned gazes. The openness of the bunker-bed spatial structure further diversifies these opinionated looks, presenting them as going in different directions onscreen and weaving them into a network of conflating gazes. The shots are variously filmed from a lower-level bed in one corner, from an upper-level bed in another corner and from the two doors of the cabin. The camera practically presents the point of view of every character and gives each a highlight medium close-up as well, so as to show their reaction to the situation. Despite his status as the central hero of the story, Qiu Shi, while observing the exchanges with deep interest and revealing his feelings through

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40  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema thoughtful looks, does not dominate the cabin scenes. He is an observing participant in these exchanges, just like the others.   On the other hand, although Liu Wenying appears alone in her defence of the Cultural Revolution, the editing never constructs her as the sole target of the disapproving gazes of all the others. In her debate with the schoolteacher, she becomes the focus of the attention of the others, but not in a simply unanimous manner. Rather than presenting Liu surrounded by the others (or their gazes) in a long shot, the editing disperses the tension by stopping the rather heated exchange with the schoolteacher quitting the debate, the worker making some ironic comments and the old peasant woman making a kind commonsensical suggestion that reasoning should be done with a peaceful attitude. Even when she appears as being on the losing side of the debate, Liu is never framed alone as the source of the isolated and wrong opinion. Rather, she is always framed together with a few other passengers, such as the young peasant woman and the young worker, who listen attentively. Despite her difference from the rest, she is still visually presented (and respected) as one among them. Narratively or visually, she is never dismissed as a simplistic caricature brainwashed beyond remedy. Instead of being forcefully changed, she will come to break with her previous self as the result of a gradual process of soulsearching and open communication, especially with her poet prisoner Qiu Shi, the major part of which takes place in the night scenes.   If the daytime scenes appear cleansed of ideology, the nighttime scenes are even more subdued in style, as their cinematic space consists mainly of steel rails, staircases and greyish aisles against a uniformly dark backdrop of night and river. A fine drape of misty rain keeps blowing onboard, communicating a rare, simple elegance that has the poetic effect of quieting and cleansing a crowded mind such as that of the revolutionary guard. With only a few spatial cues, the careful placement of characters economically communicates subtle changes in their relationship. In the crucial scene where Liu Wenying has an eye-opening conversation with Qiu Shi, the latter is at first seen from Liu’s point of view and framed between rails, as if behind the bars, which befits his role as a political prisoner. As the conversation goes on, Qiu urges Liu to try to see independently what is going on in the world around them; thus, the two characters gradually change positions, ending up with Liu taking Qiu’s original position and standing between the bar-like rails, while resenting Qiu’s words with anger and frustration (Figures 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4). At that point, Qiu remarks that Liu is actually the real prisoner, because of her bondage in mind. It is from that moment on that Liu starts to ‘see’ for herself and thus change her opinion about Qiu, as well as the Cultural Revolution. Such changeability of spatial (as well as symbolic and political) positions between the socialist representative and the class enemy was practically unimaginable in the model theatre. This deliberate confusion of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sets afloat the previously fixed ideological axis that divides Chinese society into political castes. Replacing the model theatre’s pronounced contrast between light and darkness and between red and dark, the spatial as well as the visual structure of Night Rain presents almost a completely opposite set of factors and crafts an ingeniously alternative narrative about the Cultural Revolution.

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  41

Figure 1.2  Night Rain in Bashan: Revolutionary (Liu Wenying) and counterrevolutionary (Qiu Shi) change positions [i]

Figure 1.3  Night Rain in Bashan: Revolutionary (Liu Wenying) and counterrevolutionary (Qiu Shi) change positions [ii]

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42  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

Figure 1.4  Night Rain in Bashan: Revolutionary (Liu Wenying) and counterrevolutionary (Qiu Shi) change positions [iii]   Kirk A. Denton has observed about the model theatre: ‘fire imagery is . . . strictly parallel with sun imagery and opposed to images of water’, which is the symbol of the dark forces of the negative characters.46 In Night Rain, precisely such dark and negative imageries as water, rain and night are featured not only as prominent visual elements, but also at the centre of the narrative. Apart from Liu Wenying’s change, the other various strands of narrative also reach their climax accompanied by the nightscape of river and rain: the peasant girl throws herself into the river in order to escape her deplorable fate and is saved by Qiu Shi; the old peasant woman arrives at the spot where her son was killed years ago and pours homegrown jujubes – his favorite snack when alive – into the river as a heart-wrenching memorial service; and, most importantly, Qiu Shi is reunited with his daughter Juanzi before they flee together at dawn with the help of the people onboard. Crises arise and get resolved; secrets are revealed and appeased; frustrating fate is able to meet with genuine support and love based on human understanding, rather than political guidelines. The passengers, despite their various class associations, are all recognised and restored – particularly the revolutionary Liu – to their human dimensions. Such recognition and restoration is only possible in an environment that no longer divides them into opposing camps and incompatible spaces. Lighting is evenly distributed on all characters, creating no particular shadows on the non-proletariat ones. Also impressively, though protagonists like Qiu Shi, his daughter Juanzi and Liu Wenying tend to have more close-ups, almost all of the members of the supporting cast receive such highlighting through a few close-ups or medium close-ups, thus further

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  43 creating an overall equalised relationship between the characters and presenting an alternative collective portrait of the society of the Cultural Revolution.   In the night scenes, the rails, aisles and staircases contribute to the construction of temporary and fragmented spaces in which the positions of characters are equal, flexible and interchangeable (as demonstrated by my previous discussion of the conversation scene). Often framed in part and thus appearing fragmented, the rails, aisles and staircases outline an open space that is immediately joined by what is outside the ship: the night air, the river and the indefinite space above the night river. No characters – especially neither Liu Wenying nor the ship’s policeman, if both figures represent authority to some extent – have control over this open space. Rather, its indefinite openness and subtle borderline quality forms a symbolic middle space between the ship and the world beyond. This cushion of a borderline space allows the characters to relax, hang loose and enter personal spaces inside of themselves, such as memory and soul-searching.   Harbouring this fringe space composed of rails, aisles and staircases, the ship exists as a heterotopia flowing outside revolutionary history. The fury and sound operating in the real world on the riverbanks appears far away and almost irrelevant here. A space outside the usual historical coordinates, the ship helps depoliticise the people who come and dwell here temporarily. Medium to medium-long shots show people moving naturally and slowly, their bodies relaxed. There are no heroic poses or self-deprecating stooping. If anything, the one who is represented as standing more erectly and seen in a low-angle ‘power shot’ is the poet under arrest. Unlike the model theatre stage (including its cinematic presentation) that maintains a rigid frontal relationship with the audience, the spaces in Night Rain – particularly those at nighttime – are presented from all angles and tend to be seen as parts of a larger space. Characters enter and exit the cabin through two doors, one on the ‘front’ and the other on the ‘back’ – the distinction between such dimensions is neither clear nor important. The rails and staircases are approachable from various directions and levels. Again, there is the ship itself, travelling down a river whose scenery is presented through a variety of angles, mixing shots on all sides of the river and frequently using direction-confusing close-up shots – an unusual choice for landscape cinematography – on the running water and whirlpools. Not only do the ship and its related spaces – the cabin inside, the railed aisles on the fringe and the river beyond it – all keep revolutionary politics distant and irrelevant, they also become sites where the non-revolutionary experiences and humanistic feelings are restored, acknowledged and supported. As a spatio-temporal narrative whole, the ship in Night Rain, complete with its inner architectonic and narrative structure and with the surrounding correlates of the river, rain and night, forms a heterotopia that accommodates a critical contestation of the dominant historiography by figuring an alternative parallel to the era at a suggestive distance. The characteristic attitude of holding history at a contemplative and critical distance, as we shall see later, would surface in an even more conscious manner in the works of independent filmmakers.

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44  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

The Figure of a Forsaken Child In this free-flowing and open space of the ship we have a matching figure whose wandering and evasive presence not only marks an interesting parallel, but also serves as the ‘eye’ of the film, like in traditional Chinese literati painting. An anonymous little orphan girl of around six wanders around on the ship, evades the policeman and seems to be searching for someone. Alone, silent and highly alert, the girl sneaks onto the ship at the beginning of the film with neither guardian nor luggage. Her destination is vague. Ticketless, she constantly wanders around onboard, passes through cabins and hides in dark corners and back rooms. She frequents the aisles and staircases and wanders off to the rails, a mobile figure on a floating ship on a flowing river. She turns out to be Juanzi, actually Qiu Shi’s daughter who was born during his imprisonment and whom he has never met before. After her mother passes away, Juanzi becomes an orphan and her mission onboard the ship is to find her father. It is never explained how such a helpless little child is able to find out her father’s whereabouts, because Qiu Shi’s transportation is a secret, but perhaps this is not important, as the contribution of this child figure lies more in the symbolic and figurative aspect than in the practical logic of plot (Figures 1.5 and 1.6).

Figure 1.5  Night Rain in Bashan: A forsaken child – Juanzi   The image of an orphaned child wandering loosely on a ship floating on a river carries the current cinematic heterotopia further away from revolutionary dictation into a poetic and non-ideological realm of human existence. Juanzi does not speak until toward the end (and even then not that much, because her

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  45

Figure 1.6  Night Rain in Bashan: A forsaken child – Juanzi wandering alone on the ship assumed narration is visualised as a flashback focusing on the last days of her sick mother). In contrast with such verbal reticence, she communicates through a poetic performance of singing the theme song ‘I am a Dandelion Seed’ (Wo shi yike pugongying de zhongzi). Throughout the film she hums the song, wandering from cabin to cabin and from aisle to aisle, looking for the father she has never met. The song is created from a poem Qiu Shi wrote in prison after learning about her birth. Juanzi’s mother teaches it to her before passing away: I am a dandelion seed. Nobody knows my happiness and sadness. Papa and mama gave me a small umbrella, And let me float away in the big wide world . . . The little umbrella carries me flying, flying, flying . . . The little umbrella carries me flying, flying, flying . . . The figurative parallel between the ill-fated little Juanzi wandering alone and the image of a dandelion fractal – or seed – flying away after being blown is obvious. What is more, the significance of this song and the image of a dandelion that it evokes need to be fully considered within the historical context surrounding the film’s production. In Night Rain, the song has its origin in a woodprint presenting a little girl blowing a dandelion. Resonating with the muted style of the film’s overall mise-en-scène, the woodprint has a minimalist design with

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46  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema the image delineated in black and grey lines only. Explicated with no writing or calligraphy of any sort, its background is simply the blankness of the paper itself. Significantly, this woodprint makes its first appearance when Qiu Shi suffers a house raid, at which point his love – later Juanzi’s mother – comes to express her loyal love for him. It is she who brings this dandelion woodprint as a gift. In response to the criticism of the atypical characterisation in Night Rain, the film’s screenwriter Ye Nan invokes the dandelion woodprint to highlight the stupidity of familiar revolutionary metaphors: Just like a woodblock print by painter Wu Fan that appears in the film: a little girl holds up a dandelion to her lips, about to blow it away. This is very beautiful. If some people say, there should be a cobra in there because in nature there are cobras, isn’t that a joke?!47 The woodprint is a reproduction of ‘Dandelion’, a famous woodprint by Wu Fan – a renowned printmaker and painter from Sichuan Province. ‘Dandelion’ won an international award in 1959 when China was caught in the heat of the Great Leap Forward. According to Wu Yonggang, the film’s co-director, it is precisely Wu Fan’s simple but suggestive piece of art that inspired the filmmakers’ decision to replace the red azalea – the original candidate for the theme flower – with the current mild, yellow, little flower.48   This is a subtly important choice, because, indeed, even flowers are not innocent from the effects of revolutionary politics.49 As China entered the Cultural Revolution, non-ideological artworks like Wu Fan’s ‘Dandelion’ woodprint faced increasing intolerance and political misinterpretation. For example, in the mid1960s, Madame Mao denounced the documentary Praise for the Construction Army (Jun ken zhan ge) on the basis of an exaggerated revolutionary semiotic reading: the lyrics ‘Dear Leader Mao Zedong leads us on forever’ appear against the background of a field of ‘bad’, blooming red poppies on the Gobi dry lands in northwest China. After this denunciation, poppies became a stand-in for all kinds of ‘poisonous weeds’ that refer to literature and artworks interpreted as malicious attacks on the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist Thought. In a 1976 volume of Aurora (Zhao Xia) – an official literary journal practically serving as the mouthpiece of the Cultural Revolution – an article categorised all artworks other than the model theatre as ‘poisonous weeds’ or ‘poppies’.50 Li Kuchan, a wellknown contemporary painter of classical ink paintings, was accused of attacking the eight model plays on the basis that his lotus flowers – a favourite traditional subject in ink painting – had eight petals.51   In contrast, one of the most famous examples of approved flower growths is found in Sparkling Red Star (Shanshan de hongxing, dir. Li Jun and Li Ang, 1974). A highly popular children’s film, Sparkling Red Star is about the growth of a peasant child, Dongzi, who under the nurturing of the Party becomes a little soldier of the revolutionary cause. Unblinking in its advocacy of violence in the name of irreconcilable class conflict, the film features, for example, a disturbing scene with Dongzi, still a child, killing a class enemy (a landowner) with a huge

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  47 knife. When presenting his childhood memory, the film displays a palette familiar from the model theatre: an azure sky under which the blue-uniformed Red Army soldiers fight and live; bright red star-shaped buttons on the Red Army caps; blood-red azalea flowers that represent the spirit of Dongzi’s mother, a communist heroine who sacrifices herself fighting the evil landlord and being burned to death. Over the years, Sparkling Red Star has stayed in popular memory and is remembered as a revolutionary classic. Chinese–American writer Anchee Min aptly names her personal memoirs about the Cultural Revolution Red Azalea.52 In 2003, the pop singer Liu Huan (b. 1963) created a rendition of old songs, Born in the Sixties – For My Generation and Our Children (Liushi niandai sheng ren – gei wo de tonglingren ji houdai). ‘Azalea’, the theme song of Sparkling Red Star, is the first one listed.   Against such a once-overwhelming backdrop of red discourse, Night Rain’s choice of dandelion over azalea is a carefully considered rejection of revolutionary ideology in favour of a more humanist and depoliticised world. However, although playing a significant role in further confirming the film’s commitment to humanism, the dandelion – through its depiction in the song, the woodprint image and the child figure – can be readily replaced with other non-red flowers and is not indispensable, if considered simply for its narrative function.   The main plot of the film has two closely intertwined developments: Qiu Shi’s escape and Liu Wenying’s transformation. Already fulfilling the classical narrative structure prevalent in mainstream cinema that typically depicts the ordeal of a protagonist facing a challenging situation, dealing with it and emerging changed from it, Night Rain would have had a complete and sensible plot without the insertion of the little girl Juanzi, as she plays no central role in either Qiu Shi’s escape or Liu’s change of mind. Qiu could get onto the road of freedom perfectly well, a capacity befitting the figure of an independent-minded artist and intellectual. Similarly, Liu’s soulful change results from communication with the other passengers, including Qiu Shi. Thus, one would ask precisely what additional functions the figure of the little girl (and in association with the dandelion) serves. Like the dandelion reference that points to the ridiculously forced but sadly real tension between nature and politics in a tautly politicised China during the Cultural Revolution, the answer here seems to lie again beyond the diegetic world of the film in the border zone, where film and reality are conjoined to evoke a larger world, mixing narrative and history.   The narrative structure of Night Rain resembles the shape of the river journey, following an overall one-directional development that starts with a conflict (the difference and tension between Liu and Qiu, the latter supported by his fellow passengers) and ends with Liu’s transformation and Qiu’s escape. Then, like the rapids and whirlpools that receive quite a few close-up highlights in the film, flashback scenes – mainly from Qiu’s point of view – take the narrative temporarily outside its linear trajectory and delve into the past, economically delineating the brief, bittersweet span of Qiu’s romantic life and personal history. In these flashbacks we are introduced to his poetic endeavours, political suffering and his brief romantic and family life, all serving to establish Qiu, despite being

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48  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema a political prisoner, as the admirably suffering romantic hero of the film. Being curiously suggested but as yet absent from his personal memory, however, the child figure of Juanzi gives rise to a personified heterotopia of her own that relates to the current representation of history from a provocative and symbolic distance.   As Chris Berry has acutely noted, flashbacks and first-person narration tend to appear more often in Chinese films of the late seventies, serving as an indicator of increased emphasis on subjectivity, prompted by reflections on the recent traumatising experience of the Cultural Revolution.53 Steeped in personal memory, Night Rain is partly inspired by a ninth-century poem called ‘Night Rain: Sent North’ (Yeyu ji bei) by Li Shangyin (813–58), a renowned poet from the late Tang Dynasty. Li’s poetry is known for its allusiveness and subtlety in metaphor and sentiments, often dealing with the themes of parting and loss. ‘Night Rain: Sent North’ is particularly interesting and relevant with its theme of memory and suggestion of multiple temporalities: You ask me the date for my turn; no date is set yet; Night rain in the hills of Ba Floods the autumn pools. When will we together trim the candle by the western window and discuss these times of the night rain in the hills of Ba?54 In Night Rain, Qiu Shi practically impersonates this inherited famous image of a poet thinking about his beloved far away at home. His wife is a beautiful dancer who captures his romantic as well as aesthetic interest when performing a dance about the famous Wushan Goddess – an ancient legendary figure associated with a titular scenic mountain peak in the Wu Gorge on the Yangtze River. Here, romantic life and personal memory are seamlessly joined with a nostalgic longing for ancient and pre-revolutionary traditional culture – a point expressly defended by the other intellectual figure onboard, the schoolteacher.   Curiously, the image of Juanzi never appears in Qiu Shi’s richly connotative flashbacks, although he knows of her existence. In other words, the child is written out of her own father’s memory and only gains existence when he has just been thrown into prison and removed from visible history. Equally, she has no actual memory of her poet father, not even through a photo, because all his photos have been destroyed after the various house raids of the Red Guards.55 When Juanzi does feature visibly in the past, it is through her own narration at the policeman’s sympathetic request, speaking about her mother’s death and thus providing the continuation of the sad story of Qiu Shi’s family that we have already learned.

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  49   Although appearing redundant as a source of story information, Juanzi, like her independent wandering and evasive sideline itinerary on the ship, forms a small but unique space in which is stored what is not quite accessible or containable by the existent story logic. Neither the flashbacks of Qiu Shi as the only first-person narrator nor the mental activities of Liu Wenying as the changed heroine absolutely need Juanzi to complete the journey they are already quite sufficiently on. Rather, the child figure provides a unique angle that, while omissible from the plot, is important in helping connect the film as a world of fiction to that of real history, such as the origin of the woodprint ‘Dandelion’, from which her cinematic existence is indivisible. Where Qiu Shi’s memory falls short in imagination based on received information (such as learning about his wife’s death), Juanzi, by actively taking on the journey all by herself to find her lost father despite her fragile age, miraculously repairs the missing link between father and daughter, memory and reality, past and present. Her singing and lonely search not only relocates Qiu Shi in a personal mnemonic space that he shares with his loved ones, but also connects the entire film – through the rich connotations of the dandelion and its like in China’s recent past – to the realm of history that lies beyond.   Separated by the harsh political circumstances, father and daughter have never been able to live together and thus have little shared history. With her mother gone, Juanzi becomes almost a complete castaway of (family) history, never making an appearance in Qiu Shi’s flashbacks, despite his knowledge of her birth. Her only hope to restore the forced absence of connection between them is to memorise the poem/song, make it heard and hope her father recognises both it and her. Although only a child figure, Juanzi represents a particular will of agency to introduce herself to her absent parent and make her existence known and acknowledged. As part of that process, she also helps to restore and confirm Qiu Shi’s identity, not only as a famous poet, but also as a human being with regular and precious family relations. As his daughter, she represents Qiu Shi’s personal history that has been damaged and denied existence. Significantly, she is also the carrier of his creative work, memorising his poem, singing it and keeping it alive as a vocalised and embodied document of history that is not admissible by official discourse at the moment. This child is a little angel of history for the poet, as well as for what the poet represents: the part of history and culture that falls outside of the narrow zone of revolutionary politics.   Now it would be even more curious to note that Juanzi, born during the Cultural Revolution as the plot has it, turns out to be an early cinematic persona of the Forsaken Generation. Unlike the excited, credulous and yearning face of the revolutionary boy Dongzi in Sparkling Red Star, Juanzi looks ‘sad and stubborn’, with too much distrust and caution for a child of her age.56 Interestingly, we will discover a similar (though by no means the only) countenance in the selfportraits by the Forsaken Generation and observe a similar attitude of distance, caution and skepticism in their literary and visual work. Also located at the centre of their efforts is a desire to reconnect to a past that is both present and absent for them, just like Juanzi’s experience with her father and the era at large.

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50  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema From that desire gradually evolves a will and develops an agency that seeks to reinstate alternative experiences and neglected memories – their own as well as others’ – to a more illumined position, where these can receive a proper acknowledgement and fuller understanding. When the little girl Juanzi steps onto a ship on the Yangtze River to look for her father in the early seventies toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, she is also embarking on a symbolic journey, in which she is to become both the carrier of, and the searcher for, repressed personal memory of the era, a role that her extra-cinematic counterparts – the Forsaken Generation – will later play in real life.

The Forsaken Generation: Take it Personally and Historically Like their uncanny cinematic precursor Juanzi, the Forsaken Generation had its first encounter with the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) as young children and came of age at a time when China transitioned from feverish socialism to a drastically different market economy. The Forsaken Generation, in its own words, is socialist history’s useless ‘appendix’ or its ‘bastards’, the unhatched ‘eggs laid by or under the red flag’, a generation that is ‘marginalised’, ‘anonymous’, ‘depoliticised’, ‘scattered’, forsaken by history, obsessed with memories and ‘nurtured by suspicion’.57 Various members of this generation have expressed a common sentiment towards the recent socialist past and their own interrupted and abandoned growth, one whose fundamental tone subtly mixes belief and suspicion, longing and disgust. Besides luminaries in literary fiction, such as Yu Hua (b. 1960) and Su Tong (b. 1963), for example, a ‘new generation’ of poets in the nineties – twothirds of which were born in the sixties – demonstrate a common sensitivity to the reverse side of history and reality.58 In the observations of the poet and critic Wang Ping, for these young poets nothing much seems ‘left of the past [except] ruins, a wasteland of abandoned ideology, and the rapid collapse of both nature and culture that accompanies it’. Confronted by this crisis, the poets yearn to reconnect with reality in refreshing ways that eschew the outdated language of ‘heroism and utopian idealism’, resulting in a rediscovery and exploration of ‘the darkness and ugliness of human nature’, ‘breaks and discontinuities’ in narrative, ‘gaps and holes’, as well as ‘difference’ in imagery and imagination.59 For instance, Xue Di (b. 1957) looks back at ‘youth’, ‘motherland’, ‘parents’, ‘home’, ‘childhood’ and ‘memory’ and sees decay, disappearance and decrepitude in association with hurtful images, such as nails, a hammer, a collapsing wall, hooks and a raised butcher knife.60 In ‘Black Night’, Tang Yaping (b. 1962) conjures a figure of the self that chooses to turn away from the sun and face a reality of darkness, ‘heaviness’, ‘silence’, ‘solitude and sorrow’, in which she nevertheless finds a quiet confidence, ‘self-respect’ and ‘maturity’.61   Confronting the ruins of the socialist past in which lie the roots of their existence, the Forsaken Generation is attacked by a sense of loss, pain and even despondence. However, exactly that knowledge of the doomed incompleteness and brokenness in their experience produces an intensified reflexive vision on history, reality and the specific contingency and situatedness of their own status

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  51 as postsocialist historical subjects. Aside from fiction and poetry, popular music also registers this particular structure of feeling in contemporary China.62 From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, prison songs (qiuge) became very popular. Chi Zhiqiang (b. 1958), a popular movie actor who has portrayed hopeful socialist youth in films such as Venture (Chuangye, dir. Yu Yanfu, 1974) and Sunset Street (Xizhao jie, dir. Wang Haowei, 1983), initiated the prison song fad after his release from prison for a conviction of a ‘crime of hooliganism’ (liumang zui) – a condemning name in the early eighties for sexual aggression that also included various romantic attempts and sexual relationships outside of wedlock. From 1988 to 1990, Chi released two cassettes, Regretful Tears (Huihen de lei) and Embrace Tomorrow (Yongbao mingtian), selling about 10,000,000 copies. Chi’s songs, while understandably containing expressions of regret and sadness through motifs like tears, iron bars and shackles, the mother and a longing for home and freedom, seem to harbour yet another generational ethos marked by ‘dark realism, despair, cynicism, and social alienation and antagonism’, sentiments that are also locatable in the highly popular hooligan literature of Wang Shuo.63 Indeed, the two main groups of consumers and followers of these prison songs were China’s youngsters and private entrepreneurs (getihu), most of which belong to the Forsaken Generation.64   Joining the musical reflections of Chi Zhiqiang is Cui Jian (b. 1961), the iconic figure of Chinese rock music. In 1986, Cui’s rock hit ‘Nothing to my Name’ (Yi wu suo you) gave expression to a generational sentiment of having nothing and probably wanting to have nothing and be free of baggage from the past. Tellingly, ‘Nothing to my Name’, together with songs from the socialist era such as the 1950s’ ‘Socialism is Great’ (Shehuizhuyi hao), were among the songs sung by student protesters on Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, indicating the students’ – as well as the generation’s – historical position between socialism and postsocialism. Another widely popular song by Cui Jian, ‘A Piece of Red Cloth’ (Yi kuai hong bu), clearly explains this generation’s attachment to, as well as criticism of, their spiritual father Mao and the Party: That day you used a piece of red cloth To cover my two eyes and cover up the sky You asked me what do I see I said I see happiness Nimrod Baranovitch aptly explicates that this ‘piece of red cloth’ visualises the blindfolding to which the Party submitted the Chinese public in the revolutionary past and especially during the Cultural Revolution.65 The so-called vision of happiness is a false illusion resulting from an infiltrated and controlled prospect. The graphic design of Cui Jian’s 1994 album Hong qi xia de dan (meaning ‘eggs laid by or under the red flag’) actually features an embryo in an egg, its eyes blindfolded with a strip of red cloth. Declaring the song as ‘a true historical elegy’, the critic Zhao Jianwei describes the unstoppable surge of feelings of ‘wanting to weep yet having no tears, wanting to cry yet having no voice, and wanting to jump yet

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52  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema having no energy’ whenever he saw Cui Jian cover his eyes with a piece of red cloth before performing the song during his 1990 tour.66   The art world offers their instances of the Forsaken Generation in the form of a ‘Newborn Generation’ (xinsheng dai) of painters.67 One notable motif is also, like what is found on Cui Jian’s album cover, that of infants, some born, some unborn. For example, Liu Wei (b. 1965) seats two babies with eerie faces of grown-ups in front of an equally distorted portrait of Mao in oil on canvas titled ‘The New Generation’ (1992). In her photographic series Born with the Cultural Revolution (1995), Xing Danwen (b. 1967) juxtaposes a pregnant woman with portraits of Mao and emphasises the infant’s presence, though still unborn, at the crucial historical beginning of that fateful decade. Wang Qingsong (b. 1966) chooses to impose his own face onto the body of a chubby, traditionally clad baby in his digitally produced print entitled ‘Long Life’ (1997), suggesting a strange rebirth of himself as an incongruous existence that is both traditional and contemporary, old and new.68   Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), arguably the most successful contemporary Chinese painter, produced two highly acclaimed oil on canvas series called Bloodline: The Big Family (1993–  ) and Amnesia and Memory (2003–  ), both capturing quintessential countenances of the socialist Chinese soul from a Forsaken Generation perspective. Inspired by old family photos from the fifties and sixties, in which he claims to have discovered the ‘condensed shadow’ (suoying) of the socialist era, Zhang began his inspired creations in 1993 in the form of an everyman’s face from the bygone and now-recalled socialist past. Noting the fine line between private countenance and public impression such as exemplified by old socialist family photos in which poses and expressions carefully (or unconsciously) follow ideological guidelines, Zhang chooses to reproduce the familiar familial portraits through an updated, reflexive visual language of what he calls ‘deduction realism’ (jianfa xieshi).69 The result is a haunting series of frontal portraits that feature a uniform countenance of subtle poignancy and expressionlessness against a monochromic background. Only two extra elements are superimposed on these faces: an irregularly shaped watermark or stain tends to appear on the left cheek of the figures and fine red lines randomly break and continue across each painting. All the faces – man, woman, child, parent, sibling and friend – look the same in an extremely eerie manner. Apart from their hairstyles and clothes, the most prominent insignia of their historical coordinates is the Mao badge worn on the chest. According to the artist, ‘this person is every person[,] a purely generic being’ from socialist China.70 It is a distilled figuration of his generation, as well as their family members, as hollowed, impacted, haunting, yet evasive subjects of history. Zhang clearly echoes his generational cohorts in the other fields of creative work when he describes his position vis-à-vis painting and history: I tend to observe and experience the reality we find ourselves in as well as our heavy history from a distance . . . I often unconsciously choose to stand behind the back of things in order to experience that which stays hidden beneath

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Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject  53 the surface . . . My artistic sensibility often flows out in the form of a kind of ‘inner monologue’ (neixin dubai) . . . I have [always] naturally stayed close to that basic tone of introspection and privateness.71 In this conscious self-positioning ‘behind’ and ‘beneath’ the surface of things both from a ‘distance’ and from the inside, we detect a relationship to history and phenomenon that suggests both experiential closeness and critical removal – a characteristic attitude of the Forsaken Generation’s engagement with past and present. Yin Zhaoyang (b. 1970), in his turn, explores this pull toward and away from the past through parodying the genre of socialist realist painting, inserting his own figure, either as a child or grown-up, in recreations of the iconic leader’s image. ‘Yin Zhaoyang and Mao’ (2003) seats the painter’s stand-in right next to Mao in a joined inspection of the national landscape. ‘There were Thunderstorms on the Day I Saw Chairman Mao’ (2003) shows him standing by the roadside and greeting Mao as the latter passes by. ‘Chairman Mao on His Way to Anyuan’ (2005) has the painter’s stand-in hail a young Mao from behind, as if trying to catch up with the Great Leader on his iconic trip to Anyuan, where the famous workers’ strike took place in the early 1920s. On the one hand, as Xiaobing Tang notes, a ‘father–son relationship’ is implied in the relational juxtaposition of the two figures and particularly in the alignment of their gazes in ‘Yin Zhaoyang and Mao’, which unmistakably indicates the artist figure’s identification with the Great Leader.72 On the other hand, the insertion of the artist’s self into the previous official format of representation creates an effect of defamiliarisation that is certainly reinforced by technical details, such as the impressionist brushstrokes and the unrealistic colour choices (for example, Mao looking shiny, but also bleached, fuzzy and unreal in ‘There Were Thunderstorms on the Day I Saw Chairman Mao’). The artist’s inserted presence pries loose the humourless and closed interpretation of history implied in the socialist realist images of Mao, introducing an extra level of historical reflection directed from the present era and from an utterly idiosyncratic angle.   Next to their peers in the literary, musical and art worlds, creative forces in theatre and film have produced some of the most elaborate and powerful reassessments of the socialist heritage. Working in the two most influential art forms employed in Cultural Revolution propaganda, from the early nineties onwards theatre and film directors such as Meng Jinghui and the so-called Sixth Generation have produced an amazing variety of figures and narratives that combine self-referential narrations of recent Chinese history with provocatively oblique critiques of official historiography. For example, in a 1994 avant-garde play, I Love XXX (Wo ai XXX), Meng Jinghui and his co-creators in theatre render the haunting legacy of socialist ideological propagation inside out through a brilliant strategy of endlessly mimicking the official target. Jiang Wen turns the wilfulness of official historical narrativisation into a provocative and painful joke by having the narrator question the reliability of his own memory in the film In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi, 1994). Sixth Generation directors Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiaoshuai explore a subtle spiritual ennui experienced

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54  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema by their co-generational members through a thinly veiled realism by having renowned artists – for instance, rock musicians Cui Jian and Dou Wei, painters Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong – play rockers and painters in Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong, 1993) and The Days (Dongchun de rizi, 1994). In Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu, 1997) and Platform (Zhantai, 2000), Jia Zhangke belittles big history and focuses on its impact on the life of small-town youth that is felt at removal as a result of geographical distance, social insignificance and, certainly, historical belatedness, because of the protagonists’ status as the Forsaken Generation. Even Lou Ye’s highly stylised cinematic characters and stories that seem to have little to do with socialism turn out to contain extremely serious considerations of images, memory and narrative, pointing to the nature of not only cinema, but also history.   Taken together, these theatrical and especially cinematic representations by the Forsaken Generation, because of their command of elaborate narrative and sophisticated visual means, have produced portraits – particularly, self-portraits – of a generation as representative figures and conscious subjects of history in postsocialist China. Yingjin Zhang has identified rebellion, nostalgia and monologue as three major strategies with which the young ‘urban’ filmmakers – the nomination being essentially a different way of identifying the Forsaken Generation filmmakers by emphasising the predominant urban setting in their works – cope with the drastic shift in postsocialist China. Torn between a deep dissatisfaction with the present and an unsure longing for the past, these filmmakers try to give expression to a range of related feelings, including ‘anxiety . . . deprivation, disillusion, despair, disdain . . . indignation and outrage’, pictorial illustrations of which are curiously locatable in the paintings of Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun (b. 1963) and others.73 Thus, starting from first-hand experiences with socialism and postsocialist change, they learn to take such personal matters historically and recognise the historical contingencies of personal memory (including nostalgia) and individual existence. Access to technological developments in digital media since the mid-nineties – particularly in the form of personal computers, digital video cameras and digital editing programmes – has vastly empowered them to expand the initial efforts of independent filmmaking into a full body of fiction, as well as non-fiction, moving image works. Translating their epistemological illumination beyond the self into the social field, these filmmakers and artists take up history and reality ‘personally’ and experiment with new forms of narrative and cinematic aesthetic, emphasising reflexivity, contingency, presence and embodiment, all of which point toward a thoughtful awareness of the intricate relationship between subjectivity, history and representation.

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Chapter 2 For a Narration of One’s Own

For a Narration of One’s Own Within contemporary Chinese cinema, independent cinema contrasts sharply with the state-sponsored ‘main-melody’ (zhuxuanlü) films and commercial cinema, which mainly consists of state-ordered productions on communist leaders and major historical events in accordance with official interpretations. Additionally, relying on star appeal, this also consists of investment in popular genres, such as romantic comedies and martial arts films that generally lack concern for history not as taught ‘facts’ or as a decorative background for fiction, but as a serious category for epistemological and ethical investigation. Two most recent and prominent examples combining these two sides of the mainstream – the official and the commercial, the epic genre and a dizzying star-studded cast, including Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, John Woo and Zhang Ziyi (four of the many starry extras) – are the blockbuster sequels celebrating the anniversaries of the founding of the Party and the state: The Founding of a Republic (Jianguo daye, 2009) and Beginning of the Great Revival (Jiandang weiye, 2011). Both co-directed by Huang Jianxin, a Fifth Generation director, and Han Sanping, President of the China Film Group Corporation, the country’s biggest state-run film enterprise, the two official commercial epics are about the events leading up to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and that of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Huang Jianxin’s blockbuster epics, while perfectly fitting with both official guidelines and commercial calculations, drastically contrast with his earlier works – the most famous being The Black Cannon Incident (Heipao shijian, 1986), which, according to Paul G. Pickowicz, is a pessimistic indictment of the socialist political system.1   Placed in the context of our discussion of cultural and generational (dis)continuity, the change in Huang’s directorial vision also reveals itself in the careers of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, arguably the two most renowned representatives of the Fifth Generation. Though in varied manners and genres, the cinema of the Fifth Generation as a whole takes up China’s recent past of socialist revolution and presents its generationally branded vision of history and subjectivity.2 How exactly does that vision feature in their films about the past, the knowledge of which might help us better understand the seemingly drastic – even disappointing – change at a later stage of their career? More importantly for our focus

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56  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema in this book, how does the perspective of the younger Forsaken Generation filmmakers and artists relate to, and differ from, that of the Fifth Generation, in regard to a past that is experienced in shared yet very distinct ways? How would that knowledge of their status as differential subjects of contemporary China help us reach a more perspicacious position, in which we could discern the continuity, as well as the unevenness, of the rich and pulsing landscape of history and memory? To that end, we will look at a number of coincidental narratives from the two generations, with emphasis on those produced by the younger one. These narratives – mostly cinematic, but also including one extremely telling example from the theatre – were all produced around 1993 and 1994, when independent cinema started to make a real splash in China. Through contrasting ways of placing and mobilising characters in the space of image and narrative, these examples reveal to us the precipitous angle at which national history, personal memory and subjective narration meet with each other. At such a challenging point of encounter, the characters or subjects – as bearers of history, carriers of memory and originators of narration – each negotiate with such overlapping realms of existence and representation in distinct ways: some endure, some succumb, some put up a fight and some play a game mixing confidence, hope, sarcasm and even suicide. Rather than simply setting up a rhetorical contrast with which to play down the Fifth Generation and sing praise of the newer filmmakers and artists, my goal is to direct attention to such conflated efforts of historical representation in the early nineties and provide the reader with a revealing glimpse of an important stage in the development of postsocialist subjectivity. Furthermore, those efforts would continue in a variety of manners in the works of other and newer filmmakers and artists, who are the subjects of the chapters following this one.   The Fifth Generation has contributed immensely to the cinematic intervention in socialist revolutionary Chinese history. Farewell, My Concubine (Bawang bie ji, dir. Chen Kaige, 1993), Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng, dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1993) and To Live (Huozhe, dir. Zhang Yimou, 1994) are doubtless among the most famous cinematic epics on this topic from this group. Here I shall particularly focus on Farewell, My Concubine and To Live, as they cover a more comparable and complete scale of modern Chinese history from before the founding of communist China – starting their stories in the 1920s and 1940s, respectively – through the decades till after the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s.3

Wilful Chance and Futile Subjects in To Live and Farewell, My Concubine Although having at its narrative core the fate – or, more precisely, the suffering – of a man and his family against the historical vicissitudes of modern and revolutionary China, To Live, quite curiously, refrains from combining its epic structure with melodrama – a generic form and an emotional tone that seem completely reasonable within the ambit of this film and which has seen masterful fruition in the eighties at the hands of Xie Jin.4 Fugui, as the central male protagonist of

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For a Narration of One’s Own  57 To Live, starts as a young master of a rich family who becomes poor after losing the family fortune on the gambling table. This misfortune, however, turns out to be a fortune miraculously arranged by fate, because he then qualifies as a poor civilian in the newly founded communist regime of the proletariat. The man who wins his money and house is executed, in Fugui’s stead, as a rich property owner. From those two moments on, chance, as a mysterious crucial factor in gambling as well as history, regardless of his personal will, becomes the invisible ruling hand in Fugui’s life. As a classical element in melodrama, conflict between the central protagonist and his family – the latter treated as a figuration of societal ideology ranging from tradition to politics – is, however, completely absent from Fugui’s life. Though played by Gong Li, who had hitherto interpreted defiant female roles in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, 1987), Judou (Judou, 1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiuju da guansi, 1992), Fugui’s wife, Jiazhen, remains in agreement with Fugui. The couple, neither representing the pressing societal and historical structure outside the home, always tends to agree with each other – sometimes with a little but easy comprise – on decisions regarding politics, daily life, child rearing, friendship and their daughter’s marriage. Nor do their two children have much of a chance to express difference. The son, naughty and defiant, dies young in an accident. The daughter, eventually dead, too, in an accident, has become mute early on in the film. No effective voice of disagreement or reflection is ever expressed by any member of this family. Their uniform inability to express difference from the demanding ideology of socialism renders this cinematic household a composite subject figure characterised by agreement, adjustment, alignment and silence in the face of an overpowering history.   In the narrative structure of To Live, chance and acceptance are a definitive dialogic pair that characterise the relationship between history and the human subject. Chance strikes, history directs and the human subject – summarised in the figure of Fugui – adjusts himself accordingly and follows suit. Chance has Fugui lose in gambling, become poor and start practising shadow puppetry in order to make a living, which later enables him to survive both in the Nationalist and the Communist forces in the chaos of the Civil War (1946–9). Nowhere else is most revealing of the powerless disproportion between history and subject than the scene in which Fugui, stranded on an abandoned battlefield covered with the dead bodies of the losing Nationalist Army, suddenly perceives a seemingly mobile landscape. The mysterious field of moving dots on a snowy land approaches and reveals itself to be the triumphant arrival of the communist troops that are taking over history and Fugui along with it. This moving force, both literally and figuratively, catches up with Fugui, overwhelms him and absorbs him. After that, he continues his service as a shadow puppetry entertainer, this time for the Communist Army.   Chance gives Fugui opportunities for survival – a key theme in his life, as indicated by the title of the film – but it also hurts him deeply, as a result of his too ready alignment with history. The death of both of his children involves Fugui playing an apparently small but devastatingly crucial part, without him

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58  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema being able to know it beforehand. His son dies while napping behind a wall on campus that falls when a car backs into it. The little boy has been too tired from the frequent political duties demanded at school, yet Fugui, concerned about demonstrating political commitment, urges his son’s attendance, despite the boy’s physical exhaustion. His daughter dies in labour, because the hospital has removed its qualified doctors in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. The doctor, finally available, is one freshly transported from imprisonment and still too weak to perform the task. To help revitalise the doctor, Fugui feeds him on steaming bread that, as chance again has it, proves too much for a severely undernourished man. With the doctor’s health now also in danger, the daughter dies helplessly. Overwhelming the subjects of To Live is a deep sense of powerlessness in the face of fateful illogic, the latter being best summarised in Fugui’s tale of the family that he tells his son: ‘Our family is like a chicken. It will grow into a goose, then into a goat, then into an ox, and then it will be communism.’ The fantastic metamorphosis in his tale communicates the illogic – and a subtle disbelief, perhaps – of the national utopian dream. When he retells it to his grandson – the surviving son of his daughter – he revises the end of the tale and replaces ‘communism’ with a rare logical note that, by the time the family gets to become an ox, the little boy will have grown bigger and be able to ride on it. Thus the film ends, finally restoring Fugui, as a historical subject, to a somewhat conscious and logical understanding of his own. This revised narrative ending acknowledges and registers the personal and human scale of existence, without further subsuming it in a historical narrative of fateful chance.   Farewell, My Concubine, a masterful cinematic epic by Chen Kaige, has at its narrative core three central characters that sustain the vicissitudes of modern Chinese history in comparable and also contrasting ways. Spanning the lives of Dieyi and Xiaolou, two fanatically adored Peking Opera actors who have trained and grown up together like brothers (and then a bit like lovers), plus Juxian (Gong Li), a prostitute who becomes Xiaolou’s wife, the film presents the actions and interactions of the three in response to modern historical demands made by successive political powers, including the Japanese, the Nationalists, the Communists and the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution.   Dieyi is the least adaptable of the trio. Completely absorbed by his artistic commitment to rendering and living his famous operatic female roles, Dieyi seems to serve a series of changing masters with an attitude of non-differentiation. Artistic commitment replaces political attitude, as he appreciates Master Yuan – an opera lover, although also a political changeling – and a Japanese officer for their intelligent and hearty appreciation of the art of Peking Opera. In contrast of a revolutionarily condemnable kind, he does not hesitate to criticise socialist theatrical productions for their poor understanding of operatic and traditional aesthetics. Believing what his teacher taught Xiaolou and himself in their childhood, that ‘one is one’s own fulfillment’, Dieyi makes a radical choice in renouncing reality for art and strives with all his might to define his performance – practically his whole existence – outside the reach of politics or history. His subtle homoerotic desire for Xiaolou, both on stage and in life, is more like an

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For a Narration of One’s Own  59 emphatic allegory of that total devotion to art and representation, an uncompromised cutting oneself off from reality and history. Understandably, such a radically independent subjectivity – self-fulfilling and self-cancelling at the same time – is constantly challenged and punished for daring to refuse hegemonic definitions of personal identity. Therefore, although by the end of the film China has just emerged from the shadows of the Cultural Revolution, Dieyi’s choice of suicide at that point both fulfills his individual volition to replace life completely with art and expresses a deep distrust of the recently renewed historical framework of postsocialism, which he perhaps perceives as no more encouraging to his art than the preceding political eras.   In dramatic contrast to Dieyi, Xiaolou plays an ultimately failed version of his theatrical role Xiang Yu – a historical figure from the third century bc, who becomes a much admired figure in Chinese cultural memory, due to legends and artistic representations of the ancient king’s tragic military defeat, charismatic character and romantic farewell between him, his beloved concubine and their kingdom. Both king and concubine commit suicide to show their uncompromising devotion. Xiaolou, however, is a character comparable to Fugui in To Live, who has to make compromises and adjustments in order to survive. Although not short of admirable moments of pride and rebellion earlier in life, Xiaolou is sadly reduced to betrayal of both his brother/friend and wife during the Cultural Revolution, driving a heartbroken Dieyi to frenzy and sending a disillusioned Juxian to suicide. Xiaolou seems never to be given a chance for redemption. After Juxian’s suicide, the film jumps forward to the end of the Cultural Revolution and shows the brothers reunited to rehearse their old play, Farewell, My Concubine. At the point when the concubine is to kill herself with the king’s sword, Dieyi pulls the prop from Xiaolou’s sheath – a narrative arrangement filled with phallic and homoerotic significations – which turns out to be the real, precious sword that Dieyi gave to Xiaolou as a gift decades ago. Dieyi’s decision to commit suicide, as a refusal to compromise with both the changing times and the changing Xiaolou, seems to doom the latter to a life filled with a deep sense of loss and regret that is the opposite of fulfillment.   Between the parallel, as well as contrasting, existence of the operatic brothers, the woman, Juxian, is quite an outstanding – sometimes even awkwardly protruding – figure inserted both between the homoerotic duo and in the narrative space of the film. Literally dropping into the midst of the brothers’ story by jumping from high into the arms of Xiaolou in her first appearance, Juxian is the ablest of the trio to actively search for a balanced landing between personal will and exterior circumstances. Deciding that Xiaolou is the man for her, she buys her own freedom with money and treasures saved up from years of prostitution, without consulting with Xiaolou at all. In fact, she secures her marriage with Xiaolou by telling a lie (that the whorehouse has thrown her out, because of his earlier joke that they are already engaged). After marriage, she advises on Xiaolou’s gradual alienation from Dieyi. When Xiaolou falls into the hands of the Japanese, however, she does not hesitate to seek Dieyi’s help and, in exchange for his favour, offers to leave the lives of the brotherly duo. During the socialist

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60  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema years, she strategically calls Xiaolou away from professional meetings with familial excuses, in order to protect him from saying the wrong thing or giving politically unwise advice (as Dieyi innocently does). At an earlier moment of the Cultural Revolution, she encourages Xiaolou’s betrayal of Dieyi in a momentary choice of loyalty to friendship and obedience to political demand.   In an almost unnecessary attempt to protect Xiaolou from his violent old teacher who still scolds and beats his students even though they are already successful adults, Juxian even intrudes and interferes in the ritualistic meeting between the brothers and their revered teacher. While disrupting the sphere of the operatic brotherhood centred on art and profession, her protruding presence also allows her to temporarily fulfill the role of a mother by helping effect a picture of a traditional household complete with a strict father, a protective mother and sons. At the end of the scene, Juxian stops being the symbolic mother, as Xiaolou snaps at her and asks her to leave. Yet she also confirms her status as a real mother, because at that moment she reveals to the men that she is actually pregnant. With such a typical intervention characterised by disrupting something while fulfilling something else, Juxian qualifies as an active agent of her existence, carefully and skillfully negotiating a safe landing and balanced anchoring for her romance and family life in the midst of constantly changing circumstances. However, similar to Fugui in To Live, she eventually loses the most important things that she acts and negotiates so hard for: her unborn baby and later Xiaolou as well. Her tragic loss, particularly of Xiaolou, results from a compromise of her own. Always following her advice in choosing between theatre and reality, friendship and political security, Xiaolou ends up betraying her. After publically condemning Dieyi, he fearfully denies his love for her – now exposed and attacked as a former prostitute – in public at a violent struggle meeting organised by the crazed Red Guards. Ultimately thrown off the fragile balance that she tries to reach between circumstance and existence, politics and privacy, Juxian, after showing renewed sympathy for a heartbroken and persecuted Dieyi, commits suicide by hanging herself.   Compared to Fugui and his related familial subjects that fate abuses in a chanceful play in To Live, the characters – particularly Dieyi and Juxian – in Farewell, My Concubine demonstrate a more expressive volition in their attempts to negotiate a greater degree of self-definition in terms of their subject status. Dieyi’s radical opting out of the sphere of political hegemony and Juxian’s active interaction with current circumstances are two opposite strategies of exercising subjective will and personal control toward history. Their eventual suicides prove the futility of their attempts. As the least conscious subject in this epic narrative, Xiaolou is most readily adaptable and the only survivor of the trio. While not necessarily holding him completely responsible for his actions and choices, one might take Xiaolou’s survivor status as the most passive subject of the narrative to suggest a profound sense of powerlessness that the film demonstrates regarding modern and socialist history.

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For a Narration of One’s Own  61

To Figure New Subjects: Independent Cinema and Personal Filmmaking It is against such a contemporaneous background of Fifth Generation visions that the Forsaken Generation forges their own narratives about a shared national past. In provocative contrast, not only do these younger filmmakers and artists present a unique realist aesthetic and a new cast of social figures from urban or urbanising spaces, they also more consciously mobilise the moving image as a powerful tool for epistemological inquiry on the intricate relationship between history and representation. Central to that inquiry is the generation’s interest in its own position astride the bygone socialist era and a changeful postsocialist present. Their peculiar sense of belonging and not belonging to both times drives them to investigate subjectivity as a historical inter-text and, in turn, apply this awareness of existential intertextuality and contingency to their own representational texts about history and reality. To highlight this self-conscious approach to the historical and general through the personal and experiential, I also use the term ‘personal filmmaking’, because it highlights the most important contribution of independent practices to contemporary cinema, as well as historical inquiry through the moving image.   In terms of production modes, filmmaking in socialist China had been mainly in the hands of state-run studios until the end of the eighties. When the ‘85 Class’ of the Beijing Film Academy – forming an essential part of what later would be called the Sixth Generation – graduated in 1989, Wang Xiaoshuai was assigned to the Fujian Film Studio, while Zhang Yuan raised funds on his own and started working on his first film, Mama. Without securing required official approval and made at a negative cost of a little over 200,000 RMB yuan, Mama is recognised as the first independent Chinese feature.5 In 1993, Zhang and Wang’s schoolmate Lou Ye also went independent and made his first film, Weekend Lover (Zhoumo qingren), with private funding from a so-called Hainan Star & Sea Real Estate Company. That same year, Wang Xiaoshui left his studio job and independently made The Days, using friends as actors, such as the painter couple Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong (the latter being the painter of the Witnessing Growing Up series discussed briefly in Chapter 1). At around the same time, Wu Wenguang and Wang Guangli – two former teachers never formally trained in filmmaking – were working on what would be hailed as China’s first independent documentaries: Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing: zuihou de mengxiangzhe, dir. Wu Wenguang, 1990) and I Graduated (Wo biye le, dir. Wang Guangli, 1992). Together with a bunch of other similar productions that eschewed or neglected official approval for production, distribution and exhibition – the reason causing them to be sometimes identified as ‘underground’ – these works inaugurated the unprecedented phenomenon of independent Chinese cinema.6   The ‘independent’ label tends to evoke an impression of heroic subversion and, indeed, in some cases is used by filmmakers or distributors as a strategy for difference marketing. While the term is still in use and legitimately so in many cases, scholars have called attention to its contingency on the particularity of the

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62  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Chinese postsocialist economy, which is characterised by necessary negotiations with the state-owned sector, ‘regardless of tension, frictions and disjunctures’.7 Furthermore, in order to attract the domestic audience and combat the onslaught of Hollywood imports after China’s entry into WTO, some of the filmmakers have started to cooperate with official, as well as larger, corporate resources and begun to emerge ‘above ground’, resulting in the unique phenomenon that films by one director – say, Jia Zhangke – are categorised as sometimes under and sometimes above ground. Thus, the independent label – if taken to mean unofficial and oppositional – would indeed be inaccurate in capturing the constantly shifting state of the filmmakers’ creative energy, as well as their material working conditions in dialogue with state institutions and multiple sources of capital.   With due acknowledgement of the complexity, or complicity, of independent filmmaking, I want to emphasise that, while most of the moving image works discussed in this book qualify as independent productions, our discussion of the phenomenon should not be based on their material conditions alone. Even if not completely qualifying as productions outside the official system, some of these works – for example, In the Heat of the Sun, which is co-produced by China Film Co-Production Corporation, a subsidiary of the state-run China Film Group Corporation – unmistakably stand out with their challenging visions and complicate official explanations of Chinese matters in significant ways. By proposing the term ‘personal filmmaking’ – or, more inclusively, personal cinema and media – I wish to enrich the discussion of independent film culture and emphasise its absolutely unprecedented cultivation of new narrative and aesthetic forms in engaging with history and society outside the official framework. This new moving image culture, independent or personal, makes what used to remain in the margins of official history much more visible through its significantly provocative characters, alternative narratives, individual voices and independent visions.8   In Chinese, personal filmmaking is ‘geren yingxiang’, a rich term with subtle connotations of personal memory, private experience and their visualisation, because ‘geren’ means individual, personal and private, while ‘ying’ means shadow and ‘xiang’ means image or imaging, thus making it a most appropriate name to refer to the moving image works of the memory-inspired and history-informed Forsaken Generation.9 Developments in digital technology in and after the midnineties further empowered and deepened the individuation and personalisation of this creative phenomenon. Composed of mainly, though not exclusively, independent productions, personal filmmaking often demonstrates a greater degree of openness in stylistic experimentation and tends to feature alternative perspectives, intimate tales, private spaces and even autobiographical traces of the filmmakers’ experiences. In these senses, personal filmmaking readily resonates with notions such as auteur cinema, caméra stylo, essay film, diary film and subjective cinema, examples of which are readily locatable in the works of Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye and Wu Wenguang.10 Closely connected to, or motivated by, the filmmakers’ personal experiences and observations of life, this mode of filmmaking manifests refreshingly independent visions of China’s past and

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For a Narration of One’s Own  63 present and gives rise to an impressively alternative archive of visual evidences and interpretations of Chinese reality. More than isolated individual responses to historical and social phenomena, personal filmmaking embodies an array of perspectives and styles – all of which also qualifying as strategies – through which the past is revealed to be present in the now and individual experiences are investigated for their historical and social dimensions. The personal is positional and relational, aiming to examine the sensitive yet consequential contact points between small and big, past and present, experiential and historical, individual and social aspects of human existence. That desire of relating the former to the latter of these conceptual and critical pairings is realised by way of an ‘outward’ gaze, to borrow the words of Michael Renov from his illuminating discussion of subjectivity and autobiography in non-fiction film and video, which is directed at other experiences and larger contexts for representation.11 The individual self, either the filmmaker or a certain figure in the cinematic text, is in turn revealed as a ‘[site] of instability rather than coherence’ – a nuanced understanding of whose subjectivity is predicated on an awareness of its historical and social contingency.12   In the Chinese context, personal filmmaking by the Forsaken Generation is significant in that it does not just offer another set of alternative personal accounts of socialist history and postsocialist reality. Its critical vision on previous socialist propaganda that has an indelible impact on the creators’ own experience is translated into a meaningful awareness of the risk involved in representation, especially that of others, in general. Implied in their aesthetic innovations, such as a self-conscious narration, an embodied camera and a subtle blurring of the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, is a deep respect for the complex contingencies of history and truth and for the fact that narrativisation and representation as discursive powers are frequently unequally distributed among involved parties. Alongside the project of figuring themselves out as subjects of history, the practitioners of personal filmmaking, particularly through nonfiction works, also make visible other social actors that are underrepresented in official and mainstream media, thus helping restore the latter’s status as distinctive subjects of contemporary Chinese history who are able to speak for themselves. Moving between individual expression, generational enunciation and social investigation, the Forsaken Generation through personal filmmaking contributes toward the cultivation of what Bill Nichols calls ‘social subjectivity’: Social subjectivity would link not only the doer and the done to, in selfconstituting action, but the stage of ‘doer/done to’ experienced by one and that experienced by others. Social subjectivity, like the social imaginary that it transcends, is a category of collective consciousness. It exceeds or surpasses the monadic desire by a preconstituted subject underpinning the dynamics of self/other, us/them dichotomies. Social subjectivity evokes a discourse of visceral, existential affinity. Social subjectivity transforms desire into popular memory, political community, shared orientation, and utopian yearning for what has not yet come to be.13

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64  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Personal experiences and individual visions have the great potential to connect with other comparable manifestations; from such conversations and interchanges, the shape of a collective social subjectivity would emerge as a more visible and powerful source for social change. The Forsaken Generation’s exploration of historical subjectivity and social reality through fictional and non-fictional moving image forms is practically what Tamara Hareven identifies as a process of ‘continual and active reworking’ of the historical process, with its responses to current historical conditions informed by visions that develop from their earlier encounters with history.14 Past and present, personal and social, self and other – all are connected.

Self-narrative I: I Love XXX and a Radical Recollection of History As is clear from our discussion till this point, the Forsaken Generation’s participation in contemporary historical discussion starts with something personal and experiential: their own uniquely awkward experience as a generation caught between the socialist past and the postsocialist present. Central to their self-figuration as an autonomous subject of history is a reassessment, in their own terms, of their relationship with socialism that is most prominently registered in their memory. Given the extraordinarily intertwined relationship of the generation’s personal experience and state propaganda, the task of distilling a subject position first involves recognition of the shapes and degrees of that intertwinement and demands a strategy whereby the personal can start breaking free from the pull of the official. In both theatre and cinema – two of the most prevalent media used by revolutionary propaganda – the Forsaken Generation tries to produce new narratives about the past as well as themselves that acknowledge their imbrication in the official narrative, while seeking to produce a more independent historical subject status. In the following, I will discuss such experimental new narratives of the self, first through an avantgarde theatrical play by theatre and film director Meng Jinghui (b. 1964) and then through examples of personal filmmaking.15 Meng’s theatrical piece from 1994, I Love XXX, offers a rich intertextual portrait of the Forsaken Generation as creative carriers of memories of the past. By way of its uniquely theatrical strategy of juxtaposing nine actors in enunciating the self – ‘I’ – the play provides an important insight into the intricate relationship between personal and collective memories that is essential for our understanding of the moving image works to follow.   Appearing in the same year as two of the Forsaken Generation’s features In the Heat of the Sun and Dirt (Toufa luan le, dir. Guan Hu, 1994), I Love XXX is an avant-garde play in the form of a group monologue that quotes random facts from history and prefixes practically every line with the phrase ‘I love . . .’16 According to Meng, the inspiration for the play originated from a historical chronicle: a Chinese translation of Clifton Daniel’s Chronicle of the 20th Century.17 Documenting each month of the twentieth century till 1986 on one page, the

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For a Narration of One’s Own  65 chronicle is highly provocative, with its seemingly random selection of historical facts to illustrate a certain month. The following are a few examples that might have more directly inspired the creators of the play I Love XXX, because of their mention of recent Chinese history: October 1949 – China establishes People’s Republic of China; in Boston, Harvard Law School to begin admitting women; in New York, Ten Communists get 5 years, $10,000 fines; Plane crashes in Azores; November 1966 – Red Guards accuse President Liu Shao-chi; The miniskirt: men can’t believe their eyes – British Miss Twiggy (née Leslie Hornsby) ‘rounds out’ the look with thick false eyelashes and colorful fishnet stockings; January 1976 – Chow En-Lai, China’s Top Diplomat, dies Jan. 8; Canadian rapist accepts castration (26-y-o mental patient, rapist, and murderer Henry Williams made the request at his trial in Ottawa); September 1976 – Mao Tse-tung dies at 82; California enacts 1st right-to-die law.18 Shi Hang, one of the playwrights of I Love XXX, recalls: [The chronicle’s] schizophrenic style of arrangement and editing made us see what history really is. We finally started to understand that the point in our referring back to history is to prove our innocence. What is left for us to do now is to give a fine (re)birth to ourselves.19 Certainly echoing the many infant-themed portraits created by contemporary artists, as well as the ‘return to a point of origin’ scenario in the unrealised scripts of Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli mentioned in the introduction, Shi Hang’s comments curiously connect the act of rebirth with a cleansing of name and restoration of innocence in relation to the past.   Apparently, Meng Jinghui, Shi Hang and the other co-authors of the play found a royal road to achieving that: using, reusing and abusing the prefix ‘I Love’ in the same manner as socialist propaganda does, before allowing its essential personal and human essence to re-emerge from under the burden of official history. The latter is exemplified in statements like ‘I Love Chairman Mao’ or ‘I Love the Party’, with which this generation was familiar as they grew up. The current play sends this stock phrase onto a rollercoaster ride across a variety of texts and contexts that appear increasingly random in nature to the point of being completely irrelevant to each other. Examples are: ‘I love that American movie stars Clark Gable and Gary Cooper have been born’; ‘I love that friendship is most important’; ‘I love my country’; ‘I love puppy love’; and ‘I love the Peking Duck Restaurant in Peace Gate and Qingfeng Dumpling Store’.20 In the process, the phrase is yanked free from its previous dictated course of political idolatry

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66  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema and gradually restored to the more natural and humanist dimensions of daily life, personal experience and private feelings.   The narrative structure of I Love XXX largely follows a chronological order and skims across the twentieth century to the sixties, the eighties and then to an era of love.21 A team of nine actors – five male, four female, all of whom happen to belong to the Forsaken Generation22 – speak over 700 lines, most of which begin with ‘I love’, regardless of the grammatical structure of the particular sentence. The group performs a large part of the play speaking in unison, creating the effect of a literary platoon walking in front of the acoustic and mnemonic platform of the audience (Figure 2.1). At times, they also perform short lines in solo, taking turns to be the soliloquist or props in the background. For example, in one act, they engage in activities of daily life, each with his or her separate routine, space and mundane boredom; together, they form a physical symphony of some sort.23

Figure 2.1  Avant-garde play I Love XXX (dir. Meng Jinghui, 1994): A collective monologue Randomly selected from each decade of the twentieth century, the facts or lines seem to communicate little logical relationship with each other at first, until the decade of the sixties comes up and a subtle narrative intention – that of giving them a historical re-start or rebirth – is gradually uncovered. Accompanying the arrival of this remarkable dividing moment is the first major moving image element in the play: as the actors dance wildly to a Beatles song – none other

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For a Narration of One’s Own  67 than ‘Revolution’, which was released in 1968 when the Cultural Revolution reached its height – the following text rolls vertically across a screen: I love all this has happened I love all this has never happened I love that we are not influenced by the beginning of this century, that events at the beginning of this century did not happen I love that we are not influenced by the twenties, that events in the twenties did not happen I love that we are not influenced by the thirties, that events in the thirties did not happen I love that we are not influenced by the forties, that events in the forties did not happen I love that we are not influenced by the fifties, that events in the fifties did not happen The text stops right before the sixties. So do the dancing and the music. The stage goes black. The actors, now sitting down and clicking lighters on and off, make themselves disappear and reappear. In this rhythmic exchange between light and dark, a flickering beginning of the symbolic rebirth that henceforth unfolds, they start relating the decade of the sixties, beginning with a power failure in New England and Canada that occurred on 9 November 1965. They then report a number of other interesting but apparently irrelevant facts: because of the power failure, an elevator became trapped in a skyscraper and lovers made the best of the dark, causing a baby boom nine months later; at the same moment in Beijing, ‘about 70% of child-bearing-age women were trying to avoid pregnancy’.24 What goes unmentioned here in the play, yet had a huge impact on Chinese history, is: on the day after – that is, 10 November 1965 – Yao Wenyuan published his famous ‘Critique of the New Historical Play Hai Rui’s Dismissal from Office’, a historical fact accepted as signalling the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Following such a thought-provoking negligence, the play moves straight into the next act, which invokes the generation’s direct and personal experiences of socialism. Here, for the first time, the words ‘I love’ seem to meet with human objects, such as ‘you’ and ‘myself’: I love light I love so there is light I love you I love so there is you I love myself I love so there is my self.25 This act, essential to the generation’s self-imposed rebirth, is unflatteringly entitled ‘Sounds even better than singing’ (Shuo de bi chang de haoting) – a Chinese phrase bespeaking a sarcastic criticism of the falsehood of a grand-sounding

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68  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema statement or argument. Accompanying the lines above, the second moving image element appears, presenting archival footage from the 1960s: Chairman Mao meets with a wildly applauding crowd of international designates from communist cohorts; drills march across Tiananmen Square in support of the anti-imperialist struggles of Africa and Latin America. In striking contrast to the excited emotions and impassioned expressions onscreen, the documentary is being shown in silence, with the actors also watching it in silence, before announcing: ‘I love that when a million people greeted Chairman Mao I was born.’26   Following that declaration, they start a new round of ‘I love’, quoting various objects, facts and experiences that strike a familiar cord with those who grew up and went to school in the sixties and seventies: ‘I love teachers/fellow students/ physical exercise/dictations/indigo pants/white shirts/red triangle scarves . . .’ These miscellaneous snippets of memory, all being experiential hallmarks of Chinese elementary school life of the Young Pioneers till the eighties, are concluded in a summary statement: ‘I love Beijing Tiananmen!’ As one of the most widely known sentences from the Cultural Revolution years, ‘I love Beijing Tiananmen’ was popularised through a nationally circulated song with the same title, its lyrics written by Jin Guolin, a twelve-year-old fifth grader who, arguably, is a cohort of the Forsaken Generation. On the stage of I Love XXX, the actors repeat this sentence eighteen times with increasing momentum, as if they were caught in a horrible and unstoppable compulsion, reminding one of K – the crazy woman mentioned in the autobiography of Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell, My Concubine. K was imprisoned in a room where the only source of light – the only window – was covered with outdated newspaper. At first, K was excited to find that she still had access to the outside real world through this single source of information. However, very soon, it became the source of nightmares. K found herself going crazy as she started involuntarily reciting every character on that little piece of outdated information. She even dreamed about it. K asked for help, but was denied. She finally went crazy.27 Comparably, the Cultural Revolution rhetoric and ideology seems so entrenched in the experience of the Forsaken Generation that revolutionary language and iconography tend to take over all territories of culture and surrender the latter to its own absurd illogic.   The burden of history, however, is taken up not without a fight. Whilst donning the rhetorical uniform fully invested in familiar socialist ideology, I Love XXX fiddles with its tailoring by way of innovative verbal collage, throwing taught knowledge out of context and baring the seams where propaganda and history meet. Tellingly, when Meng Jinghui started his independent theatre troupe in 1992, he named it ‘Chuanbang jutuan’ (Accidental Exposure Troupe), belying an interest in exposing the suture lines between reality and representation.28 The most scathingly playful blow that I Love XXX deals to the official teaching occurs in the section on ‘jiti wu’ (group dance), which is another familiar form of popular mobilisation and collective performance prevalent in socialist China. After stating their love for ‘the age of group dance’ by describing the various spaces and landscapes where group dances have been staged, the actors reel into

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For a Narration of One’s Own  69 a fantastic restaging of group dances in literary texts and imaginary landscapes excerpted from high school textbooks: I hope to encounter a group dance that is melancholy like a lilac flower. Above the winding lotus pond, far and near, high and low, are all group dances. The Master Confucius said, among three people who travel together, there must be a group dance. I just couldn’t fall asleep. I read for half of the night and finally saw between the lines ‘GROUP DANCE’.29 Taking these famous quotes out of their original contexts, which are authored respectively by Dai Wangshu, Zhu Ziqing, Confucius and Lu Xun, all modern or pre-modern literary and historical luminaries, the new text replaces the nouns such as ‘girl’, ‘trees’ and ‘teacher’ in the original texts with a uniform ‘group dance’. Furthermore, the deliberate curt and assertive tone in which the actors deliver these lines reminds one of similar forceful oral renditions of revolutionary slogans. The resultant effect renders the hybrid text both familiar and strange, highlighting the absurdity of revolutionary rhetoric. In the meantime, this intertextual play does not stop at the level of pastiche and irony. Whilst shortcutting familiar literary heritage with revolutionary rhetoric, this textual poaching also repositions the socialist image(ry) of ‘group dance’ in the midst of literary legacies from previous historical periods, thus enabling a dialogue between pasts in which the historical status of the socialist regime is rendered relative as one moment in Chinese history, rather than being an absolute conclusion to all that has happened before (as the model theatre has it). Here, the most biting twist is found in the reference to ‘Diary of a Madman’, one of the most famous short stories by Lu Xun (1881–1936), who is arguably modern China’s most important writer and critic. This story, canonically acknowledged as an important harbinger of the 4 May Movement, attacks traditional Chinese teachings for suffocating individuality and personal freedom: ‘I read that history very carefully for most of the night, and finally I began to work out what was written between the lines; the whole volume was filled with a single phrase: EAT PEOPLE.’30 In I Love XXX, ‘eat people’ is daringly replaced with ‘group dance’. Thus, what starts out like a playful and random grafting of texts arrives at an extremely critical comment, because the socialist ‘group dance’ – and the totalitarian uniformity and mannequinism it implies – is equated with the political and cultural cannibalism of traditional culture that Lu Xun has famously criticised in early modern China.   As the creative recollectors of these fragments of Chinese history, Meng Jinghui and his fellow creators succeed in criticising the revolutionary ideology that once practiced its absolutist logic on their education and in the process gradually free themselves from the burden of official interpretation of the past. This is why, after this major attempt of rewriting past texts, without whose symbolic cleansing the project of rebirth is not possible, the play moves toward a drastically different act, in which ‘I love’ is finally applied to personal emotions and experiences, such as the love of an individual, his/her flesh, body and even

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70  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema all of the body parts of a beloved person.31 The abstract, absolutist, impersonal and spiritual ‘love’ of Chairman Mao, the Party, Beijing and Tiananmen becomes replaced by the specific and bodily love of individual human beings.   I Love XXX moves on to transmit that declaration of love to the concrete circumstances of the current moment of theatrical presentation when the actors conclude the play by directly addressing the audience: ‘I love you/I love so here is you/I love the stage/I love so there is the stage/I love leaving/I love so there is leaving.’ On this note of resituating the narration in the present performance, it is clear that the narrative structure of the play not only follows a temporal order in chronologically traversing miscellaneous details throughout the twentieth century, but also has a spatial vision in gradually zooming onto the present time and space – Beijing in 1994, for example – where this theatrical and collective recollection takes place. Not only do the audience witness a crescendo of ‘I love’, whose references gradually progress toward the more individual and concrete dimensions of human experience, they also tend to be incorporated into the narrative itself – such as through the actors’ direct address – and therefore become both the objects of that ‘love’ and the conscious witnesses of that statement of love, the latter role certainly encouraging an exercise of critical reflection. Significantly, it is at this point that the third moving image element is displayed: on a staged screen, a tracking shot browses street after street of ruins, an unexplained sight/site of catastrophe, but also possibly of demolition. Such a conclusion also feels like the beginning of a journey that starts on the ruins, which symbolically resembles Meng and his generation’s verbal and theatrical pilgrimage across the fragments of twentieth century history, particularly the history of recent socialist China, before leaving for a destination that seems yet open to question.   It is remarkable that this rewriting of history is consistently coupled with the apparently personal mission of searching for, and confirming, the subject status of the enunciators. As mentioned earlier in Shi Hang’s comment, the significance of the play’s constant historical referencing lies in its mission of proving the generation’s ‘innocence’ and giving them ‘a fine (re)birth’.32 It seems apparent that the party guilty of deforming their sense of history is the socialist propaganda to which they have been too long exposed. Yet the proof of innocence and the chance of rebirth does not come ever so easily as merely identifying the culprit (as an impersonal Other) when the crime already becomes a birthmark of their identity. This paradoxical situation explains why I Love XXX employs strategic opposites: repetition and deletion, taking things out of context and applying random insertions, using ‘I’ both collectively and individually, all of which bespeak a deeplyseated dilemma of Meng Jinghui, Shi Hang and their generation. They are so rooted in what they now try to break away from that the attempt for flight and freedom necessarily involves a constant tug-of-war between imposed memory (for example, ‘I love Chairman Mao/Tiananmen/hygiene’) and subjective struggle (for example, ‘I love NOT-hygiene!’). They begin the ‘I love’ statements like a horde of Little Red Guards happily inheriting familiar rhetoric in referring to history and expressing themselves. To aid this transformation from a collective socialist persona to an increasingly individual identity in the postsocialist era,

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For a Narration of One’s Own  71 the pronoun ‘I’ is inserted as a rhetorical wedge in the body of imposed memory in order to pry it open, little by little and line by line, for a more independent and fully self-enunciating subject of history to be born.

Self-narrative II: Fractured and Fragmented In the Heat of the Sun When Meng Jinghui presented I Love XXX in 1994, Jiang Wen (b. 1963), one of China’s most talented actors, who had interpreted major roles in Hibiscus Town and Black Snow (dir. Xie Fei, 1990), adapted Wang Shuo’s novel Ferocious Animals (Dongwu xiongmeng) into a screenplay and made it into his directorial debut In the Heat of the Sun.33 As a fictional feature exclusively devoted to the Forsaken Generation’s personal memory of the Cultural Revolution – literally delivered in first person narration – the film caused a big controversy with its apparently positive depiction of youthful freedom, sexual awakening and emotional nostalgia in association with the usually and officially condemned ‘ten years of chaos’.   An immediate success both at the box office and international film festivals, In the Heat of the Sun is narrated from the suspicious but creatively misremembered memory of a grown-up Ma Xiaojun, the son of a PLA officer. The story takes the form of a personal recollection about the early 1970s when Ma and his friends come of age in a Beijing practically free from parental and teacherly authority, because of the particular historical circumstances at the time. At the centre of this recollection is Ma’s longing for a girl named Mi Lan and his various adventures infused with a typical adolescent hormonal drive and a revolutionary zeal characteristic of Cultural Revolution China. Although blending national history and personal memory, In the Heat of the Sun distinguishes itself from the common stories of trauma prevalent in many literary and cinematic works about the Cultural Revolution. Its tale of desire and freedom blends youthful energy with political zest and communicates a strong nostalgia for the revolutionary past by way of frequent romantic as well as comic touches and a warm cinematic palette inspired by the goldenness of sunshine. This atypical interpretation of the famous decade of chaos struck such a sensitive cord in accepted Chinese collective memory that it was criticised as both unauthentic and unethical: All the serious memories that can selflessly and relentlessly represent the truth and the right and wrong of history are the result of a combination of profound experiences and self-transcendence. That kind of memory not only contains the sediment and solidification of its owner’s personal experiences, but also represents a development of the memory owner’s conscience and the distilment of his or her rationality. It comes after the personal experience of the memory owner is interrogated by conscience and reason, and happens as identification with and respect for the national fate and memory that transcends individual vicissitudes. I think, together with the honest intellectuals, workers, peasants and people in general, Jiang Wen and his like should question their own conscience, reason hard, and refer to the national

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72  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema experience and memory. [Jiang Wen] is actually erasing and poaching the Chinese nation’s memory of suffering, and thus is gilding the dark, ridiculous, and shameful history of the Cultural Revolution!34 This urgent critique, with its placement of individual experience and personal memory after national history, is actually characteristic of the revolutionary rhetoric that demands the submission of individuality to the need for ideology. Wang Shuo, the author of the original novel from which the film is adapted, was unapologetic: My parents and teachers were away so I could do whatever I wanted. It was the freest period of my life. It’s a pity that people died, but I was busy with my own life. In the Heat of the Sun is about my friends and myself. I had lots of fun. Should I lie about it?35   More than just an honest representation of personal memories of the past, the apparently sunny tale of the novel as well as the film registers something beyond simple nostalgia. Instead of expressing a poorly reflected longing for one’s youthful self regardless of the ethical status of that past, In the Heat of the Sun constantly exercises reason, rationality and conscience – as demanded by the critic, but of a much different kind – in questioning its own narration and interpretation of history and memory. Specifically, although the film evolves around the narration of the central protagonist, Ma Xiaojun, its highly complex narrative structure constantly questions this first person narrator and renders his recollection both unreliable and empowering. Through a series of strategies, such as baring the seams of storytelling, creating an alter ego of Ma Xiaojun in the form of a fool and a recurrent dream, the film gives rise to the figure of an unreliable recollector, a self-defeating narrator and a (self-)conscious interpreter of the past. Rather than being a simplistic sunny tale about the revolutionary past, this film explores the treacherous relationship between memory, narrative and subjectivity and in the process gradually gives birth to a quintessential Forsaken Generation figure as a pained and conscious historical subject.   Throughout the film, Ma Xiaojun’s voice-over dominates the storytelling. Though speaking in the first person, this voice seems to refuse to be restrained in its limited single point of view. Whilst powerless in regard to Mi Lan, the mysterious object of Ma’s desire whose life he never seems to have enough details about, Ma’s voiced explication and interpretation frequents practically every transition between the scenes. Besides providing information about the background of the era and the characters, this voice also comments on scenes as they are occurring or warns the audience about what is going to happen next, as if no surprise is intended. This willed narration, however, encounters abysmal cracks in the narrative and at those points has to demonstrate a visible effort in mending the seams in the story. It is at such fractured moments that the storytelling evolves into a self-conscious critique of the treacherous nature of narrative, memory and history.

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For a Narration of One’s Own  73   The first fracture occurs a little past the middle of the film. Though such a break has been suggested early in the prologue, when the narrator says that his memory is messed up and he cannot tell reality from illusion, the initial warning tends to be temporarily forgotten, because the film progresses quite smoothly under the guidance of Ma’s single perspective to the point that he successfully makes friends with Mi Lan. Accompanied by Ma’s narration that he has been spending ‘almost everyday’ with Mi Lan, we are privy to scenes of their happy time together in the girl’s sun-kissed home. However, Ma’s narration does not allow this happy nostalgia to continue. It calls for a pause: Wait. Something seems to be wrong with my memory. Truth and illusion get mixed up again. Maybe she had never fallen asleep in front of me. Maybe she had never stared at me like that. Then how the hell did that sharp look in her eyes and her lying there asleep enter my memory. We see Ma Xiaojun and Mi Lan dancing happily in her room, but the music we hear is none of the upbeat music of the day that we might expect in the diegesis. Instead, it is from a late nineteenth-century Italian opera, Cavelleria Rusticana (1890) by Pietro Masgani (1863–1945). As a director, Jiang Wen is notoriously exacting about accuracy in details. For example, he insisted that the military uniforms featured in In the Heat of the Sun be coloured with realistic differentiation, ranging from shiny grassy green to a bleached wornness, precisely as they really were in those years. The diegetic sound that accompanies the boys biking through the hutong alleys on their way to a melee is Internationale, which is also a reliable acoustic memory from the Cultural Revolution, for the tune regularly sounded at the end of the evening news on the national radio. The insertion of the intermission section of Cavelleria Rusticana, however, creates a soft and contemplative acoustic space completely different from the uproar typical of a Cultural Revolution Beijing and carries the film beyond mere remembrance into the realm of subjective reflection and historical consciousness.36 In contrast to the acoustic experience of the older Red Guard generation, whose eardrums and memory were pounded with shouts and songs of ideologies, the low, sentimental and wordless strains of Cavalleria Rusticana sound like a quiet, personal and almost involuntary gesture of writing against a forced experience. Cavalleria Rusticana proved crucial for the revival of Jiang’s memory and feelings at the script stage of the film, so much so that by the time he finished the screenplay, he could completely replay the whole opera in his head. What is more, the opera also played an important role in the post-production of the film: A very peculiar phenomenon is, when I was editing the film, I knew which measure of the music we were at even when it was played backwards. Not even professional musicians can do this . . . Another peculiar thing is, I edited many sequences of the film without setting them to the music during the editing. However, when we finished editing and played it to the music, everything matched perfectly.37

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74  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Apparently, both Volker Schlöndorff and Werner Herzog, two outstanding figures of the New German Cinema, also found this phenomenon intriguing and discussed it with Jiang Wen when he was working on the post-production in Germany. Herzog wondered if it was because ‘this music expressed the aspirations of people in the nineteenth century for the coming of the twentieth century [which] resonates with China in the sixties and seventies, its looking forward to the coming of communism’.38   Herzog’s remark touches upon the issue of the Chinese experience of communism and socialism as one of modernity. Picked up by Jiang Wen in his effort to retrieve a bygone era whose drive for modernisation was comparable to the aspiring mood felt in the West when the opera was written a century ago, Cavelleria Rusticana is now borrowed for Jiang’s stitching of the fissures between the bygone era of revolution and the present-day postsocialism, between the character’s personal memory and the truth of the past. While Ma Xiaojun and Mi Lan seem to be dancing carefree in the sun-kissed room of his memory accompanied by the nostalgic tune of Cavelleria Rusticana, Ma’s voice-over, even though allowing the sepia-toned nostalgia to transit into an equally lovely bike ride of the two on a sunlit and poplar-lined boulevard in the capital’s countryside, keeps dropping seeds of doubt amidst a willingness to praise and love the past: ‘That is the happiest day in my life. The smell of burning withered grass pleased me a lot, but it wouldn’t have been possible to smell that if it had been in summer.’ With all his longing to settle in a sweet memory of the past, the narrating subject is too conscious of the fissures and cracks in the remembrance to relax and believe it.   The most powerful ripping of suture lines between memory and narration takes place at a birthday dinner in the Moscow Restaurant. Out of jealousy and anger, Ma Xiaojun has a seemingly all-out fight with his pal Liu Yikou over Mi Lan. After a few damaging verbal exchanges, Ma madly pushes over to Liu and stabs him with a broken wine bottle. At this climatic moment of romantic heroism, Ma’s voice-over again ruthlessly belies the unreliability of his memory and narration: Hahaha . . . don’t ever believe this. I’ve never been so brave and courageous. I kept swearing that I would tell the true story as earnestly as I could, but the greater my desire to tell the truth is, the more interference there is to disrupt that effort. I discovered, sadly, that it is impossible to remember the truth. Loyally following the order of the narration, the stabbing onscreen shifts to slow motion as Ma’s voice-over continues lashing out at the susceptibility of his memory to emotions and moods so much so that he even questions the existence of the character Mi Lan at all and whether she and Yu Beipei are actually the imaginary split halves of one and the same person.39 The credibility of the entire story is thrown out of the window now. However, rather than admitting defeat and concluding his story here, this narrator decides to continue in the face of the impossible and expands the problematic discovered in his personal remembrance to question the nature of memory and storytelling in general.

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For a Narration of One’s Own  75 Directly addressing the audience, the voice-over asks: ‘Should I give up now? No. Never. You wouldn’t have the heart to let me give up like this, right? I now totally understand those who insist on their lies. It’s impossible to be honest.’   Onscreen not only is the slow motion stabbing action reversed, Ma Xiaojun and his friends are seen re-entering the restaurant happily and congenially, a deliberate narrative ‘correction’ written over the previous violent scenario. Obviously, this new scenario is no more reliable than the previous one. Such an anti-climactic continuation in the face of defeat and exposure, however, serves to transpose the storytelling beyond the frame of a single-minded plot. By directly appealing for the sympathy of the spectator, the diegetic narrator exposes his role as the non-diegetic author more clearly than ever and thus reveals his remembrance of the past as a crafted and wilful account. In its elevation of the spectator’s relationship to the film onto a new level of consciousness and reflection, the effect is practically comparable to that of the last third of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The latter contains an ingenious anti-climactic revelation of the true identity of Madeleine/Judy to the spectator (but not to the male protagonist Scottie).40   Thus, forcing itself to go on with the story in spite of the many previous clues exposed as unreliable, the narration of Ma Xiaojun wills toward a wishful denouement that turns out to be yet another anticlimax. No longer able to repress his desire for as well as anger at Mi Lan, Ma storms into her home, tries to rape her, but fails humiliatingly. She, indeed, turns out to be as physically strong as she claims on their first encounter and teaches the young man a good lesson. After that happens, Ma’s friends isolate him; his days in the heat of the sun seem to end on a poignant note of defeat and alienation. As Yomi Braester observes, In the Heat of the Sun does not simply discredit memory, but also reveals that speaking in the name of history is no more than a form of affectation.41 On the basis of an apparently different and sunny tale of the past, the film exercises a contradictory narrative strategy that starts by guiding and controlling and evolves into self-questioning and self-deconstruction. The narrator’s desire to represent a past fitting his will is not unlike the official historiography that he, together with the narrative’s creators such as Jiang Wen and Wang Shuo, has been exposed to. Although like a child who at first looks like the spitting image of its parental socialist history, the narrating subject of the film bravely exposes the fractures in memory. The reason for the narrative fracture needs to be located in the identity of that narrating subject himself as a composite of fragments from official history and personal experience. The very efforts of remembrance, correction, narration and re-narration bespeak a process of working from incomplete and even unreliable evidence to arrive at a more creditable and integral comprehension of the past. By way of such deliberate deconstruction and then reconstruction of a questionable recollection, the bared stitches in the fractured narrative give rise to the figure of a subject who, although defeated and poignant, is also respectable with his hard-earned knowledge of the treachery of memory, history and narrative.   There is a very interesting dream sequence in In the Heat of the Sun that was

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76  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema later cut from the DVD release, as apparently critical opinion had it that this sequence seemed too long and unnecessary for the story.42 However, this cut-out dream sequence provides very powerful evidence of the impact of socialist history on the unconscious of Ma Xiaojun and his generation, whose development into a more fully conscious historical subject would rely on a profound understanding of that baggage. Here, I will try to reconstruct the scene, combining both the original screenplay and the theatrical release version of the finished film (which included the dream sequence) to see what marks of the past have been put away.43   In this deleted sequence, Ma Xiaojun takes a nap in the field on his way back after he gives Mi Lan a bicycle ride to the farm where she works. In the heat of the summer sun, he has a dream within a dream that, according to the screenplay, is practically a rollercoaster ride through some of the most famous memories of socialist media.44 It includes references to films like Heroic Sons and Daughters (Yingxiong ernü, dir. Wu Zhaodi, 1964) and Lenin in 1918 (dir. Mikhail Romm and E. Aron, 1939), the model opera Taking the Tiger Mountain by Strategy, the Soviet song ‘Katyusha’ and the highly popular novel How the Steel was Tempered (1942) by Nikolai Ostrovsky that was adapted for the movie screen as Pavel Korchagin (dir. Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov, 1957), named after its protagonist who became an iconic socialist hero. Ma and Mi Lan play various contradicting roles of heroes and enemies, such as the PLA soldier Wang Cheng, Soviet hero Vasili, Nationalist spy Luan Ping, Korchagin’s love Tonya and a female spy attempting to assassinate Lenin. In accordance with the illogic of the dream world, the two keep changing roles with one guiding desire: Ma wants Mi Lan. Mi Lan takes turns being the good Tonya and then the counter-revolutionary assassin of Lenin. The dream ends with both finally getting ready to join the Communist Party and taking the oath together: ‘from now on I will follow the Communist Party, kill the tigers and wolves, through water and fire . . .’ However, before they finish their lines, Mi Lan falls unconscious and is no longer able to respond to Ma’s calls. Ma cries, but cannot be heard. In the meantime, the singing of an ongoing revolutionary opera overwhelms his crying. Ma Xiaojun becomes all tears and starts waking up from this dream. He opens his eyes and finds Mi Lan right there, her smile bright as sunshine. Then he feels the urgent need to empty his bladder, yet Mi Lan annoyingly follows him everywhere.   It turns out that, once this dream appears, it keeps coming back to Ma Xiaojun to the point where he cannot dream of anything else.45 In other words, this dream has become the dream of his life: I don’t remember how long I had chatted with the melon-selling old man that day or how many melons of his I had eaten. I don’t remember how I got my bicycle fixed and came back. All I remember clearly is that dream, every detail, every sentence, every singing, and every person in it. And the dream followed by another dream, the dream within a dream, it’s so interesting, can’t tell if it’s a dream or if it’s real. For years I have always had the same dream, like a fixed item in a theatre program. There might be a little change or innovation in a detail here and there, but the principal stuff is always the same.46

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For a Narration of One’s Own  77   In this principal dream, we see a projection from the unconscious of Ma’s generational memories. The sources from which the various quotes and re-enactments of scenes are taken were all widely popular in China in the 1960s and 1970s. The Forsaken Generation was forced to become close readers of official media, and their dreams and imagination blossomed within the limited space of these intensely ideological productions. Like Ma Xiaojun, they imagined themselves re-enacting the revolutionary battles with capitalist enemies in spaces and scenarios that are slight variations on the central story: Never Forget Class Struggle and the enemy might be right next to you, disguised as your family, your friends or your lover. Personal stories and identities disappear into re-enactments of taught guidelines to be readily categorised into established groups of good and bad, the people and the enemy. Although the people find themselves assigned to different categories at different times, sometimes changing far too quickly, what do not change are the categories themselves and the system and power that creates and sustains them.   However, in In the Heat of the Sun, individual imagination and anti-interpretation find revenge in a ridiculous mode. Towards the end of his dream, Ma Xiaojun is attacked by an urge to take a leak. All the revolutionary heat and passion, all the playful excitement and willing self-manipulation now give way to the urge of the body, albeit a non-physical body in a dream. Here, Jiang Wen and Meng Jinghui coincide in their choices of the means of redemption: both have discovered the conceptual implication of the body and the indispensable physical dimension of desire, be it amour or urination, as antidotes to the inhumanly spiritualising tendency of socialist ideology that denies and suppresses the irreducible essence of personal experience and individual existence. In this regard, the personal is also experiential and physical, containing a deep awareness of, and respect for, the necessity of concrete and discrete relationships with the historical and phenomenal world.

The Delirium of a Fool: Narrative Excess and the Subject’s Alter Ego Language is the first and last structure of madness, its constituent form; on language are based all the cycles in which madness articulates its nature. That the essence of madness can be ultimately defined in the simple structure of a discourse does not reduce it to a purely psychological nature, but gives it a hold over the totality of soul and body; such discourse is both the silent language by which the mind speaks to itself in the truth proper to it, and the visible articulation in the movements of the body. – Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (1961) When Michel Foucault was writing Madness and Civilization in the early sixties, Jiang Wen and his contemporaries had just started living in an era of madness in the name of revolutionary civilisation. Like the woman K, mentioned in Chen Kaige’s autobiography, whose memory has been helplessly imprinted

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78  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema due to repeated exposure to official media, the Forsaken Generation suffered in their early years from a similarly limited and imposed access to history and reality. While the branding of socialist historiography on the psyche was beyond their awareness and comprehension as it was carried out at an early stage of their lives, fragments of it erupt once in a while, leaving traces of the damage it has inflicted. In order for the originally incomprehensible trauma to become accessible for understanding and healing, the past, with its particular form of distorted interpretation, comes to revisit the mind by a circuitous route, such as in the form of an enigmatic excess of memory and narrative.

Figure 2.2  In the Heat of the Sun (dir. Jiang Wen, 1994): The mysterious fool   In the Heat of the Sun provides a powerful case in point in the figure of a mysterious fool, whom I argue is the branded and repressed alter ego of Ma Xiaojun (Figure 2.2). It is not explained in the film whether this character was born mentally challenged or became so after some traumatic event (as innumerable tragic stories about persecutions during the Cultural Revolution have testified). What is more, he appears neither in the original novel nor in the screenplay. Apparently, this character is a creation that emerged in the process of filmmaking. His age is hard to tell and he constantly rides a huge, long stick that looks like a ridiculously enormous phallus, always responding with ‘Oba’ to anybody who shouts ‘Kulunmu’ at him. The greeting ‘Kulunmu’ has practically become his name. He always hangs around near the entrance to the military residence quarters, where Ma, his friends and their families live.   In contrast to the film’s overall faithfulness to Wang Shuo’s original novel, Ferocious Animals, and in spite of the formal (however suspect) authority of the narrator’s voice-over, the unexplained appearance of the stick-riding fool is a mysterious leap out of the grip of the narrative. Found nowhere in the novel or the adapted screenplay and never summoned or explained by the voice-over (as most of other characters and events are), the fool nevertheless makes five appearances.

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For a Narration of One’s Own  79 Table 2.1  The five appearances of the fool Order of appearances of the fool

Location

1

2

3

At the entrance to the military family residence.

4

On a highway overpass. 5

Time

Action

Significance in Ma Xiaojun’s life

Daily routine: Ma and friends on their way out for fun.

‘Kulunmu – Oba’ greeting.

Ma and friends just turned into teens.

The day when Ma ‘sees’ and falls in love with Mi Lan for the first time.

‘Kulunmu – Oba’ greeting.

First day of Ma’s first love.

The day when Ma and friends wait for Mi Lan.

Waiting for Mi Lan. The fool is there too.

First (group) date with Mi Lan.

The day after Ma returns from a trip to his mother’s home; there his maternal grandfather has just committed suicide.

‘Kulunmu – Oba’ greeting. Ma is sad and disturbed. The fool is whimpering for no reason.

Ma has just learned that his maternal grandfather was actually an identified class enemy.

At the end of the film when Ma and friends pass by in a limousine.

‘Kulunmu – Shaxx!’ (‘You jerk!’) greeting.

Twenty years later; Ma and friends, now middle-aged, look both rich and bleak.

  As indicated above, the fool is there during all of the crucial points of Ma Xiaojun’s life: when his ‘sunny’ days of adolescence start, when he first falls in love, on his first ‘date’, when he first feels the weight of the socialist reality through his grandfather’s suicide and when he becomes a suspiciously successful person in a postsocialist China. With such a frequent and important appearance, however, the fool contributes little to the narrative progress, except, perhaps, when Ma and his friends get into a bloody fight with another local gang: the latter is said to have attacked a buddy of theirs who had tried to protect the fool from bullying. This narrative function is obviously a convenient contrivance, because, just as in the novel and the screenplay, they could possibly have gotten into the same fight without having to involve the fool at all. In other words, the

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80  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema fool’s narrative function is dispensable. He is a case of narrative excess. If so, then what is the ‘extra’ layer of story, or history, that the film wants to communicate through this character?   The key to the answer lies in the mysterious greeting, ‘Kulunmu – Oba’. These two words that have no particular meaning in the Chinese language actually come from nowhere else than one of the eight revolutionary model operas: Raid on the White Tiger Regiment. In this model opera set in the summer of 1953 during the Korean War, the Americans and South Koreans pretend to propose a ceasefire, yet are really in preparation for an aggressive move, scheming to tear up the armistice talks unilaterally. Their main force, called the White Tiger Regiment, is launching a fierce attack. In order to expose the enemy’s fraud, Yan Weicai, the reconnoitre platoon leader from a unit of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Force, leads the dagger squad, which, with help from the North Korean People’s Army and members of the community, penetrates into the enemy’s army base in disguise and destroys the headquarters of the White Tiger Regiment, thus creating favourable conditions for the overall victory of the communist troops. At one of the checkpoints, the communist dagger squad manages to grab two South Korean guards and squeeze out of them the enemy’s secret exchange code for that night, which is: ‘Kulunmu – Oba’.47 Through shouting such words at each other, the various American and South Korean squads and platoons stationed in the area are able to identify each other as allies. Curiously, it is this line poached from the enemy that becomes the present-day exchange code between Ma Xiaojun, his pals and the fool. Somehow, like a young audience featured in the film who are so familiar with the films shown in open-air screenings in the residence community that they are able to say the lines even before the actors in the films – for example, ‘Be careful, this is poisonous!’ from the Soviet film Lenin in 1918 – Ma and his friends, and by extension the director and his generation, retain the code ‘Kulunmu – Oba’ in their memories. Without trying to explain the origin of this mysterious code, Jiang Wen lets it slip into the head and out of the mouth of a fool and across the cinematic space to arrive at the present-day audience. This borrowed code with foreign sounds carries the lingering memory of an almost forgotten past through the figure of a fool, who is not even necessary to the film’s plot.   Here is where we need to search for the raison d’être of this superfluous character beyond the cinematic and in the historical dimension. The fool, with his schizophrenic ejection of traces of a shattered memory, functions like a ‘broken halberd’ shot out of the cinematic diegesis and landing in a space beyond the movie screen – that of the model opera, the Cultural Revolution and the historical space of socialist China.48 The fool is the personification of a past that is both collective and personal, protected through stupefaction and craziness from the passage of time and the change of history. Like a halberd that is ‘deflected from its goal, the object embodies an unfulfilled possibility: it “recalls” what might have been, and finding it, we too dream its dreams’. Noticing and following it, we fly beyond the film on an ‘oblique’ flight of memory into the realm of history.49   Placed at the five key stages in Ma Xiaojun’s recollected adolescent life, the

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For a Narration of One’s Own  81 fool could be read as a personification and concretisation of Ma’s adolescent excitement, passion, sadness and finally his awakening to a bleak postsocialist reality. The fool is a shadow of Ma and his friends, or a mirror image, distorted and distilled. He is a distillation of the past that, though sunny in their memory, has its brightness riddled with questions and suspicion. While appearing largely expressionless due to his retarded state, the fool cries once, apparently for no reason, at the point when Ma Xiaojun has just returned from his trip to Tangshan with the grim news that his grandfather has committed suicide (as a result of persecutions suffered as a labelled class enemy). The narrating voice of the middle-aged Ma Xiaojun sounds at this point: I didn’t expect that Grandpa turned out to be the object of the proletariat dictatorship . . . Ever since we came back from that trip, Mom started to speak much less, and I started to feel like a broken jug, no longer caring how more broken I could become. Accompanying this voice-over, we see the young Ma Xiaojun riding a bicycle and heading for the military residence gate, where he runs into the fool. The fool is whimpering hard as if his heart has been broken. ‘Kulunmu’ – ‘Oba’. After the usual exchange, this time in a much less excited voice, Ma seems to be riding his bicycle in slow motion. The contemplative tune of Cavalleria Rusticana flows along, and the camera moves slowly to the side to reveal Mi Lan, who is speaking on the phone at the janitor’s window. In the novel, the first person narration admits: In the following days, my memory of the order in which things happened is kind of messed up; neither could I recall clearly what reasons prompted certain actions. But there is no doubt about the truthfulness of some scenes, even if they are largely incomplete.50   The film is an even more hectic, disorderly chronicle of Ma’s memories than the novel. In the novel, the first person narrator presents a list of scenes remembered about Mi Lan, and the scene with her talking on the phone at the janitor’s window is the first on this list. Jiang Wen’s film motivates such elements of memory beyond the simply mnemonic level. Gliding from Ma’s confusion and the fool’s whimpering to the scene of Mi Lan making a phone call while actually hanging out with Liu Yiku in Ma’s absence, the scene points in two directions, both of which signal disillusionment and pain. On the one hand, it marks Ma’s first encounter with the dark side of revolutionary reality uncovered by his grandfather’s suicide. On the other hand, he discovers Mi Lan’s possible ‘betrayal’ of his feelings for her, as she seems to have developed a very intimate rapport with his best buddy, Liu Yiku, during his absence. At such a moment of disillusionment for Ma Xiaojun on both the public and private, revolutionary and romantic levels, the fool is whimpering. It is as if Ma himself were whimpering through the fool, now confronted with the vague knowledge that everything

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82  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema – the revolutionary years, his joyous belief in them, his romance with Mi Lan and his belief in the memory of all that – could be a deceitful construction. History is as unreliable as his memory of it.   In the revolutionary model operas and propaganda films, there are only good and bad people. Ambiguous characters would be considered indicative of the incapacity to commit to revolutionary ideology. Thus, the politically neutral, nihilistic character of the fool is an oddity, impossible to be imagined on those earlier revolutionary stages and screens. Yet as Foucault notes about farces: the character of the Madman, the Fool, or the Simpleton [stands] center stage as the guardian of truth[.] If folly leads each man into a blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of this truth[.]51 In Madness and Civilization, Foucault distinguishes four forms of madness: madness by romantic identification (for example, Don Quixote), madness of vain presumption (for example, narcissism), madness of just punishment (for example, Lady Macbeth) and madness of desperate passion (for example, Ophelia in Hamlet). The last two categories of madness are especially relevant to our discussion here. The fool in In the Heat of the Sun seems to suffer from the madness of just punishment and desperate passion. For Foucault, the madness of just punishment chastises, along with the disorders of the mind, those of the heart. [The] punishment it inflicts multiplies by nature insofar as, by punishing itself, it unveils the truth. The justification of this madness is that it is truthful. Truthful since the sufferer already experiences, in the vain whirlwind of his hallucinations, what will for all eternity be the pain of his punishment.52 Alternatively, in the madness of desperate passion, [l]ove disappointed in its excess, and especially love deceived by the fatality of death, has no other recourse but madness. As long as there was an object, mad love was more love than madness; left to itself, it pursues itself in the void of delirium.53 If China had been caught in an unreasonable romantic infatuation with the Don Quixote of Mao during the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s death or, rather, the instinctive sense of the necessary coming to an end of Mao’s era, in both physical and spiritual terms, might have caused some vague anxiety among the young followers. If it came to an end, it would come to an end inevitably because of its innate failure of reason and its betrayal of their trust, such as is manifest in Ma Xiaojun’s inexplicable sadness and confusion following the suicide of his grandfather: where would they go and where would they end up? In this sense, the whimpering of the fool is a cry from the heart of Ma Xiaojun and his generation. It is a cry in response to the unexpected revelation of the truth: that the

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For a Narration of One’s Own  83 revolutionary era into which they were born was not all right, that something was terribly wrong, that it would end and that they, as joyful players and innocent sidekicks in it, would be left behind and forgotten.   Even more terribly, their happy experiences and beautiful memories turned out to be very likely a lie: a misconceived and innocently misplaced historical investment that was both inevitable and irredeemable. Such sentiment explains the neurotically insistent and unsuccessful efforts of the later, middle-aged Ma Xiaojun to remember and tell a ‘truthful’ account of the past with its silver linings. The fool, ‘outside of time, [establishes] a link with a meaning about to be lost, and whose continuity will no longer survive except in darkness’ – in this case, the darkness of history and memory.54 The fool rides a phallic stick and is frozen in the memory loop of an outdated imaginary battle signalled by the repeated line ‘Kulunmu – Oba’. His madness is comparable to what Foucault describes as a ‘frenzied and ranting madness, symbolized by a fool astride a chair, [that] struggles beneath Minerva’s gaze [goddess of wisdom]’.55 Lines from the past have been etched into his mind and he has nothing left but to adhere to them. They become his name and his definition. He is a cancelled or interrupted postsocialist Don Quixote who rides on an emaciated, wingless horse of imagined socialist history and is caught in the loop of charging at a non-existent enemy (conjured up by Mao’s permanent class struggle). He is a madman caught between the cracks of history and memory, a sacrifice, a reminder, a broken container of the past and an interrupted projector of the sights and sounds of recent history. Indeed, the fool’s symptoms remind us of what Foucault says about the relationship between madness and image: [Madness] . . . consists merely in allowing the image a spontaneous value, total and absolute truth. The act of the reasonable man who, rightly or wrongly, judges an image to be true or false, is beyond this image, transcends and measures it by what is not itself; the act of the madman never oversteps the image presented, but surrenders to its immediacy, and affirms it only insofar as it is enveloped by it . . . An act of faith, an act of affirmation and of negation—a discourse which sustains and at the same time erodes the image, undermines it, distends it in the course of a reasoning, and organizes it around a segment of language.56 Foucault looks at the kind of delirium that ‘is not formulated by the sufferer himself in the course of the disease’, but which definitely exists and points to a deeper structure of discourse.57 He calls it ‘implicit delirium’.58 By the same token, the fool’s ‘Kulunmu – Oba’ qualifies as one of those ‘silent gestures, wordless violence, oddities of conduct’ that once grabbed Foucault’s attention and led him to ponder the larger structure behind such traces and to look at (and for) the ‘discourse [that] covers the entire range of madness’.59   In his way, Jiang Wen conducts a comparable search of a larger range of madness and history. Whereas the crazy fool of In the Heat of the Sun is still a marginal character, this alter ego of Ma Xiaojun is important for a fuller account

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84  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema of the protagonist’s evolution into a more conscious subject, whose journey in the narrative starts from immersion in the diegesis and ends with a leap into the abyss of memory and history – the latter actually symbolised by Ma’s jumping into the pool at the conclusion of his recollection. In this sense, Ma’s isolation from his friends might be understood as a necessary although pained experience of growth. As the central subject of the narrative, Ma is alone in his conscious awareness of the treacherous abyss between their sunny youth and the truth of the era they are living in, which is why he is the only witness of the fool’s whimpering. Significantly, after being rejected by his friends as they keep kicking him back in the water, he is seen floating alone in the sunlit pool – an image that evokes at the same time death and birth, isolation and freedom (Figure 2.3). Perhaps in order to undergo the process of rebirth as an awakened subject of history, Ma has to pass this rite of breaking from, and isolation by, his friends, who represent a collective unconsciousness bound by their immersion in the socialist past as a permanent present. Ma, as the narrator and the conscious thinker of their collective experience, sees the seams between memory and narrative and can no longer bear to be a passive object – such as merely a character – of the story. His consciousness and subjectivity, gradually activated and strengthened, stop him from believing that their life is unproblematic and make it impossible for him to continue the innocuous remembrance.

Figure 2.3  In the Heat of the Sun: Ma Xiaojun floating in the pool, an image of both death and birth   As his alter ego, the fool demonstrates the other side of Ma’s persona – more precisely, the historical dimension in him – as the bearer of the ideological birthmark, the emotive sensor of the political persecution suffered by his family and, as shown at the end of the film, the sarcastic commentator on present-day Beijing. When Ma and his friends, all middle-aged and apparently successful in

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For a Narration of One’s Own  85 the postsocialist reform era, ride in a luxury limousine across a contemporary Beijing full of new buildings and highways, they again encounter the fool. Surprisingly, the fool responds to the greeting ‘Kulunmu!’ with a new response: ‘You jerk!’ The fool is striding along the sidewalk of a highway overpass. Still riding his phallic stick, he looks both ridiculously incongruous with, and heroically irrelevant to, his surroundings. The limousine drives on, leaving the fool behind. Looking miraculously unchanged, the fool’s agelessness suggests the persistence of the past in the present – a fact that Ma and his generation need to carry with them internally, if not on the surface of their present life.   Jiang Wen continues his exploration of the postsocialist subject in his later films with varied results. While the director’s full trajectory deserves a much more elaborate discussion than can be accommodated here, the critical cluster of history, memory, narrative and subjectivity continues defining his films.60 For example, his second film, Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi lai le, 2000), is a funny and ironic restaging of history, this time the Sino-Japanese War during WWII. Turning topsy-turvy the audience’s expectation of a familiar subject that has seen numerous official, as well as mainstream, media representations, Jiang Wen chooses to focus neither on staging spectacular battles nor on depicting heroic Chinese fighters and particularly communist soldiers. Instead, his film is about a bunch of innocent and idiosyncratic peasants and how they are forced to look after two ‘devils’ – a Japanese soldier and a Chinese interpreter – that are captured and delivered to their doorstep by an anonymous and threatening communist soldier. In the model theatre, as we have discussed previously, communist heroes command all the light, sound, bright colours and theatrical, as well as cinematic, space. In dramatic contrast, Jiang Wen’s current black-and-white film (except its dramatic ending) plays a visual pastiche not only on model theatre, but also, as Gary G. Xu accurately observes, on classical socialist war films, such as Tunnel Warfare (Didao zhan, 1965) and Mine Warfare (Dilei zhan, 1962).61 Jiang’s communist soldier simply dumps the enemy ‘devils’ on the doorstep of two members of the masses – ignobly represented by the peasant Ma Dasan (played by Jiang Wen himself) and his ‘illegitimate’ lover outside of wedlock – forcing them with a gun into the unusual responsibility of guarding the captives until the hero is ready to return and pick them up at a later, more optimal point of time. For the rest of the film, this supposedly positive nation-defending character never comes back as promised. Afraid of the possible revenge he will carry out if they fail in their task, Ma Dasan and his fellow villagers are stuck with the two captives and have to think up all manner of means to try to keep them alive. In the meantime, their village is under the control of the Japanese. Henceforth unfolds a critique of the difficult and ridiculous position that an individual finds himself in the face of the uncaring forces of wider historical events and eras.   In Jiang Wen’s rewriting of the wartime past, the communist hero is consigned to the shadowy or marginal side of representation. With key lighting removed, the only frontal close-up shot of the enemy-capturing hero is masked, so that his silhouette figure, with his facial features totally invisible, appears mysterious and almost devilish. This hero makes an appearance by edging in from the dark night

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86  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema into the private life of Ma Dasan when the latter is having sex with his lover. He exits similarly without formal signalling. His brief presence is mysterious and violent (with a gun pointed against Ma’s forehead to stop Ma from looking at his face). To Ma’s inquiry about who he is, this figure does not provide a straight answer like a noble hero would proudly do in a traditional Chinese folktale or the model theatre. Instead, he replies with a forceful ‘I!’, as if that pronoun were self-explanatory. Through such an edgy treatment of the communist hero figure, Jiang Wen continues his questioning of history started in In the Heat of the Sun in a more radical manner. With the communist hero moved to the background of the narrative, the peasant, Ma Dasan, characterised by an insistence on his own wisdom that is almost idiosyncratic, becomes the drive of the whole narrative. Thus, engaging with another personalised angle for the purpose of re-imagining the past, Jiang continues to explore the relationship between nation and individual, narrative and subjectivity, for a critical and informed comprehension of the nature of history.   From Meng Jinghui to Jiang Wen, narrations of one’s own become a powerful tool with which to pry open rigid official or mainstream interpretations of the past and thereby produce a space – in the form of narrative fractures, seams or edges – for alternative tales and personal experiences to be seen and heard. These alternative narratives of the self not only enrich the general archive of history and memory, but also confirm the narrating subject’s status as an epistemological inquirer and a historical subject. Baring the process of narrative construction in a constant self-examination, they also contribute to the nurturing of a general critical consciousness – that of the director as well as the viewer – about the intricate relationship between memory, history and representation, which, as an ethically impactful epistemological inquiry, continues to be attempted and deepened in a variety of eye-opening and thought-provoking ways by other filmmakers of the Forsaken Generation.

Self-portraits of New Cinematic Subjects out of the Dirt of History Alongside Meng Jinghui and Jiang Wen, practitioners of personal filmmaking have been engaged in fictional and non-fictional experiments with selffiguration as independent subjects of history. In 1990, Wu Wenguang (b. 1956), a schoolteacher-turned-filmmaker from Yunnan Province, made Bumming in Beijing, arguably China’s first independent documentary. The film presents a crude and lively portrait of a group of materially, as well as spiritually, struggling young artists, who, like Wu himself, had bravely ridden on the tide of reform, quit employment in their ‘work units’ and chosen a migrant and freelance life.   In 1992, Guan Hu (b. 1968), a recent graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, acquired investment from a subsidiary of the state-owned Sino-Chemicals (Zhonghua), paid a label fee to the Inner Mongolian Studio for the official approval of production and in May that same year started production of Dirt (Toufa luan le, 1994) – a feature about an independent rock band in a Beijing hutong (alley)

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For a Narration of One’s Own  87 neighbourhood and its female vocal’s ruminations over changes in the city and in her childhood friends.62 In the summer of the same year, Wang Guangli, another teacher-turned-filmmaker who had left employment at the China Youth University for Political Sciences – China’s largest training institution for highranking youth leaders and future public service professionals – started filming I Graduated with financial support first from a restaurant owner friend and then from Shi Jian, a producer at CCTV and an important promoter, as well as experimenter, of new forms of documentary.63 Later to become another landmark of independent documentary, I Graduated also directed its gaze at the filmmaker’s generational cohorts: the former participants of the student movement in 1989 who were graduating from college in 1992.   The following year saw Wu Wenguang working on his second documentary, 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1966, wo de hongweibing shidai, 1993), which is yet another collective portrait of figures associated with recent Chinese history, this time from an older generation: former Red Guards, including Fifth Generation director Tian Zhuangzhuang (b. 1952). Also in 1993, Sixth Generation director Zhang Yuan made Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong), a much rougher rock feature compared to Guan Hu’s Dirt. Beijing Bastards strings its narrative flimsily on the troubled relationship of a young couple, involving an unwanted pregnancy and the struggling efforts of a rock band to find a stable venue for performances. Rock luminaries, such as Cui Jian, Dou Wei and Zang Tianshuo – all members of the Forsaken Generation – play a thinly veiled version of themselves. At around the same time, Wang Xiaoshuai, Zhang Yuan’s schoolmate who also graduated in 1989 from the Beijing Film Academy, made The Days, a black and white film about the disintegrating relationship of a young painter couple (played by the real and now highly successful painter couple Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong). The film ends with the woman going abroad and the man going crazy, making it look like an elaborate fictionalised version of artists’ lives, as documented earlier in Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing.   Amongst such early self-portraits of the Forsaken Generation, Guan Hu’s Dirt stands out as a piece that more explicitly reflects on the generation’s position, astride both past and present. This thematic concern is apparent in the film’s juxtaposition of contemporary space – a present-day Beijing neighbourhood – with the protagonist’s flashbacks and first person narration. Ye Tong is a young woman who was born in the sixties and grew up in Beijing. Having been away for many years, she now returns to her childhood neighbourhood for a prolonged visit. Centred on Ye’s revisit, Dirt follows two parallel and intertwining storylines: one about the difficult development of an underground rock band that Ye joins, the other about the different lives of Ye’s old friends from the neighbourhood. Frequently evoking memories of their shared childhood, the film weaves between the felt baggage of a disappearing past and the ennui of a directionless present that all characters are struggling with.   The relationship between the two temporalities seems to be both obvious and evasive and is reflected in the placement of flashbacks in the film. Specifically, two major flashbacks of Ye Tong are featured, one at the very beginning and

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88  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema the other toward the end, accompanying her performance of a rock song that is finally realised. The first flashback features snippets of her childhood life playing with friends, including a game in which they follow a typical Cultural Revolution procession (Figure 2.4). Her friends push her and Ye pretends to fight and struggle, saying ‘let me go, I’m not an agent [of the enemy]’. Behind them, a waving banner indicates a slogan typical of the era: ‘Continue the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ This flashback is intercut with a present-day scene of Ye, in which she, now in her twenties and carrying a guitar on her back, walks along the rails and then into an urban landscape. In the voice-over, Ye only relates the personal dimension of this memory, introducing her childhood friends and explaining her current return to Beijing for a revisit. The historical dimension seems temporarily subdued. For the rest of the film, as Ye renews her friendships, observes their problems, gets involved in a sort of love triangle between one childhood buddy and a fellow rock musician and, in the meantime, witnesses the neighbourhood disappearing due to encroaching demolition and new urban development, the past seems to linger quietly in the background, in the neighbourhood ruins and in the inexplicable ennui of all the young characters in the film.

Figure 2.4  Dirt (dir. Guan Hu, 1994): Ye Tong’s flashback of a childhood game playing revolutionary and counter-revolutionary   A revealing moment occurs in a scene where the two temporalities of past and present and the two dimensions of personal and collective memory are juxtaposed in an old house. In this scene, Ye Tong (‘tong’ means red) has an intimate rendezvous with her romantic interest, as well as childhood buddy, Weidong (another common first name in the Cultural Revolution years, meaning ‘defend the East’). Sharing a feeling of nostalgia for the past, she confesses to him: ‘I

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For a Narration of One’s Own  89 always dream of the good old days when we played here, dirty and ugly, every one of us, strange faces . . .’ However, this sharing does not look or sound happy. Paralleling this peculiar moment of sharing and reflection is a private screening going on in another room organised by the other three friends of Ye Tong and Weidong. They are watching some archival footage about the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao’s death and memorial, the toppling down of the Gang of Four and the end of the era. Shown in silence and watched by an equally silent private audience, the documentary footage displays a strange array of excited crowds, agitated expressions and tearful faces whose quiet spectrality falls short of the zealous uproar often characterising the era in collective memory.   Yingjin Zhang comments on the juxtaposition of this private screening with the more private act of lovemaking between Ye Tong and Weidong that follows their get-together, suggesting that the cross-cutting used in this sequence points to ‘the fragmentation of the private memory and the seeming irrelevance of public history in postsocialist China’.64 In my opinion, such an apparently jaggy juxtaposition of past and present, private and public, elements precisely gives birth to a historical consciousness on the basis of which a new relationship between personal experience and national history can be figured. Faced with the huge gap between history and memory, Ye Tong and her friends (or on behalf of them), as the new subjects of postsocialist history, need to self-navigate on a broken and evasive map and construct an itinerary of their own in the present. This is perhaps the reason why we see Ye Tong walking and walking in a vague direction in the midst of a present-day Beijing, both at the beginning and the end of the film.   In fact, Dirt already demonstrates traces of such an agenda. In a sort of summary scene of the whole film, Ye Tong gives a performance of a song, ‘A Night with No Dreams’. Accompanying this song is a music video of a flashback connecting various snippets of memory, personal as well as public: Ye’s early childhood, her recent experiences in the neighbourhood and a series of documentary images of old houses and communities being demolished – a reality of China that is still going on to this day, two decades after Dirt was made. Just like past and present are conjoined together in this performance sequence, the distinctions between public memory and personal experience also tend to merge into one metaphor about loss, reflection and the desire to find a way to move on. ‘You were my only love and it feels so sad now that I lose it’, sings Ye Tong, possibly referring to her romantic love, Weidong, and to the past they have shared together. That past is now disappearing and they are moving into a new era, whose coordinates they just begin to figure out. Interestingly, compared to the flashback sequence at the beginning of the film, the scenes from the past that appear in this second flashback (conjoined with scenes from the present) mostly use a handheld camera cinematography, communicating the distinctly subjective point of view of Ye Tong, as well as a greater sense of being on the scene of documentation (even though the childhood scenes are in black and white and supposedly in a past where a personal movie camera was not yet available). As the film’s central protagonist, Ye Tong, evolves as the subject who travels back to the

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90  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema past, witnesses the changes in her old neighbourhood and friends and inspects her own relationship with them by way of nostalgia, friendship, romance and rock music. She wants to better understand the meaning of all this, herself, as well as her generation. At the end of the film, she leaves it all and walks along a highway in a new Beijing. She does not do so alone; her friends come to bid her adieu. Although she looks sad and the way in front of her looks characterless and extends long into an indistinct distance, her revisit of the past seems not only concluded – as indicated by the friendly adieu – but also places her in a position where a new journey, albeit not an easy one, is just beginning (Figure 2.5).

Figure 2.5  Dirt: Ye Tong begins her new journey

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Chapter 3 Surface and Edge: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye

Surface and Edge: Zhangke and Lou Ye Following on from Jiang Wen, Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiaoshuai, new members like Lou Ye (b. 1965) and Jia Zhangke (b. 1971) debuted on the scene of independent cinema with Weekend Lover (Zhoumo qingren, dir. Lou Ye, 1995) and Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu, dir. Jia Zhangke, 1997). Over the years, Lou and Jia have become arguably the two most outstanding representatives of the group, with a steadily growing repertoire and a level of creative acumen fitting the strictest definition of film auteurs. Each has cultivated an aesthetic system grown out of their distinct understanding of the cinematic medium and its uniquely figurative mobilisation of time and space in representing Chinese reality and history.   Jia Zhangke is widely recognised for his realist commitment, evidenced by Italian neorealism-inspired stylistic regulars, such as location shooting, long shots, reliance on non-professional or amateur actors, as well as the many Antonionian long takes accomplished through an extremely patient and restrained camera. While a dynamic handheld camera is found in Xiao Wu, Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao, 2002) and the receiving shot at the beginning of The World (Shijie, 2004), Jia’s cinematic world tends to emphasise the distance (but not irrelevance) – both physical and symbolic – between character, background and camera. In the resulting spacious cinemascape, characters and their surroundings coexist in a classic neorealist manner as parallel, mutually complimentary layers of the socio-historical world, often with the human figures roaming at a loss on the surface of the landscape. Observing this futile yet meaningful interaction between human and space is Jia’s patient camera that often stays static for a prolonged duration of time or does mostly slow, horizontal pans, thus setting in yet another layer from which to dwell in contemplative observation on the previous two. Avoiding dramatic and singular directionality in both narrative and image, Jia’s cinema tends to do what Roger Cardinal wonderfully advocates as ‘a studied dislocation of the gaze from the center of the frame to its quirky circumference’ and cultivates for the spectator ‘a fresh relationship to the image, one in which the whole screen is acknowledged as a surface which is . . . available to the gaze as an even field of rippling potency and plenitude’.1

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94  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema   In contrast to Jia’s decision to dwell on the surface of the world, Lou Ye displays a very different aesthetic personality in a series of convoluted narratives of romance, intrigue and death (often suicides). Accompanying (or frequently following) his many fiercely wandering protagonists who often find themselves in a triangular relationship of some sort, Lou’s extremely dynamic handheld camera likes to run into the visual field head on. Lou furthers his subjective approach to narrative and cinematography with first person voice-over narration, atmospheric mise-en-scène composed with rain, wind, shadows and dim available lighting, quick jumpy editing and deliberate technical ‘mistakes’, such as visible, left-in shadows of the camera. Every formal aspect of Lou’s cinema demonstrates a profound interest in the rough edge between filmmaking as a documenting process of arranged situations and the finished film as a summary product of selected parts of that process.   Despite the apparent contrast in the very texture of their works – one smooth, contemplative and vision-oriented, the other raw in emotion, melodramatic in expression and bodily in action, with a kinetic camera following highly sexed bodies and confusing urban spaces at close range – Jia and Lou share a commitment to the exploration of film aesthetic as a highly complex and powerful form of critical intervention in the nature of representation and history. This chapter reaches into the deep structures of their film form to reveal certain aspects of that claim and particularly aims to examine, whether superficial or edgy in their mobilisation of the camera and the cinematic space, how these two auteurs work toward a common goal of constructing extra-textual and conscious subject positions for the spectator.   In his search for a critical framework more relevant to the historical context of the 1980s’ Chinese cinema, Nick Browne observes that Western film criticism since 1968, although ‘heavily invested in ideological critique, has not generally confronted the problem of the critique of socialist representation’.2 That Althusser-inspired, Marxist cultural criticism, as summarised by Browne, ‘has treated ideology as a discourse of mystification justifying the capitalist order by naturalization’ and, when applied to film studies, sets the goal of demystifying the coded cinematic text that forces the spectator into an implicit agreement with its message by way of the cinematographic apparatus.3 However, such an attitude and methodology of baring the hidden ideological operation seems to run into a challenge from the obvious in Chinese cinema, because ‘[socialist] ideology, it would seem, is hardly in need of demystification – it is explicit and taught as such’.4 A similarly astute warning against the closure of a text for insular analysis applies to our taking up of the cinematic space. In an important article, Stephen Heath reveals mainstream cinema’s narrative efforts to produce spatial coherence as essentially ideology at work, in order to subsume the viewer into the limited and guided space of the narrative to consume it and to be consumed by it.5 What Heath’s illuminating approach misses, however, as Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes point out – with inspiration from Roger Cardinal and his fascinating investment in the edge of the frame – is the potential accountability and liberating power of those peripheral details not lying at the centre

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Surface and Edge  95 of the narratively organised frame; for example, the possibility of spectatorial identification in a shot of a place ‘as this place and not just a place may be the condition of an engagement of film’ falling outside Heath’s narrative-centred understanding.6   Both of these insights point to the need for fresh critical methodologies that match the openness and richness of the moving image not simply as a narrative text, but as a container of recorded space and time, for which ideological or counter-ideological reading is only one among many possible interpretative angles.7 When transferred to our current study of two of the most accomplished Chinese auteurs and film stylists, whose works are, on the one hand, well-known for their alternative and even controversial subjects and, on the other hand, awarded and marketed for their distinct style on a par with standards set at international film festivals and art cinema circuits, I would like to go beyond mere thematic evaluation or stylistic analysis, in order to gain a fuller understanding of both the mechanism and value of their unique stories and styles. Oriented toward the various subjective angles and textual layers hidden in their cinematic space, my analysis reveals how the organisation of these and other elements of film form give rise to a dynamic set of positions from which the spectator is to assess his own critical relationship with the moving image thus presented. As we shall see, from their multi-layered formal process of constructing, exercising and analysing the cinematic vision and subjective position of viewing emerges an epistemological inquiry that carries both historiographical and ethical significance. That is, the vision and subject position thus cinematically constructed give rise to the development of a self-reflecting, critical, historical subject – one who sees himself implicated in the textual body of the film, as well as invoked in its extra-cinematic references as an actual historical agent. The knowledge of this dual relationship to cinema and context is located in the specific position of the subject, thus projecting and producing an awareness of the relation between the specific and the general, the representational and the experiential, the personal and the socio-historical. In this sense, the particular aesthetic forms these filmmakers mobilise translate into attitudes and methodologies through which subject positions are taken and subjectivities are formed beyond the movie screen in the real historical world.

Jia Zhangke: A Subjective Metanarrative Vision In an interview, Jia Zhangke talks about his profuse use of long shots in Platform, explaining his reluctance to impose guided interpretations onto the audience. Rather, he prefers to evoke a ‘mood’ within which they can do their own looking, each possibly coming up with his own range of observations.8 More than offering a clear set of contents, Jia seems interested in providing a frame of looking that, while perhaps frustratingly spacious and unfocused, allows and encourages the spectator to not only do his own visual inspection, but also notice the particular form of the current frame through which he is looking. This rigorous denial of given knowledge for the cultivation of independent vision is embedded in the

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96  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema strategy of spatial distance and epistemological detachment. Jia Zhangke exercises what I call a ‘subjective metanarrative vision’ and creates conscious subject positions for the spectator to encounter cinematic representations of past and present. The encounter is an epistemological experience of the ‘superficial’ nature of time and space: traces left on the surface of a wall as an embodiment of the past and debris as a spatial index of the memory of a place, for instance. In the face of the richly suggestive surface of the present pregnant with the past, Jia’s camera remains non-intruding yet attentive, anonymous yet conscious, placing the spectator in a sensitive position, from where cinematic interventions and the real historical world informing them are seen and experienced simultaneously as a whole.   Chris Berry has commented on two kinds of cinematic time in Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu: one is the narrative ‘distension’ exemplified by long takes in which characters (and especially the eponymous Xiao Wu) do nothing; the other refers to ‘the kinds of time constructed by the cinema institution, and the corresponding need to understand time as differential or multiple and disaggregated rather than homogenous’.9 Although Berry does not elaborate on the exact forms of the relationship between these cinematic temporalities, his proposal is highly valuable in its correlation of screen time with real historical time, pushing us to contemplate not only the relationship between the various ‘realist and non-realist cinematic modes’ of Chinese films since the early eighties, but also the historiographical implications of ‘this multiplicity of postsocialist time schemes’.10 Xiao Wu and its independent documentary counterparts such as Bumming in Beijing and Out of Phoenix Bridge (Huidao Fenghuang qiao, dir. Li Hong, 1997) signified the appearance of an alternative ‘experiential realism of the loser’ and the underrepresented members of Chinese society who were unable to catch up with postsocialist modern progress in the reform years.11 In this sense, the act of ‘watching time go by’ from the roadside of reform and progress marks a ‘negative’ sense of time and history that is based on an alternative personal experience and subjective perspective.   No wonder that Xiao Wu ends with a long take to augment the sense of distension, exposing the protagonist Xiao Wu for curious but eventless public display (as no eventful or dramatic ‘action’ occurs in this take). This final long take transforms into a subtly subjective point of view shot through the swerving around of the camera and displays the observing onlookers from a mildly lowangle position, mimicking the perspective of the squatting Xiao Wu (who stays outside the frame, thus justifying the conflation of the gaze of the camera with his own). Emerging from this moment of exposure, display and observation, all of which is taking place in mutual terms between the camera (partly Xiao Wu) and the onlookers, we sense a combination of humiliation, curiosity, defiance and critical thinking. Whereas Jason McGrath sees this exchange of looks as serving an integrating narrative function and subsuming the gawking of the real-life bystanders into the diegetic world of Xiao Wu’s fictional cinematic existence, I prefer to linger on the ambiguity of Xiao Wu’s gaze.12 More than just a return of the gaze at the surrounding crowd, Xiao Wu’s looking back develops

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Surface and Edge  97 from an intensive practice of critical vision that has been gathering momentum throughout the film before arriving at the conclusive moment.   In this scene, Xiao Wu is being deported to another police station. Feeling the need to use the public toilet, the policeman chains the handcuffed Xiao Wu to the buttressing cord of an electric post on the roadside. Xiao Wu seems to notice something around him, squats down, looks a little uncomfortable and then stands up, at which point the camera moves beyond his head and reveals a crowd of onlookers. It first looks at two male onlookers for twenty-five seconds, then pans right to face a larger group for thirteen seconds, before moving left to look at an even larger crowd for thirty-eight seconds. Despite the quick swish move from one cluster of onlookers to another, the camera overall remains steady and undaunted within these three durations of counter observation. The length of which it holds the gaze communicates an unrelenting confrontation on the part of Xiao Wu as well. The film features narrative distension and emphasises Xiao Wu as an exemplar anti-hero, who, not without a palatable sense of dignity and aesthetic, falls by the wayside of postsocialist progress. However, this protagonist does more than float alongside the episodic narrative structure. Experiencing one rejection after another in terms of friendship, romance and family, Xiao Wu nevertheless proves himself to be a strong narrative core, as he develops an increasingly determined sense of being loyal to what he always has been: an artisan pickpocket and a faithful friend, lover and son. Following this trajectory, it is unsurprising that he finally gets caught – an unfortunate accident to which he remains nonchalant, as if it were the expected result of his choices in life. Even his chaining to the roadside does not stop him from conducting a quiet but active assessment of the world surrounding him.   By extension, since at this point the fictional character is emphatically re-placed on the border between fiction and non-fiction, his subjective vision – aided by the point of view shot – conflates with that of the viewer. The exchange of looking between Xiao Wu and the surrounding crowd, communicated not through a back-and-forth shot/reverse-shot structure, but mainly riveted on Xiao Wu’s subjective vision, emphasises him (and us) both as the subject and object of looking, thus heightening the viewer’s awareness of the perceptual structure at work here, in which the latter’s own vision forms yet another extracinematic dimension. This highly complex transposition of vision(s) in, across and beyond the cinematic text renders the subjective vision(s) in this sequence one with metahistorical significance, as it economically and powerfully evokes all at once the fine line and the complex relationship existing between representation and reality.

Platform: Cinematic Space and Multivalent Subject Positions Much like Xiao Wu, which uses two documentary-like shots to punctuate its title sequence and set a tone and pace for the main body of the film, Platform, Jia’s three-hour epic about social change between 1979 and 1990, as reflected in the evolution of a small-town performance troupe (Fenyang Peasant Culture

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98  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Group) and its members, has an utterly elaborate opening.13 In the four shots presented between the opening credits, one finds all the major formal and thematic elements that mark the entire film: lengthy takes, long shots, static camera positions, the motif of waiting, a deliberate relegation of official history to the margins of representation and an anonymous point of view combined with temporal distension that together transforms the viewing experience of mundaneness and boredom into a critical examination of the current moving image representation of history.   Centred on a staged performance of a classical socialist agitprop skit, ‘The Train Heading for Shaoshan’ (Huoche xiangzhe Shaoshan pao), these four shots present the moments before, during and after the show, respectively. The performance does not take place until the third shot and its presentation is achieved through an extreme long shot, where it not only looks miniscule and indistinct, but also tends to be immersed in the ambient noise of the audience laughing, chatting and coughing. Around this diminished narrative centre is a series of parallel nonactions of ‘waiting’: members of the local audience waiting in the lobby before the performance; the audience seated in the theatre before the performance; and the troupe members boarding a bus to go back after the night’s show is over. Treated as a narrative motif, the act of waiting is more of a non-action that heightens viewer attention to the cinematic setting, such as the theatre or the bus, and its spatial correlations offscreen. It also transforms the movie-watching into an experiential capsule that accommodates both screen time and real time – the latter including both the duration of filming the long takes in question and that of watching them. Thus, within these sequence shots, the duration of screen time equals that of both story time and real time, as the viewer, like the onscreen crowds, watches and waits for the same length of time to pass.   Besides this experiential equivalence, which parallels and connects temporalities both on- and offscreen, these four opening shots also organise and conflate perspectives from different but connected positions. The first and the last shots feature relatively limited spaces – one in the lobby of the theatre, the other inside a bus – and place multiple characters in them, according to a more or less layered structure. The second and the third shots (Figures 3.1 and 3.2) are filmed from behind two standing microphones on the stage and from behind the audience respectively, thus presenting directly opposite points of view on the stage show from both ends of the perspectival axis. The resultant viewing experience is not singly guided by a thematic focus. Rather, because of the experiential parallel established between the camera and the viewer of the film, it is relaxed, accommodated and conflated in an ambiguous but rich space that extends from the onscreen theatre space to the offscreen space in which the viewer is currently watching the film. That ambiguity of the cinematic space matches with the multiple temporalities that are represented and evoked in these shots.   From within as well as outside of this arrangement, we watch the stage performance as it enacts a political pilgrimage. A young woman strides onstage and announces the programme title, ‘Train Heading for Shaoshan’. After an

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Surface and Edge  99 introduction that suggests an impersonal omniscient point of view typical of Cultural Revolution shows and directs the audience’s attention to a ‘southward train running on a sunlit landscape toward the hometown of the Great Leader Chairman Mao’, she calls out, ‘Look, they are here!’ Upon her words the stage is lit up, music comes on and a ‘train’ of performers starts to file across the stage, riding on stools and singing the eponymous song (Figure 3.2).   This performance finds a historical precedent in a Cultural Revolution non-fictional musical, We Are All Sunflowers (Women doushi xiangyanghua). Produced by the E-mei Film Studio in Chengdu in 1975, the film features an impassioned although impersonal female voice-over typically found in political agitprop that expresses a sworn devotion to Chairman Mao and to the revolutionary cause. Through a string of songs and dances, child actors re-enact excerpts of the revolutionary model operas, welcome the ‘uncles and aunties’ from China’s Third World allies, condemn and catch socialism’s saboteurs and conclude with a performance of ‘Little Train Please Take Us to Beijing Fast’ (Xiao huoche ya kuaikuai ba women daidao Beijing qu) – the singing and dancing piece that is the historical precedent for ‘Train Heading for Shaoshan’ featured at the beginning of Jia’s Platform.14

Figure 3.1  Platform (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2000): The second opening shot of Platform   In the original version, a dozen colourfully costumed child actors enact a train journey and file briskly onto a brightly lit stage with a painted backdrop of mountainous landscapes under a blue sky. On this symbolic journey, the young travellers witness and praise various sights of the socialist nation building of which they will be the proud inheritors. Although their sightseeing as a narrative arrangement supposes these child travellers as the onscreen/onstage subjects of looking, reverse shots of what they see are absent. Instead, their subject position is abstractly maintained through verbal descriptions provided in the lyrics. The

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100  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema symbolic journey by train follows a predetermined itinerary where sights and scenes are as prearranged as their vision. What they see cannot be of their own free discovery. When they specify the various sights observed on the trip, they do so standing behind a banner that reads ‘Beijing Express’, thus embodying the official perspective that has been maintained throughout the film We Are All Sunflowers.   The climax of this symbolic journey comes with the announcement of the train’s arrival in Beijing. A variety of frames, ranging from long shots to closeups, of the children emphasises their intense expectancy of the holy destination, which is indicated by a shot of a shining, iconic Tiananmen Gate. A second wave of intense expectancy is communicated with three long shots of children cheering and running toward the camera, which are answered by another shot of the Tiananmen Gate. As their cheering of ‘Chairman Mao Live for Ten Thousand Years!’ increases in speed and exuberance, the shots also gather momentum visually, now reduced to only two, before being concluded with a climactic shot. As the only returned gaze in this entire sequence, the portrait of Mao now looks placidly from the Tiananmen Gate. As if not enough to emphasise the singularly authoritative status of Mao, the film provides a series of close-ups showing the children looking up and cheering passionately, which, as image and sound are edited slightly out of sync at this point, strikes one as if they were murmuring in awe. Out of a total of fifty seconds of this sequence, the shot of Mao’s portrait counts for only three seconds. Yet as indicated by the above layout of the editing, it is the quasi gaze of Mao that guides, commands, answers and holds the expectant gazes of the children and gives meaning to their journey. In this quasi exchange of looks, the gazes of the children are unified to meet with that of the portrait, and the contrast between the multiplicity of the performers, faces, expressions and shots and the singularity of the defining icon subsumes the former under the absolute authority of the latter.   When restaged by Jia Zhangke in Platform, this classic socialist train journey undergoes a significant reframing in terms of both the style of presentation and the subject positions imbricated in that presentation. In the latter case, Jia particularly exercises a loosening of the representational frame via which multiple subject positions are constructed for a more flexible and conscious relationship not only with the theatrical performance, but also with what comes before, during and after it. The multiplicity of available subject positions – certainly emphasised by the temporal spaciousness provided by the act of waiting – plays a central role in turning the current cinematic re-presentation of the historical past into a critical reassessment not only of memory as a discourse of subjective reframing, but also of spectatorship as a subjective and concrete interrelationship between past and present. In other words, Jia transforms the experience of remembering the past and watching its re-presentation into an occasion for the viewer to contemplate his own relationship, as a conscious and critical subject, to history and its (cinematic) representation.   Compared to the original version, the performance in Platform also begins in medias res, but with a ‘train’ of very different performers filing onto the stage. A

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Surface and Edge  101 line of adults ride rather awkwardly on tall stools across a stage emptied of any décor except a drab backdrop in an oilcloth brown. Whereas in the early version evenly distributed lighting sets out the décor and the colourful costumes of the child performers without being intrusive, on the stage in Platform lighting becomes emphasised as a formal element. Invisible footlights cast faint yet immense shadows of the performers onto the monochrome backdrop, their blown-up quality tending to distract the audience from the performance, the latter already looking indistinct in the far background of an extreme long shot. Because of the stools they ride on, the performers are moving at an awkwardly staccato cadence. With their growth in age and their faces practically invisible in the long shot, this renewed line of revolutionary pilgrims looks insignificant if not totally defeated. The train, as an important trope of Jia’s film that signifies the small town youth’s dream about Beijing and the outside world at large, does not bode very hopefully in its very first appearance.   Except for a few point of view shots identified with the troupe members when they leave their hometown for performance tours,15 the cinematic vision in Platform appears mostly anonymous, maintaining a steady gaze often at eye level and from a distance. However, the exceptional length of the shot duration – with an average of seventy-six seconds and major sequence shots lasting three-and-ahalf minutes – calls attention to the directorial deliberation.16 Whereas McGrath regards this as indicative of Jia’s conscious cultivation of a distinct auteur style, a tendency impacted upon by contemporary international art cinema, I suggest that the complex structure of this extended vision calls for a fuller consideration of the specific historical dimension informing such a particular subject position. Doubtless representing the director’s artistic vision, its actual exercise in different parts of the film Platform is varied and tends to be identified with multiple viewpoints from miscellaneous sources: human, nonhuman, collective and individual. In other words, the static camera maintains a consistent, but not a singular, way of looking. It is shared by a variety of subject positions in the film.   Take, for example, the second and third shots of the opening sequence (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). In the second shot, the camera inspects the crowded theatre from the stage, its point of view on the same level as two inanimate objects: two microphones standing at knee height. The third shot sort of returns the gaze to this impersonal one, this time identifying with the onscreen audience as if it were one of them sitting in the far back of the theatre. Such directly opposite placements of the camera, plus the long duration of the shots, invite the spectator to take in the theatre space as a rich body pregnant with small details. Both shots frame the stage and the audience as two pronounced visual distinctions: the stage is lit, its edges distinct and squarish, while the audience sits in rows in the half dark. In sonic contrast to this orderly structure of straight lines, layers and patches, the ambient noise of the audience’s small talk, laughing and coughing further invades the performance of ‘Train Going to Shaoshan’ that is already obscured in the long shot. As the dramatic highlight of these two shots, the performance onstage nevertheless tends to be visually diminished, because of emphatic lighting thrown on part of the audience, which competes for attention

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102  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema with the lit stage. In such a mise-en-scène, the camera is limited in providing narrative guidance on the presentation of the performance. Instead, it invites the spectator to approach and comprehend the cinematic space through viewing positions and angles that are anonymous yet independent, directly opposite thus highly attentive. The horizontal layering characterising the organisation of the stage and audience spaces also tends to derail the direction (and intention) of the gaze from searching for a dramatic focus and move it along the lines toward beyond the frame. This heightened consciousness of the cinematic space, both onscreen and offscreen, is accompanied by a similar (ex)tension in the temporal dimension. The unusually long takes enable screen time and real time to be experienced with the same duration when the spectator has to wait as does the audience in the film.

Figure 3.2  Platform: The third opening shot of Platform restages the revolutionary skit ‘Train Heading for Shaoshan’   Waiting, as a loose but consistent narrative motif in Platform, continues into the fourth shot and for the rest of the film. Inside an idling bus, troupe members gradually arrive and seat themselves at various distances from the camera that frames the troupe supervisor (played by poet Xi Chuan) in the foreground in a medium shot. Though seemingly organised in a more pronounced central perspective that looks down the aisle, this shot continues to discourage an easy and straightforward relationship between narrative and visual cues. The characters mostly sit in the dark; four small ceiling lights manage to illumine pockets of space around them. Like in the previous shots, here the spectator is again participating in the action – or, rather, non-action – of waiting, together with the characters onscreen, which are waiting for their colleagues to get on the bus. Much darker than the previous three shots, this shot also invites attention to the ambient sounds, such as the idling noise of the bus and fragments of a merry song praising the Party and the country, which possibly emanates from inside

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Surface and Edge  103 the theatre. The resulting experience is transposed from a minimally supported visual engagement to a fuller sense of the spaces this scene harbours and combines: onscreen (in the bus), offscreen (outside the bus) and even the immediate theatre or living room space in which the spectator or audience watches this film. The supervisor gets impatient (and the viewer tends to empathise with him) as one troupe member named Cui Mingliang, who will take a more central role in the film, arrives very late. An exchange of words communicates to us that the supervisor is unsatisfied with Cui’s performance on stage, criticising his incompetence in producing authentic sound effects of a train whistling. Cui admits defiantly that he has not seen a train yet. The bus finally moves and some naughty troupe members start imitating a train whistling. The film proper begins.

Superficial Time: Writing on the Wall At this point, the status of the information provided is not clear, because the long wait, the dim lighting and the apparent mundaneness of the dialogue all make the content of this scene appear ordinary and negligible. Its significance will only become gradually revealed as the film develops the tropes of the train, the platform and the non-action of waiting. Platform ends with a poignant summary of them all. By that point, Cui Mingliang has futilely run around to reach a bigger outside world, failed to realise his dream on both professional and romantic fronts and is living a family life in the old town. The compromised and unfulfilled nature of his current life is evidenced by his slouched posture, his dozing off and a city wall in front of his home that continues framing and blocking his access to the outside. Yin Ruijuan, his previous romantic interest who rejected him, drifted away and yet now becomes his wife is hanging around, their child in her arms. The water boiler on a stove in the living room starts whistling, echoing the initial reference to the train – a symbol of freedom that is subtly missed in this current life blocked by the same old city wall in the background (Figure 3.7).   Here, I want to discuss the wall as another trope in the film, not in regard to its narrative significance – Michael Berry has offered a quite thorough discussion on this point17 – but in the light of the concept of surface. As an auteuristic obsession of Jia Zhangke, the surface symbolises his unique approach to the phenomenal and historical world in the form of an embodied epistemological vision encountering the body of information, emotion and time. Such an understanding attempts a fuller account for Jia’s cinematic vision as embedded in the immediate context of recent Chinese history and reality, suggesting his work as a significant component of the exploration and formation of an individual-based historical consciousness that is present among other contemporary filmmakers and artists as well.   Before the making of Platform, Jia seemed already aware of the theoretical and moral implications of practicing discipline by remaining at a surface level when approaching his characters. Speaking of Xiao Wu in an interview, he stated:

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104  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema I don’t want the camera to penetrate beneath the surface because when you enter a character’s inner world with the camera – I mean the kind of subjective entry – you already start to make interpretations about the character. Nobody has the right to give instructions about other people’s life. I hope my film stays on the track of non-involvement. Of course cinema can not avoid involvement because when you choose to shoot in a certain way you are already involved and start to make decisions of filming what and not filming what. I hope I can restrain myself.18 As is clear from this quote, the concept of surface results from a conscious practice of non-involvement and restraint on the part of the director so that an almost protective layer keeps the characters from the subjectively arbitrary and possibly inaccurate interpretations and assumptions enacted by the camera. With Jia, that layer of protection and respect is built through a largely minimalist and distant aesthetic, in which panaches of expressionist mise-en-scène and manipulative editing are forbidden. Indicative of a high level of consciousness about the power of the (moving) image and the cinematic apparatus, Jia’s commitment to the surface of phenomenon resists meaning production through facile narrativisation. He intends to capture a moving image not as a fully directed and neatly snapped moment, but as the full amount and account of something coming into being. What Seymour Chatman has observed about the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni – that it is a process of ‘rendering the surface’ – is applicable to the work of this young Chinese director.19 For them, the creation of a shot is largely a process of transformation that a piece of time and space undergoes from original to representational, from real to cinematic and from unaware to historical.   In Jia’s films, the concept of surface summarises his theoretical stance toward cinematic representation and his aesthetic approach to reality. It embodies a historical vision that is invested in the diversity and richness of each individual existence and unique identity. As the apparent top layer of an entity that, in fact, contains a depth with multiple levels, formations and structures, the surface is most readily found in manifest textures, such as a face, a wall, a landscape, a piece of clothing or a hairstyle, all of which have a plastic quality and are capable of bearing physical traces of change. The placement of such ‘superficial’ elements, because of their capacity to physically evidence the passing of time or the conflation of different moments, allows temporal concepts like memory and history to be communicated in a spatial or architectonic manner.   For example, there are two memory-ridden moments in Xiao Wu that highlight a wall outside the home of Xiao Yong – Xiao Wu’s friend who also used to be a pickpocket, but now is successfully reinventing himself as a businessman (Figures 3.3 and 3.4).   As a figuration of the opportunistic economic upstart being promoted all over the reform-era China, Xiao Yong functions as Xiao Wu’s contrasting counterpart, because, unlike Xiao Wu, in his moving forward to catch the boom he does not hesitate to cast friendships and memories behind. The wall makes its first prominent appearance in the scene where Xiao Yong rejects a friend’s suggestion that

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Figure 3.3  Xiao Wu (dir. Jia Zhangke, 1998): Xiao Yong looks at the writing on the wall

Figure 3.4  Xiao Wu: Xiao Wu looks at the writing on the wall

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106  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema he should invite Xiao Wu to his wedding banquet. Visibly pissed and uncomfortable, Xiao Yong declares that he has no desire of Xiao Wu’s presence to remind the guests of his inglorious past as once a pickpocket. He says this standing in front of a wall that bears a number of short black horizontal lines, the names ‘Yong’ and ‘Wu’ and year marks, such as 1982 and 1987 – obviously indicators of the two friends’ changing heights over the years of growing up together. After the phone call, he glimpses at the wall, sighs, touches it and exits the frame. The camera remains static on the wall for six seconds, allowing this past-evidencing architectural surface to exude a quiet comment on the changing of time and heart.   The wall’s significance as their shared memory is further highlighted in a second appearance, in which it receives the unspoken emotion, this time of Xiao Wu, about the lost past. In a single mobile long take lasting forty-five seconds, the camera, here specifically embodying the point of view of Xiao Wu, arrives and stops in front of Xiao Yong’s home. It looks into the empty courtyard and turns left to dwell upon the same wall. After a few seconds, Xiao Wu enters the frame and continues the act of looking. Like Xiao Yong has done earlier, he touches the wall where it is marked, obviously remembering the past as well. His surmise of the wall lasts for about eleven seconds before he turns away, leaving without checking if Xiao Yong is actually at home. Unlike Xiao Yong, who puts the past behind him in a selfish pursuit of richness and happiness, Xiao Wu makes a different decision. The next few scenes show him accomplishing another job in order to afford a wedding gift for Xiao Yong.   In a film composed largely in the present tense, as the episodes of Xiao Wu’s life unfold in a sequential chronological order, this wall bearing traces of the past is the only place where the past figures itself and claims its presence in the present. Except for this wall, which is concrete proof of the shared past of Xiao Wu and Xiao Yong, very little information is provided as to the two characters’ personal histories. We do not know, for example, how they grew up, how they became thieves and how they arrived where they are today. Alongside their similar bodily gesture of touching the wall and acknowledging their common connection, the two characters nevertheless react differently to this interpellation from the past. Xiao Yong casts it behind him and moves forward, whereas Xiao Wu, being too much of a romantic, stays loyal to friendship, pickpocketing in order to be able to afford a wedding gift and eventually getting himself caught. The wall is not only a bearer of traces of the past, but also a surface enabling those traces to hold a visible presence in the present. In this sense, the surface, being the top layer of things, evokes depth and time. It is both the result and figuration of hidden or forgotten experiential layers, emotional depths and individual temporalities.   In his discussion of the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, Seymour Chatman offers an inspiring insight that the spaces and objects in the mise-en-scène have a metonymic rather than metaphoric relationship to the characters. Chatman calls our attention to the setting as the characters’ ‘objective correlative’, whose various components ‘remain stubbornly themselves’, while serving as ‘metonymic signs’ of the ‘inner life’ of the character.20 By replacing the metaphor

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Surface and Edge  107 possibly implied in Antonioni’s cinematic rhetoric with the concept of metonymy, Chatman seems to argue that a more organic (and equal) relationship exists between character and environment in Antonioni’s predominant emphasis on the visual image. The visible environment, complete with places and objects, is not a second-order metaphoric commentary on the interior state of the human character, such as in, say, German Expressionism. Rather, these physical things are imaged as ‘how they are’ in life in the spirit of a documentary realism.21 Character and environment coexist and relate to each other objectively, but not without feelings, suggestions and meanings.   In Jia’s Platform, walls serve as a perfect objective correlative for the central character Cui Mingliang, who, although dreaming of the outside and trying to wander around, does not get to go beyond the limits of his small town life, physically or spiritually. Besides being indexes of chronological change, such as bearing revolutionary slogans and then commercial logos and helping frame the historical space in which Cui and his friends exist, walls appear as an objective witness to, or even as a symbolic participant in, Cui’s personal life. When he tries to get a confession from Yin Ruijuan about her honest feelings toward him, their date takes place on top of an ancient citadel wall. The architectural structure of the walled location helps divide onscreen and offscreen spaces, in which they take turns to appear, disappear and reappear, while engaging in an oblique but intimate communication. Visually and realistically blocked (the latter as a result of disapproval from Yin’s father), the romance of the two never manages to truly take flight, as at the end even the marriage is suggested as a compromise between dream and reality. Along with such narrative-oriented functions of the city wall, the wall as a trope in the film points to the concretely lived quality of the boundary between a number of distinct or even oppositional concepts: inside and outside, small town and big city, here and faraway, past and present, cinema and reality, representation and history.   Not only is Chatman’s observation of Antonioni applicable to the relationship between character and environment in the cinema of Jia Zhangke, it is also particularly inspiring for my current discussion of the wall as a revealing surface (or surfacing) of the characters’ past. Etymologically, the word ‘surface’ originated from French in the early seventeenth century, referring to the ‘outermost boundary of anything’ and the fine part just above the ‘face’. Here, it seems perfectly fitting that we attach to the wall, on top of its metonymical relationship to the character, a synecdochical quality in relation to history – the latter might be defined as an amount of time and experience that has accumulated and forms a thick and deeply-structured interior right beneath the surface of the current moment. The wall in Xiao Wu not only metonymically coexists with the characters as a physical register of their shared past, it also qualifies as an integral part of that larger body of bygone time in which all of them – the characters as well as the wall – share an existence.   Apart from bearing traces of story time that the characters have lived, this synecdochical aspect of the wall as a textual surface acquires an even more present and real time quality in Platform. In a scene in which Cui Mingliang comes out

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108  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema of the performance troupe’s office as well as rehearsal hall – a blue-greyish brick house – into a snow-covered courtyard, we are provided with a clear view of the side wall of the house in a medium shot (Figure 3.5). Chalked on this wall are names, characters and letters that include typical graffiti markings, such as the title of a pop song (‘Love in Late Autumn’ from the eighties by the Hong Kong pop singer Alan Tan), ‘jerk’ (sb) and the words ‘Down with’ (or ‘Beat to death’, dasi) – the last being a common sight in the denunciatory big-character posters during the Cultural Revolution. Surprisingly, among these we also see the title of the film Platform, as well as the name of the director, Jia Zhangke.

Figure 3.5  Platform: Non-diegetic writing on the wall   The significance of this non-diegetic inscription needs to be assessed in the context of Platform’s overall narrative trajectory. As a film that largely obeys a chronological order in presenting the temporal progress of the characters’ lives, Platform chooses to fixate its narrative focus on Cui Mingliang and let his fellow troupe members (particularly Zhang Jun, Zhong Ping and Cui’s romantic interest, Yin Ruijuan) appear, disappear and reappear without significantly diverging from the progression of the main story line. Zhang Jun takes a trip to Guangzhou and re-emerges with sunglasses, bell-bottoms and a portable tape recorder spewing out music from the Taiwanese pop singer Zhang Di. Zhong Ping disappears in 1985 without leaving a word or reconnecting again until the end of the film. Yin Ruijuan breaks from the troupe after it becomes privatised and works as a civil official in the tax bureau, seemingly not in touch with any of them until toward the end of the film, when she and Cui reunite and, illustrated by only one more shot of them together, are already married with a toddler boy. Despite the ellipses thus created, the narrative of Platform remains largely linear with its story time communicated by two temporal principles: the chronological progress of the decade of the eighties and the visual synchronicity registered

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Surface and Edge  109 in ‘superficial’ signs, including changes in the troupe’s performance programme and in the characters’ costumes and hairstyles, such as Cui’s combination of home-made bell-bottoms with a Mao jacket.22 Although suggesting temporal overlaps, the visual synchronicity thus presented is contained within the overall chronological story time, because it refers to the small town youth’s state of living in an out-of-fashion present, while trying to catch up with the outside and the new – a desire that is itself chronological, rather than nostalgic and anachronistic in nature.23   The writing on the brick wall, however, is of a different order. By figuring the movie title and the director’s name, this textual surface wedges real time into the chronological order of the film’s story time. It transports the viewer beyond the fictional life world of Cui Mingliang in the eighties to the current moment when Platform is being made and then watched. Foregrounded in the shot on the left side of the frame, this metanarrative surface of a wall presents a sort of caption for the scene in the yard – seen on the right side of the same frame in a rather long shot – not as part of a self-contained and self-sufficient diegetic world, but as undergoing a conflated process of becoming both moving image (for the film as text) and historical document (for the making of the film). In this sense, the wall fulfills a metonymic function, because it, as part of the troupe’s rehearsal facilities, has undergone the passage of (story) time in the film and qualifies as a spatial correlate of the characters. Bearing the title of the current film and the name of the director, it also harkens to the real time of the film’s production (and exhibition) and thus strikes a synecdochic note, because it evokes a larger and fuller historical world from where comes both of these fictional, as well as non-fictional, dimensions of Platform.

Superficial Space: Debris, Wanderers and Vehicles As a memory-ridden surface and a lived boundary between past and present, the wall is susceptible to erasure and forgetting – a reality pervasive in contemporary China as countless demolitions and constructions quickly change the nation’s landscape and in the process render previously standing walls and buildings merely debris to be cleared away. It is no surprise that debris – as a surface erased of its history – features as another important trope in Jia’s cinema. Having a prominent presence in Xiao Wu, Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao, 2002) and Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006), debris is a figuration of personal life and private time being surfaced, flattened and erased. In Xiao Wu, for example, the city of Fenyang is shown to undergo demolition, as a result of which Xiao Yu’s friend (also his money launderer) has to move his small shop elsewhere. Throughout the film, Xiao Wu never seems to have a residence of his own and exists instead as a wanderer who either is out on the street or visits others. He is not welcome in real homes, whether that of his friend Xiao Yong or that of his parents: Xiao Yong is forced to receive him and feels very uncomfortable; Xiao Wu’s own father ends up throwing him out of the house during his visit. The few moments Xiao Wu comes close to an intimate relationship are spent with Meimei, a nightclub

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110  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema girl who comes from elsewhere and is also homeless. The places where they hang out together are all temporary – for example, a karaoke lounge, Meimei’s rented dorm room and the city’s streets full of busy traffic and demolition debris. None of these places will last, just as the human figures populating and traversing them only occupy them for a limited period of time before they go somewhere else. As a wandering figure in a fast-changing landscape, Xiao Wu seems to live a ‘superficial’ existence on the surface of a landscape whose mass of history is on the verge of being turned into demolition debris before being completely erased. Refusing to put the past behind him and change with the times as Xiao Yong does, Xiao Wu is like a mobile, wandering and isolated wall still committed to the past and holding dearly to values such as friendship, loyalty and promises, which seem no longer in fashion. In this sense, his return of the gaze at the gawking crowd at the end of the film Xiao Wu is also comparable to the implied point of view of the wall, where it seems to silently comment on Xiao Yong’s betrayal of friendship. Both returned gazes issue from a subjectively invested position committed to a disappearing past and silently disagreeing with a present that is quickly changing and forgetting.   With walls demolished and windows emptied to leave gaping frames, the debris gives form to a new landscape of sheer surface in which familiar coordinates are abolished and the previous background becomes foreshortened as a new visual highlight. On such a tabula rasa, Jia’s characters walk, search and pause. A place of debris forces people to move on and not stay, rendering yet another superficial relationship between space and figure. If the character’s relationship to the debris in the foreground is mobile and temporary, their relationship to the far background – often representing development and fulfillment through a glittering prospect of large-scale constructions, such as city lights, a newly built bridge or a new town with new buildings, an exemplar image of which opens the film The World (Shijie, dir. Jia Zhangke, 2004) – is marked by decorative irrelevance and superficiality.   A surface also suggests physical and bodily dimensions with its immediate evocations of face and skin. Thus, it is also possible to understand the human figure – certainly an element of central importance to Jia’s cinema – as a spatial construct on a smaller scale that forms a parallel, as well as a contrast, to the landscape on which it moves. In this sense, it is perhaps no accident that, despite his propensity for a static camera, Jia tends to populate his cinematic world with highly mobile characters, even if they tend to return to where they began. Like Xiao Wu, almost all of Jia’s protagonists seem to either have no family or are far away from home. The few that do seem to have such a formal relationship, such as the wife-searching husband and the husband-searching wife in Still Life, so far only have it in long absence. Their existence is characterised by an overall rootlessness in a place that provides no supporting ground, because the place is itself either undergoing drastic change or is simply a groundless fake construction, such as the theme park that provides the main setting for The World. Xiao Wu, Cui Mingliang, the two young guys in Unknown Pleasures, the temporary employees in the World Park in The World and the two visitors to the Three Gorges Dam area in Still Life – all these figures roam around on a fast-changing

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Surface and Edge  111 (or already changed) landscape that neither belongs to them nor delivers them to a different and better place in life.   Visually, Jia accentuates this superficial relationship between figure and place through mise-en-scène and shot composition. In The World, human figures such as the tourists are arranged to take pictures in front of the miniature architectural landmarks in the World Park, in order to set off the latter’s ridiculously unreal and small size. Two tourists even pretend to push at a miniature Leaning Tower of Pisa, in order to strike a pose for their cameras. In Still Life, the overall lack of directional action of the two protagonists – both seemingly lost in the town of Fengjie near the Three Gorges Dam – communicates a sense of temporariness and superficiality in their relationship to the much-debated grandiose project. They visit this space in order to wrap up an old score before moving on (and away from this place); therefore, the grandly lit new bridge proves just as irrelevant to the woman (Zhao Tao) as the buildings in the distance are to the man (Han Sanming). A straightforward two-plane composition characterises a number of shots, featuring the protagonists in the foreground and landscapes of development (including demolition, as well as construction) in the background, often with the former looking at the latter and then turning around to tend to his or her own business of little significance, such as hanging washed clothes. Figure and landscape coexist, the former roaming on the surface of the latter and leaving it eventually, the latter reducible to an image of capital as the local Kuimen Gorge seen on the five-yuan RMB money bill (Figure 3.6).

Figure 3.6  Still Life (dir. Jia Zhangke, 2006): Superficial relationship between figure and place   Much like the various means of transportation featured in Jia’s films that do not lead to the arrival at a rewarding and meaningful destination justifying the journeys taken in its name, figure and landscape are characterised by a relation

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112  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema that is mutually objective and superficial, a mobility that remains still and local, a change that appears stagnant and irrelevant, an accomplishment that is balanced by loss, a home that is erased and turned strange, a loved someone who becomes a stranger and a new beginning that can only truly start not here but elsewhere. Whether in Paris or Beijing, life in the metropolis proves inaccessible for the aspiring young couple in The World who are found unconscious from a gas leak in a loaned room. The two protagonists in Still Life are outsiders to the region of the Three Gorges Dam where they have at first lost their love and now they need to leave again, in order to live a life truly relevant to themselves.  Although Platform does not feature scenes of demolition and erasure as it is set in the eighties, the wandering existence of Cui Mingliang and the performance troupe illustrates the thematic duos of surface/history, character/place and present/past in a symbolic and temporal direction. Cui eventually returns to his hometown and settles down to an apparently succumbed life, but his itinerary has until that point strived to be mobile and go beyond the limits of the local represented by the surrounding city walls. By travelling from one place to another, from one programme to another, from one fashion to another, Cui tries to bring quality change to his existence. The sadness lies in the fact that his itinerary and that of the imaginary train – the symbol of national-scale modernisation and mainstream historical breakthrough – do not cross. In the scene in which a train finally figures for him and his friends, it coincides with the breakdown of their truck in the midst of a desolate wasteland with no vegetation at all – another symbolically abstract but rich tabula rasa. There, while listening to the title song ‘Platform’ (Zhang Xing, 1987), a popular tune about unrequited longing and endless waiting, they hear a train coming in the distance. They have to run across a vast expanse of bare ground before finally climbing onto a bridge, only to see that the train has already passed them. Implied in the unilateral status of their desiring gaze that is matched with no reverse shot answering their point of view, the train disappears in the offscreen space in a direction that remains unknown and unreachable for them. The train, as a means of transportation that covers vast distances over the surface of the earth, operates in a different historical temporality than that of Cui Mingliang’s life. Imagined in a whistle, performed in a skit and chased across a barren wasteland, the train remains out of reach for Cui, as it runs not only to too distant a place, but also in a sense of time and history that is too national, too official and too mainstream to be immediately caring or relevant to his life (Figure 3.7).   Indeed, the various vehicles or means of transportation featured in Jia’s films – such as the bus in Xiao Wu, the motorcycle that keeps breaking down (including at the last minute) in Unknown Pleasures and the tram car that circulates within the fake international space in the World Park in The World – all these modern machines of mobility do not deliver the characters to somewhere else that is significantly better or different. Rather, they at best keep the characters at a mobile stillness, a frustrating experience of ‘restriction and entrapment’ that confronts the two teenagers in Unknown Pleasures.24 Not even able to ride their motorcycles into an offscreen space (as Tonglin Lin observes), they and many

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Surface and Edge  113

Figure 3.7  Platform: Ending scene – superficial relationship between character (a slouching Cui Mingliang) and history (the world outside hometown) other characters of Jia Zhangke are locked within a locale that is an obscure ripple and an inconsequential after-thought of large-scale change issuing from a faraway centre. Their own space is often a small town or an equivalent marginal locale, the latter best exemplified by the World Park outside Beijing featured in The World. Much like the characters’ poor copy of metropolitan fashion and performance style, this marginal space of theirs is characterised by imitational aspiration, pathetic pastiche and depressing failure. Neither the space nor the characters are able to go beyond what they are and become elevated to what they try to emulate. Within this space that accommodates the existences and dreams of the marginal characters, the various means of transportation, like the walls that bear witness to passing time and lived experience, are yet another set of metonymic as well as synecdochic objective correlatives of the characters. They coexist and together give form to a figuration of spatial marginality and historical insignificance that are the central themes of Jia Zhangke’s cinema. That comparably marginal and irrelevant status of character and place in relation to the national, the mainstream and the official tempo-space of postsocialist China is the reason why the featured means of transportation found within these locales invariably fail to deliver the characters to a world that is more promising and fulfilling. These means of transportation operate within a local space and even there, as demonstrated by the motorcycle in Still Life that takes Han Sanming to a destination no longer existent on the surface of the earth because it is submerged in water, they prove as futile as the space they operate in.25   Character, vehicle and place, these three correlatives in the cinema of Jia Zhangke as a whole evoke a personal, local and alternative temporality contrasting with the sweeping progress eulogised in official history. Their relationship to the

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114  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema latter is marginal, inconsequential and superficial. In this sense, it is also interesting to see that the few uses of animation and special effects in Jia’s cinema all communicate fantasies that either enable the characters to assume supernatural powers and fly beyond their immediate environment (for example, The World) or imagine similar transcendental transportation via a UFO, an abandoned-towerturned-rocket or a tightrope walker (for example, Still Life). It is still largely open to question if such fantasies will stop at the level of, as Yingjin Zhang interprets the animated flight in The World, ‘a chilling metaphor for the freedom denied to low-income migrant workers in Beijing’, or whether they might, more hopefully, become the reality in future films where such wanderers can break away from this superficial relationship to postsocialist reality for a more solid self-positioning in the contemporary world.26

Lou Ye: Dwelling on the Edge of the Camera Jia Zhangke stays staunchly on the surface of phenomena and insists on a rigorously nonintrusive but conscious subject position in relating to the world in front of his camera – a world that is cinematic and historical, representational and real. On his part, Lou Ye chooses strategies that seem to lie at the direct opposite end from Jia’s works. Heavy reliance on a handheld camera, sometimes coupled with first person voice-over, communicates a straightforwardly subjective vision that vacillates between the point of view of a particular character and that of a more ambiguous entity. Frequent use of jump cuts, a saturated colour palette, expressionist low-key lighting and the incorporation of documentary footage in the midst of fictional narrative – all these stylistic references to canonical precedents such as the French New Wave, film noir and Alfred Hitchcock call attention to the film form of Lou’s cinema. While the richness of this topic is worth a much fuller discussion than can be provided here, in the context of this discussion I particularly want to focus on Lou’s characteristic crafting of cinematic subjectivities that, like Jia, plays with the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, but does so in a completely different and high-profile manner, hence evidencing the creative vigour of the Forsaken Generation and enriching our understanding of their related yet varied interventions in historical thinking through the moving image.   Apart from the first person voice-over, such as that featured in Suzhou River (Suzhou he, 1998) and Summer Palace (Yiheyuan, 2006), Lou Ye employs a highly mobile handheld camera to visibly introduce a subjective vision of the cinematic as well as phenomenal world contained in his films. Suzhou River begins with documentary footage that the director captured with a camcorder during the early stages of conceptualising the film.27 While fast-paced editing plus jump cuts puts together a cubist impression of life on the Suzhou River, an infamous neighbourhood in a neglected corner of Shanghai, a first person voice-over wonders about the possible tales of the real people seen on the river and gradually leads us into the narrative of the film. The identity of this voice-over is not all that clear as it traverses from the perspective of the director Lou Ye to that of another

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Surface and Edge  115 director within the diegesis: a videographer who reveals himself to be a character in the unfolding narrative. ‘I’, the videographer, is in a relationship with Meimei (Zhou Xun), a young woman who dresses as a mermaid and performs a fantastic underwater dance in a tank placed in a nightclub. Meimei often disappears and reappears in his life with little explanation. Waiting for her in front of his apartment window, the videographer sees a motorcyclist and imagines a tale of doomed love for him: that of Mada and Mudan.28  Throughout Suzhou River, the narrating videographer never appears in front of the camera except with a small part of his body, such as when he holds Meimei’s face in his hands or when he drinks vodka after she leaves. We see most of Meimei’s life from this specific and limited perspective. In contrast, the story of Mada and Mudan has a more conventional visual presentation in which the camera is attached to the unlimited perspective of an omniscient storyteller that the voice-over of the videographer embodies. On top of that, there is the ambiguity of the voice-over, particularly in the documentary footage at the beginning of the film: it is the voice of Lou Ye himself that we hear. Although all emitting from the voice of the videographer we know as ‘I’, the subject positions available to the spectator are split and changeable between a few options: as the videographer, as the director and as the camera itself.29 The resulting dynamic is a constant shuttle between narration and camera, fiction and non-fiction, belief and belying.30 Like Ma Xiaojun who unveils the fissures in his own memory and story in In the Heat of the Sun, the ‘I’ in Suzhou River also bares the wilful and unsure fictionalisation of his tale. Conceptualising loudly the story of Mada and Mudan, the voice-over says: I can spin a yarn like that too . . . maybe . . . and then, and then . . . perhaps, perhaps . . . and then . . . I don’t know how to continue this story. Maybe it should end here. However, maybe Mada can continue the story by himself . . . Lou Ye’s playing with such a postmodernist form of storytelling and multiple subject positions does not merely stop at the level of narrative innovation. It points to the permeability of what divides fiction and non-fiction, story and storytelling, content and form, and results in a heightened consciousness of the present inflected by the past and of history as a multilayered narrative.   On that note, it is significant that Suzhou River as a self-conscious fictional narrative incorporates documentary footage – a choice that Lou Ye made again in his later films, such as Purple Butterfly and Summer Palace. During the mesmerising opening sequence, composed of a string of subjective shots browsing the river, boats, people and the skeletal buildings that are being demolished to make way for a more modern Shanghai, the narrator contemplates the baggage of history embodied in this landscape: ‘A century’s worth of legends, stories, memories, and all the garbage, are stacked here, making it the filthiest river.’ The browsing camera, demonstrating a highly intentional and subjective attitude with the many zoom-in movements and perfunctorily canted framing, functions like a mnemonic connoisseur of sorts who collects and documents fragments of river life here and incorporates them into fiction. The volatile transferability between

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116  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema the ‘fictional’ Mudan and the ‘real’ Meimei within the diegetic world of the film becomes a metaphor for the relationship between the camera as a fantastic apparatus and the camera as a reality recorder. Committed to a conscious experience of both dimensions, Lou Ye resorts to the said narrative as well as cinematographic strategies, in order to create an actively epistemological experience for the viewer about the mutual imbrications of fiction and non-fiction.   When mapped onto subject matter taken from a real historical past, such as the Sino-Japanese War, this innovative play with the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction – again charged with the acute critical vision of a felt subjectivity – manifests itself as a powerful way of invoking the nature of historical representation as an inter-text composed of fact and imagination. Set in a Republican China inflicted by WWII, Purple Butterfly (2003) tells an intricate story of wartime romance and treachery. Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) and Itami (Toru Nakamura) are lovers in the late 1920s before Itami leaves Manchuria for Japan. Years later after the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) started, they meet again in Shanghai, whence Ding Hui has become a Resistance fighter and Itami is working for the Japanese secret intelligence. During a mission that goes astray, the bullets of Ding Hui’s group inadvertently kill the girlfriend of Situ (Liu Ye), an ordinary white-collar employee. Situ is also mistaken for having connections with an enemy political group. Gradually, Situ becomes unwillingly involved in the midst of wartime politics, harassed and abused by both the Resistance and Japanese forces. He starts seeking revenge for himself and his lost love. At the end of the film, all three are killed in a melee of clashing schemes and bullets.

Figure 3.8  Purple Butterfly (dir. Lou Ye, 2003): Situ – an innocent sidekick character receives a formal, frontal introduction

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Surface and Edge  117   Formal features, such as a saturated colour palette, extremely low-key lighting, the story of Situ as an anti-hero falling into the spiked nest of a dangerous situation, the prevalent environmental element of rain and a visual effect of blocked access to the characters as they tend to be placed between props and overlays, all evidence references to film noir, Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurosawa, revered traditions known for their extreme effectiveness in constructing cinematic drama. However, if these stylistic choices prove perfect for a noir story about romance and treachery, Lou’s profuse employment of handheld camera and jump cuts might be quite unusual for a film set in the historical past, because such highly subjective and self-conscious strategies communicate a present and immediate temporality, unless the past is intended to be felt as taking place now.   This leads us to a more careful consideration of the historical vision embodied in Lou Ye’s subjective camera. First of all, like the mysterious demented fool in In the Heat of the Sun, the character Situ is also a very peculiar construction. Instead of being ‘randomly’ picked up by the camera like many other of Lou’s characters, Situ is rather formally introduced into the story by a close-up shot showing him meticulously combing his well-oiled hair, his face turned towards us in a mirror (Figure 3.8). This emphatic treatment subtly suggests his central role in the film. Originally entitled The Innocent, Purple Butterfly is really about Situ and what he stands for. Situ is apparently a sidekick commoner character that has nothing to do with the assassination, resistance or even the war. He is content to have a small private space of his own with his love, a pretty telephone operator, in a cozy little room beyond the rain that seems to be following him everywhere he shows up. Due to sheer coincidence, Situ becomes involved in the espionage battle between the Japanese and the Resistance assassination group, because he happens to take the wrong coat when getting off a train. The coat contains confidential information that both the Japanese and the Resistance force want. His girlfriend dies from stray bullets when a fight breaks out on the platform when his train arrives. Situ is helplessly sucked into the forces of wider (inter)national history, like the butterfly that happens to fall on his lamp and gets trapped and dies in a glass bottle. Situ finally goes crazy under the burden of big history. He plans to seek revenge for the death of his love. He shoots at and kills both sides: Ding Hui and Itami, woman and man, resistance fighter and invader, Chinese and Japanese. In Situ’s personal scenario, there is no longer an absolute division between right and wrong, winner and loser. What remains is an individual being crushed and trying to fight back against the unbearable burden of history.   The extremely mobile vision of a handheld camera does not simply communicate the impression of being a witness to events that take place in the past; rather, it functions as a witness to a plot unfolding in the present. In fact, Purple Butterfly begins in a manner similar to the moment in Suzhou River when the narrating videographer starts imagining a story about Mada and Mudan. In Suzhou River, the videographer looks out of his apartment window at a busy street. As his voice says ‘I can spin a yarn like that too’, the camera moves across the street, focuses on a motorcyclist (Mada), then focuses on a young girl (Mudan), assumes connections between them and begins its story. In Purple Butterfly, the

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118  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema camera scans the visual field, almost a bit lost in the swiftness at which it moves. It looks at rails, workers and smoke, which suggest a factory space, and then picks up Itami, a young Japanese worker who is Ding Hui’s lover and years later will become her enemy. Ding Hui is introduced in a similar manner, preceded by shots of her surroundings. Such a spatial introduction eschews the conventional establishing shot that reveals a cinematic space in its entirety before dissecting it into parts and zooming in to the sector where a central character is placed. Instead, the handheld camera introduces a space that seems highly confusing and fragmented. The picking up of a character from such a space has a degree of randomness, as any human figure in this space seems to have the potential to become the narrative focus.   Such a suggestive parallel between story characters and human figures in the visual field of the movie camera arrives at an emphatic finale, when the film ends with archival footage of the Japanese bombing of Shanghai. A montage of the wartime city composed of scenes of air raids, ground battle and destruction, planes, vehicles, army and crowds concludes with one historical detail: a wounded man lies in the arms of a woman seated on the debris, both of whom are kind of facing the camera as if they were the historical prototypes of the doomed lovers in the narrative of Purple Butterfly (Figure 3.9). In a symbolic way, fictional characters find possible historical counterparts in the archival footage. The vision embodied in Lou Ye’s camera looking for characters and stories overlaps with that of the camera documenting history as it was taking place.

Figure 3.9  Purple Butterfly: An image of doomed lovers in archival footage

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Surface and Edge  119   Besides the handheld camera, Lou Ye also innovatively uses long takes and jump cuts – two seemingly opposite strategies – to play with cinematic time. One outstanding example found in Purple Butterfly directly precedes the early climactic scene of firing and melee at the railway station, where the private life of Situ collides with an (inter)national political situation for the first time. A handheld camera follows Situ’s girlfriend walking on the platform until she stops, and then it continues to move and pick up figures in the far background that are walking on the other side of the railway, crossing the connecting bridge and descending a staircase onto the platform. These are Ding Hui and her fellow assassins. The significance of this long take is not clear until almost the end of the film when, after all the characters are killed and before the concluding archival footage sequence begins, the camera presents another mobile long take in a curious flashback. The camera follows Ding Hui and her comrade as they come out of a building and walk in the street against a busy traffic of buses and student demonstrators. They are (or were) on their way to the mission at the railway station that the earlier long take presents. In this flashback, as the camera shows Ding Hui stepping out into the street, it captures in the foreground a figure on a bus who is none other than Situ’s girlfriend. As we have already learned from the film, she is (or was) on her way to the railway station to meet with Situ and she is (or was) about to be killed there by the stray bullets. The handheld camera, although attached to no specific character in the film, exercises a well-intended vision that coordinates with the space and figures and creates a subdued yet intense feeling of drama. The original apparent irrelevance of the life of Situ to that of Ding Hui is dissolved in such long takes, suggesting the continuity and transferability between national politics and personal fate. When further joined by the sequence of wartime archival footage, Lou Ye’s cinematic vision is confirmed as a subtle, historical one that registers and contemplates the volatile boundary between fiction and history, as well as between the cinematic and the real.   On that account, the director’s ample use of jump cuts – an editing technique known for its interruption and compression of a continuous take by way of removing a number of frames from that take – need also be assessed in the light of the current consideration of the relationship between aesthetic style and historical vision. Like in Suzhou River, jump cuts, often combined with close-up or medium close shots, are frequently used in Purple Butterfly to present characters and spaces. A prominent example can be found in the sequence where Ding Hui sees her anti-Japanese brother being killed by a Japanese terrorist (Figures 3.10, 3.11, 3.12 and 3.13). Dwelling closely on her face, the film strings together jump-cut moments of her emotional reaction to this trauma – an experience that directly informs her Resistance activities later. Apart from an obvious effectiveness in communicating emotions by way of repetition with variation, the jump cuts also contribute to the creation of a particular temporal sense – the present tense, in particular – that agrees with the director’s vision of time and history. When applied to a story set in a past that is real (for example, the SinoJapanese War) rather than legendary or mythical, this stylistic choice, famous

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120  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

Figure 3.10  Purple Butterfly: Jump cuts on Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) [i]

Figure 3.11  Purple Butterfly: Jump cuts on Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) [ii]

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Surface and Edge  121

Figure 3.12  Purple Butterfly: Jump cuts on Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) [iii]

Figure 3.13  Purple Butterfly: Jump cuts on Ding Hui (Zhang Ziyi) [iv]

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122  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema for its French New Wave connection when enthusiastic young directors such as Jean-Luc Godard were eager to communicate a sense of contemporary life as they experienced it in post-war France of the late fifties and early sixties, seems to be a rather peculiar decision, because of the apparent clash between a sense of the historical past predicated by the story and a sense of the immediate present implied by the jumpy style. The reason behind this unusual and highly daring choice of Lou Ye, I believe, can be located in his unique vision of the function and potential of the movie camera.   Specifically, a highly self-conscious technique like jump cuts tends to call attention – both that of the filmmaker as well as of the viewer – to the constructedness of this film grammar and allows one to experience the moving image thus presented as a series of immediate happenings. More than just a fictional character who feels traumatised by the killing of her sibling in front of her eyes, Ding Hui, played by the then rising international movie star Zhang Ziyi, because of her leading role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (dir. Ang Lee, 2001), is seen in a series of close-ups, her expression in each only slightly different from that in the adjoining shot. The effect is a cubist moving image portrait of the character whose facial minutiae and multiplicity subtly overshadows her narrative function. What becomes foregrounded in such a use of jump cuts is an awareness of the sequence as also a documentary of the fact and act of filming, as well as the actor’s performance. Fragments of different takes are put together to create a composite picture of not only Ding Hui’s emotional reaction, but also Zhang Ziyi’s laboured performance. Together with the long takes and handheld camera, the jump cut as yet another peculiar stylistic choice not only signifies the director’s homage to specific film traditions, but also embodies his vision of the concept of cinema or the act of filmmaking as a technology capable of historical interventions.   ‘My camera doesn’t lie’ – this famous statement selected as the slogan of the Sixth Generation actually comes from Suzhou River, in which the videographer states that his camera is to show everything it captures, whether his client likes it or not.31 As the originator of this statement, Lou Ye demonstrates an impressive persistence in practising this metanarrative realism. Insisting on a highly self-conscious cinematic style, all of his films tend to highlight the suture line between fiction and non-fiction and challenge the spectator’s illusionistic immersion in a more conventional narrative film. In Summer Palace, Lou’s scandalously daring picture set around the democratic student movement of 1989 that got him punished and banned from making films for five years by the Chinese Government, he even allows the cast shadow of the movie camera to stay in a tracking shot in which the film’s protagonists are walking on the streets of Beijing at night after participating in the demonstrations. They are still excited from what happened during the day and are singing while walking. However, the non-diegetic shadow of the running movie camera tends to pull the viewer out of fictional immersion and makes him aware of the current scene as a fabrication. Lou Ye’s goal here is certainly not to deny the historical factuality of the events of spring 1989. Speaking of his recent film Love and Bruises (Hua, 2011), he makes an appositional comment in an interview:

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Surface and Edge  123 Cinema is like documentary. I should document all the things that have taken place on the scene. Nobody can control what might or might not happen during the filming of a scene; I want to document that sense of [spontaneity and unpredictability].32 When asked about a few apparent incidents that filmmakers habitually avoid or correct, such as out-of-focus shots (and, certainly, the camera’s cast shadow as well), Lou replies that being out of focus is itself part of film language. Obviously, he is less interested in constructing a cinematic world in which everything is under seamless control. Instead, he wishes to explore the boundary between zero control and the intention of the creators, such as the director and the D. P., intending to capture the ‘real’ (or real-time) state of mind of the actors who ideally would have forgotten about the presence of the camera during shooting – a perfect explication of what he achieves in the jump cuts in Purple Butterfly, which show the emotional state of Ding Hui (or the state of mind impregnated in the acting of Zhang Ziyi).33 While it might be too much (or too simplistic) of a stretch to argue that Lou Ye’s films are accountable as documentaries about the process of his narrative filmmaking, his various strategies of baring the suture lines between the cinematic and the real in both temporal and spatial terms enable his cinema to embody important strategies and potentials of the moving image as critical interventions in historical thinking in the contemporary era.

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Chapter 4 Personal Documentary

Personal Documentary From 1949 until the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late seventies, documentary filmmaking in the People’s Republic of China was mostly under absolute state control in the service of socialist ideology, as the country’s social life during this period was largely equalised with state-led political life.1 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 official, 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 people.2 Photographic evidence of this kind of documentary alignment of state ideology and the public’s reception can be located in the published album of Li Zhensheng, a journalist who took and secretly preserved photographs of the Cultural Revolution.3 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. The audience was made up of students, obviously Red Guards, and they shouted ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ each time Mao’s image appeared on the screen.4 Exemplified by the direct connection between Mao’s waving hand onscreen and the avid faces and applauding hands of the students looking up at the screen, Li’s photographic memory effectively summarises the relationship between official documentary and its audience in Cultural Revolution China. The ideological hailing and interpellation that Western film 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 filmmaking, while mainly practiced within the official 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 reflection that grew out of a desire to understand the recent trauma of the Cultural

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Personal Documentary  125 Revolution and which resulted in the freshly resumed contact with international and particularly Western culture – classic as well as contemporary – these new documentaries of the eighties, named zhuanti pian (special-topic film), often deal with the topic of history. Examples are TV documentary series on the history of the Communist Red Army’s Long March, the fifty-year history of the People’s Republic of China, histories of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River and biographies of Mao Zedong and other major founding figures of the People’s Republic of China. Commonly equipped with a pre-written script that needed to be approved before filming 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, filmed and edited. Their 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), significantly 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), The City of Huizhou (Huizhou), Early Merchants from Anhui (Huishang) and Early Merchants from Shanxi (Jinshang). Apart from featuring the staple characteristics of the eighties’ special-topic documentaries, such as a scripted voice-over and an omniscient camera vision, these so-called ‘humanistic documentaries’ (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 ossified scene to be nostalgically missed. Concerned about their implied simplistic logic of a linear historical causality, critics such as Cheng Kai question this particular ‘humanism’ on its representation of a visually appealing past, seeing in it a questionable tendency to mystify the past and encase it as a ‘safe existence’ for convenient and poorly reflected consumption by the public.5   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 filmed subjects, the filmmaker himself was far away from home (Kunming, Yunnan Province), belonged to no ‘work unit’, 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 first independent documentary in contemporary

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126  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema China: Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990).6 Several months after Wu started filming Bumming in Beijing, Shi Jian (b. 1963), a director of CCTV’s Special Topic Department, began the shooting of Tiananmen, an eight-part documentary about Beijing, with private funding.7 Envisioned as an experiment to go against the officially ordained special-topic documentaries, Tiananmen ended up not being broadcast on television, because of the documentary’s ideologically neutral ‘grey tone’ in depicting life in the capital.8 It adopted a bottom-up perspective on reality and history through interviews or first-person accounts of ordinary people, synchronised sound recording, lowered camera angles, mobile long takes and various other strategies.9   The coincidence of these two attempts at a different presentation of Chinese reality, coming respectively from outside and inside the official system (considering Shi Jian’s state-related employment status) and joined by other likeminded figures, forms the backbone of Lu Xinyu’s seminal writing on the rise and significance of what she calls the ‘New Documentary Movement’.10 Apart from the desire of these early experimenters – who also belong to the Forsaken Generation – to record and present alternative Chinese realities, quick developments 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 today’s admirable dimensions and particularly in the direction of what I call ‘personal documentary’ 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 unprecedented path, aiming less to ‘persuade and promote’ given or authoritative views than to ‘record, reveal . . . preserve . . . analyze . . . interrogate . . . [and] express’ specifically motivated visions on reality.11   In his overview of Chinese documentary filmmaking, critic Lin Xudong praises the independent practice’s abandonment of scripted narration and its opting for ambient sound and a mobile camera, seeing in the latter the emergence of a much more ‘concrete, confrontational, open and individualistic’ reality.12 The resulting epistemological space offered to the audience, rather than being a closed and ideologically charged sphere allowing little room for participation in the production of knowledge, is ‘more liberated’, because the documentary’s ‘structural epicenter’ has ‘moved away from offscreen narration and toward the events actually taking place onscreen’.13 With the help of digital technologies, the filmmaker’s camera becomes more mobile, as it can readily follow a filmed 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 unprecedented sense of depth, mass and volume of the physical world is thus brought forth into visibility and audibility.   Lin Xudong’s observation aptly highlights the independent practice’s rerouting of the epistemological mission of documentary into a more open direction, where underrepresented aspects of Chinese life can enter the public’s view. The difference and novelty of alternative aspects of reality are, indeed, no small

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Personal Documentary  127 achievement of the independent filmmakers. However, this epistemological pursuit does not stop at the level of documenting what is thematically different from official practices. More impressively and particularly by way of the ‘personal documentary’, this pursuit also embodies a project of seeking self-knowledge – a journey that not only reveals the subjects and subject matters as the content and target of documentary filmmaking, but also bares the traces of the complexly meaningful encounters between filmmaker, camera and reality. More than just an aesthetic novelty of a few filmmakers with particular artistic temperaments, this persistent (although initially neglected) search for a reflexive, 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 document.14 Its major practitioners – many happening to be members of the Forsaken Generation – are able to translate their historical vision about the socialist past into a concerned, conscious and critical intervention in the documentation and interpretation of the present (as self-conscious historical records) so that the kind of historical misinformation and manipulation 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 – past as well as present – cannot be overemphasised.15 In a discussion of the connection between documentary and modern historiography, Philip Rosen distinguishes what is at work when a pre-filmic piece of actuality enters a filmic shot and becomes part of a documentary. For Rosen, rather than annulling the truth-value of the pre-filmic real, it would be more productive to redirect critical attention away from the mere ‘content’ of a finished documentary to the actual ‘process’ of filmmaking, thus recognising the contexts in which our tendency for narrativisation takes place.16 Mapped onto our current discussion, the most important value of personal documentary 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 filmmaker and his camera.

Chinese Verité and Duan Jinchuan’s Invisible Gaze From 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 introducing them to the observational practice of Frederick Wiseman and the social documentaries of Ogawa Shinsuke. In 1993, the works of seven filmmakers were shown at the festival, among which Wu Wenguang’s 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1993), a memoir of collective yet personal experiences of the Cultural Revolution as Red Guards, won the first Ogawa Shinsuke Prize, inaugurated in 1993 to honour start-up Asian documentary filmmakers.17 That same year, YIDFF also awarded Frederick Wiseman the Mayor’s Prize for his film Zoo (1993) and organised a retrospective of eleven documentaries by Ogawa Productions to

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128  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema commemorate Ogawa’s death in 1992. Following their initial exposure to these influences, the Chinese documentarians were introduced to the rich language of documentary illustrated by works from all over the world, the most directly influential style among which proves to be that of non-interference from Wiseman’s direct cinema.18 Duan Jinchuan, who would later become arguably the most important practitioner of direct cinema in this group, acknowledges that his The Square (Guangchang, co-dir. Zhang Yuan, 1994) was directly informed by Wiseman’s 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 structure of the unbalanced power relationship existing between the government and its citizens without attracting unwanted attention to (and censorship of) the person of the filmmaker. As Chinese documentarians were also trying to reject the voice-of-God presentation in official documentaries, it is hardly surprising that they found direct cinema to be such an attractive and effective approach with which to dissect and analyse the highly politicised and symbolic spaces in postsocialist China. Exemplar Chinese verité documentaries over the years include: Du Haibin’s Along the Railway (Tielu yanxian, 2000); Duan Jinchuan’s The Square (co-dir. Zhang Yuan), South Bakhor St. 16 (Ba kuo nan jie shiliu hao, 1995), The Secret of My Success (Linqi da shetou, 2002) and The Storm (Baofeng zhouyu, co-dir. Jiang Yue, 2005); Jia Zhangke’s In Public (Gonggong changsuo, 2001); Kang Jianning’s Yin Yang (Yin Yang, 1997); Li Yifan and Yan Yu’s Before the Flood (Yanmo, 2003); Zhang Yuan’s Crazy English (Fengkuang yingyu, 2000); Zhou Hao and Ji Jianghong’s Houjie Township (Houjie, 2003) and Senior Year (Gaosan, 2005); Zhu Chuanming’s Extras (Qunzhong yanyuan, 2002) and so on.   After seeing Wiseman’s Central Park (1989), Duan felt that he, too, could use a ‘sandian jiegou’ (dispersed focus structure) – or what Bill Nichols identifies as an overall mosaic structure in Wiseman – in which there are no ‘concrete characters, individual destinies, or heightened conflicts’.20 Apparently exemplifying direct cinema’s famous attitude of the filmmaker being a fly on the wall (while leaving strong impressions of ‘tactless’ voyeurism on closer inspection), Wiseman’s methodology of non-interference appears reasonably attractive and effective for Duan, who was searching for the symbolic meaning of a chosen subject in the Chinese context.21 This search for truth underneath surface phenomenon is particularly obvious in The Square and South Bakhor St. 16. Both documentaries feature a symbolically resounding space – one being Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the other being a residence community committee office in Lhasa, Tibet – whose daily workings point to the hidden mechanisms of Chinese political life. Containing no central protagonist or storyline, The 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, fly kites, engage in pickpocketing, do sightseeing or simply pass by. Asked if the people filmed in The Square were aware of the presence of the camera and of the fact that they were being filmed, Duan replies: ‘Everybody is doing a show, and they do it

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Personal Documentary  129 most naturally and unconsciously, until this accumulates to a certain point, they themselves will be shocked to see their own performance.’22   As arguably the most significant lieu de mémoire (site of memory) in China, Tiananmen Square is laden with ritual, political and historical significations that transform into an unnamable yet palpable ambience.23 This historically charged and temporally overflowing space imbricates the human figures 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 – 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 – non-interfering perhaps, but acutely attentive – Tiananmen Square shapes forth as a symbolic stage that, because of the content and intent bestowed by centuries of historical time, restructures the figures, 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 preordained 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 Mao’s 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 office 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 intimate contact between the government and its citizens takes place. Through the defamiliarising exemplification of two representative public spaces – ‘one open, the other closed’, to use his own words – Duan manages to highlight the subtle exercises of power in the most symbolic and mundane spaces in China.   With full acknowledgement of the effective analysis that Duan achieves in visualising the hidden structure of power’s spatial expression, we also need to be aware of critics’ sustained challenge of the misleading assumption that noninterfering observation and the avoidance of a deliberately arranged narrative allow direct cinema a greater degree of objectivity and therefore truth. Bill Nichols notes direct cinema’s employment of the standard tropes of subjective editing that are more obviously associated with fiction films and discerns in the midst of its apparent objectivity the implication of ‘a social subjectivity . . . dissociated from any single individuated character’.24 In the case of Wiseman’s documentaries, Barry Keith Grant highlights the presence of subjectivity in Wiseman’s approach, evidenced by an analysis of Titicut Follies (dir. Frederick Wiseman, 1967), a documentary about a state institution for the criminally insane in Massachusetts.25 With all the apparent openness of identification that characterises the particular structure of the point of view in Wiseman’s film, the combination of ‘detached observation and expressive manipulation (through mise-en-scène and montage)’ actually results in ‘what Jean Rouch has called “ethnographic cinema in the first person”’.26   Despite the applicability of the Wisemanian verité in Duan’s postsocialist

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130  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema China, Duan’s acceptance of Wiseman seems insufficiently informed. In an illuminating analysis of the two-tier structure characterising Wiseman’s 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 continuity.27 The epistemological consequence of such a double (and self-contradicting) structure, as Nichols cautions us, is a way of seeing that is active (with full acknowledgement), yet also retroactive: ‘Politically, Wiseman’s choice of an “ensemble of social relations” 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 itself.’28   Duan’s invocation of direct cinema and Wiseman’s techniques is a necessary and effective 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 official documentaries. However, such a deliberate erasure of personal involvement and, more problematically, its presentation of an alternative account to a pre-set (official) 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 filmmaking places a rigorous demand on the filmmaker for reflexivity.   Curiously, while Duan emphasises the offering of an open space (made possible by a ‘dispersed focus’ 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 structure.29 His desire for ‘theatricality’ in documentary, following the Aristotelian unities, might be understood as the pursuit of a structural theatricality, such as whether the motivation for each turn and conflict makes sense and whether it is a correct or proper arrangement of the relationship between people and events. This proper arrangement depends on the filmmaker’s understanding and judgment of the contingencies of the situation, so as to be able to capture the totality of a given event.30 In other words, and perhaps not surprisingly, Duan’s 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. This is what makes his non-interfering observational practice interesting and valuable at first (in the early context of initial rebellions against official narrative), but, when continued later in documentaries such as The Storm, causes one to want to rethink the implications of direct cinema for Chinese documentary.   The 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 (1946–9) against the ruling Nationalists. In the form of a grassroots oral history, this documentary presents

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Personal Documentary  131 peasants in a village in northeast China, where the Land Reform was first put forward for experimentation. All the featured peasants were either actual participants in or close-range witnesses to the movement of over five decades before. The peasants speak from memory, giving accounts of manipulation, injustice and cruelty that exude a quiet, disturbing poignancy. The directors frame the documentary as a counter-narrative in contrast to two official representations of the history of Land Reform. One is the 1961 feature film directed by Xie Tieli that bears the same title. Duan and co-director Jiang deconstruct that official narrative by presenting actual figures that either were among, or personally knew, those who served as prototypes for the original novel from which the 1961 film was adapted.31 The other implied target in the documentary is the construction of a local museum, which was being built at precisely the same time as the documentary was being filmed. The Storm qualifies as a non-physical, alternative archive of history that contrasts with the local museum, the latter continuing to immortalise the incomplete, official accounts of history while exploiting the past through ‘red tourism’, a goal desired by the local authorities.   Duan and Jiang’s interrogation does not simply target the version of national history authored by the CCP. To set off the personal testimonies of the peasants, they juxtapose archival footage of propaganda from both the Communists and Nationalists.32 Ironically, each side fervently voices its concern for the interests of the Chinese people. The peasants’ personal testimonies frequently jar with those grandiose official accounts of the experience and instead speak of the actual, daily violence of the mass movement in the late 1940s. More interestingly, while these personal testimonies seem to work in sync in offering an alternative version of the past, at times they are also in conflict with each other, resulting in a polyphonic effect. For example, among the featured peasants and previous Land Reform officials, a Grandma Ding gives an account of her experience 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 actually incriminated and beaten others hard during ‘work’. This subtle moment of contradiction opens up the text of the current grassroots oral history to incredulity and suspicion, a rewarding wake-up call that reminds us of the necessarily selective process of recollection.33   The Storm is certainly invaluable in uncovering previously unknown details of a highly distorted past. As in most of Duan Jinchuan’s works, the presence of the filmmaker is hidden behind the camera in The Storm. The personal testimonies we hear are from the filmed subjects alone: each interviewee faces the camera alone and recounts his or her experience. There is neither onscreen communication between interviewees nor dialogue between the interviewees and the filmmakers. If in The Square and South Bakhor St. 16 the represented space – physical, political and historical – is still open and multivalent, the narrative in The Storm seems to become more categorically summarised. In other words, the documentary provides different accounts of the past, but does not necessarily offer a truly alternative frame of thinking about history and its representation. The

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132  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema testimonies in The Storm, despite the little frisson of suspicion over Grandma Ding’s account, remain disappointingly consistent in debunking the lies and partial representations in official media. Instead of exploring more fully the current equivocation that hangs around the ‘truth’ of Grandma Ding’s 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 benefit from the testimonial cacophony and perhaps from there attempt a more thorough investigation of the nature of history, memory and narrativisation on a structural, rather than just thematic, level.   As possible precedents of The Storm in the history of documentary, Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) are two classics that also rely on testimonies in their search for the truth lying beneath, respectively, the shooting of a police officer 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 practice’s 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 ‘truths’ are ‘partial and contingent’.34 Qualified as a mode of historical inquiry, postmodern documentaries throw light on the processes through which history ‘became as it is’, because of their emphasis on ‘the ideologies and consciousnesses’ behind the ‘competing truths’.35 History, in this case, is no longer assumed to be available as some essentially graspable truth and as the object of a confident and penetrating subjectivity equipped with objective methodologies and scientific technologies. Rather, it displays as many facets as there are faces, voices, individual experiences and personal memories that provide the testimonies and impressions. The latter forms what Williams calls ‘a horizon of relative and contingent truths’, from which the spectator is invited, or challenged, to consider everything altogether for an approximation of the past.36   Compared to The Thin Blue Line and Shoah, The Storm successfully testifies 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, ‘the pertinence of documents is intricated a priori with the ex post facto significance of the historical sequence’, the latter as a result of the unification and sequentiation of multiple (and potentially conflicting) temporal sequences.37 The Storm chooses and structures the elements – testimonies of villagers who recall a past in the present – in accordance with a present desire to provide an account different from, and counter to, what has been represented in official history. Alternative accounts are gathered to play against past lies, but then stop there. The 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. The urgency of that conundrum – that independent Chinese documentaries seem prone to slip back into a paradigm they rose up against in the first place – seems to be what drives the critic Lu Xinyu to question

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Personal Documentary  133 the basic issues of documentary filmmaking: ‘Why did we start? Who are We? How do we narrate? And why?’38 Yingjin Zhang also points out three problems in independent Chinese documentary filmmaking from the 1990s: erasing oneself, blind belief in objectivity and exploitation of the filmed subjects.39 Excessive dependence on, or trust in, the cinematic apparatus and technology, coupled with insufficient reflection on the erasure of the signature of the filmmaker, 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 offer an incisive reflection of globalisation at home. However, this great example of Chinese verité demonstrates awkward, if not disrespectful, reticence regarding the filmed subjects when the latter are emotionally invested and caught in vulnerable moments in their lives, in front of the camera.40   To counter these problems in independent Chinese documentary, I argue that, apart from the Chinese verité practice that Lin Xudong has summarised and championed, there is actually a line of documentaries that does not hesitate to show the filmmaker’s involvement in the documenting process. The baring of the filmmaker’s position, sometimes in the form of the camera movement, sometimes in the more obvious presence of the filmmaker’s body or voice, bespeaks a significantly different tendency that offers inspiring answers to some of the problems already encountered by independent documentary. Although Lin Xudong offers a valuable paradigm for the understanding of the new documentaries, their significance cannot be fully appreciated without considering the specific role of the filmmaker in the documentary text. It is for that purpose that I propose we turn our attention to ‘personal documentary’ – 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 Zhou’s fellow members of the Forsaken Generation, have created filmic texts that both reflect on history and reality and explicate the relationship between the human agent and the historical or filmic space. Going beyond illuminating aspects of history and reality that are not found in official 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 first and foremost a discovery of the self.41 – Wu Wenguang I hope that by having you watch [West of the Tracks], you can discover shared emotions. Meaning that I myself am filming them this time, but while showing the truth of their lives, I am also showing my own feelings. I was following

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134  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema their lives, but at the same time I am layered within the film. So, the people who view the film 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 viewers.42 – Wang Bing The definition and theorisation of personal documentary is still under construction. On the one hand, the term seems chimeric enough to include documentary subgenres as diverse as diary film, home movie, essay film, the ‘I’ film, self-documentary, autobiographical video, personal cinema and, sometimes, postmodern documentary and domestic ethnographic film. All of these display a common interest in the intimately experiential and subjective dimensions of human existence.43 On the other hand, as a point of convergence, this commitment 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 definitive, cultivating a special kinship with openminded and open-ended notions, such as border-crossing, flexibility, 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 identified as a site where descriptive and reflexive modalities are coupled [,] the representation of the historical real is consciously filtered through the flux of subjectivity [, and] a self is produced through a plurality of voices marked fundamentally by a sense of indeterminacy [or] epistemological uncertainty.44 Through its proximity to the subjectivity of the essayist, the essayistic is already, in the sense of Montaigne’s ‘book of the self’, autobiographical and personal. In film and video, the essayistic converges with the personal in that its ‘locatable itinerary’ is often related to the unique specificity 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 significance of being a ‘“new” or historicizing autobiography in film and video’.45 In the history of non-fiction film 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 Sherman’s March (dir. Ross McElwee, 1986).46   As Renov notes, the rise of autobiographical documentary filmmaking 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 movements (for instance, anti-war, civil rights, the student movement) with the

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Personal Documentary  135 politics of identity, ‘[the] “post-verité” documentary practice from 1970 to 1995’ definitely reflected a greater interest in the issue of subjectivity.47 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 official history. However, in significant contrast with the verité practice that has gained currency in China, personal documentary not only aims at presenting a different 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 specific contingencies on the complex network of information and intention, reminding us of the epistemological and ethical consequences that documentary, as a mode of representation specifically 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 official and mainstream humanistic documentaries, what needs to be excavated and cultivated are not only previously underrepresented aspects of Chinese life, but also – indeed, more crucially – a new relationship to history and representation, in which the filmmakers as well as the audience are able to participate in the knowledge production and historical representation as conscious historical subjects. The personal is political as well as historical. Ross McElwee – one of the most prominent and engaging practitioners of personal documentary – puts it in simple, candid terms: I think the most political thing I can do, anyway, is to try to render people’s lives, including my own, in some sort of context that makes other people interested, empathetic, questioning, or even antipathetic to what they’re seeing – but that somehow engages them to look at life as it’s really lived and react to it.48 Rather than being taken as a fixed focal enclosure, the self-inscription of the filmmaker, as Renov illumines, often contains a gaze directed outward to other people and to the wider social, historical and cultural context. This outward gaze helps to construct ‘historical selves that are nonetheless sites of instability rather than coherence . . . [and the] construction of subjectivity [becomes] a site of instability – flux, drift, perpetual revision’.49   That instability finds a quite concrete personification in the figure of Wu Wenguang, the filmmaker and artist who made Bumming in Beijing – the first independent Chinese documentary. While perhaps in apparent contradiction with his early deep respect for Wiseman’s observational practice (which evidences the complex process of Chinese documentary’s development more than it discredits direct cinema’s 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-reflexive involvement of the filmmaker.50 I have discussed this in detail elsewhere.51 There

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136  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema have been well-considered concerns about the danger of ‘over-emphasis’ on the personal stance, because critics fear it might reduce the social impact of independent documentaries if they solely focus on the self to the exclusion of efforts to connect to any other issue.52 Such concerns are understandable in the context of some of Wu Wenguang’s 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, Wu’s 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 documentary.53   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. This informed construction and conscious exploration, when envisioned in historiographical terms, qualifies as a highly reflexive 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 filmmaker by making it visible or audible. Less physical strategies of evidencing the presence of the filmmaker’s creative subjectivity include deliberate camera angles and frame compositions (thus indicating the specific 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 filmmaker.   Second, due to its specifically positioned and necessarily limited perspective, a personal documentary demonstrates a deep interest in the ‘meeting, encounter, [and] dialogue’ – terms that Renov finds appositional in ethical philosophy and documentary – between the camera and the phenomenal world.54 When translated 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 filmmaking as the constant shaping forth of a relationship between the embodied subjectivity of the filmmaker and the filmed subject (or subject matter).   Third, as a result of the above commitments to the physically-based specificity of the filmmaker’s 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 epistemological project in the present moment in which the filmmaker’s embodied subjectivity is placed. By spatialising and embodying the ‘now’ as the ‘here’ where the self stands, starts off and returns to, and where diverse temporalities such as personal memory, traces of the past and the current moments of filmmaking converge, a personal documentary demonstrates an awareness of the presence of the past in the present. Thus, 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 selfcomplete, but rather have a profoundly involved relationship with each other. As

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Personal Documentary  137 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 personalities, 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 existence and experience. Such an ethically-charged interest in the contact zones – sites where relationships take place – tends to be manifest in all aspects of the cinematic form, such as combining fiction and non-fiction in the narrative, introducing performance in representing reality and mobilising unconventional framing and editing strategies to evoke a juxtaposition of different spaces or temporalities.   Subjectivity – mostly that of the filmmaker as a historical inquirer – serves to provide a concrete footing to this cinematic journey in time and space. Documentary scholars have noted the shared impressionability of both the filmmaker as an embodied subjectivity and the phenomenal world as ‘the multi-layered and heterogeneous environment’.55 Whereas Michael Renov calls attention to a sort of ‘crucible effect’, in which reality is subjected to the heat and pressure of the filmmaker’s creative subjectivity, Yiman Wang, inspired by Jia Zhangke and Walter Benjamin, observes the laudable willingness of the Chinese documentarian to be ‘seared’ (zhuoshao) by the immediate context of the actual material ambience.56 The subjectivity of the human agent (mostly the filmmaker, but also applicable to filmed subjects who actively present their stances and situations and form an inter-subjective relationship with the filmmaker), 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 reflexive cinematic style. It embodies an ethically consequential vision that historical representation, through non-fiction moving image or otherwise, need always be aware of, and call attention to, its own specific situatedness and dynamic connection with other nodal points of experience and knowledge, thus to avoid blindly subsuming the infinite entirety of human experience (including history) under an isolated interpretation.   The value of the personal documentary is found in its highlighting of documentary filmmaking not as a finished product of objective knowledge, but as a lived result of a dynamic epistemological journey, in which the subject of this journey – the filmmaker – and the phenomenal world (including the filmed subjects in it) leave marks on each other. Rather than penetrating into a target field, extracting useful information and then leaving it as a clean and triumphant beneficiary who gets what he has set out to look for, the filmmaker, either physically or symbolically and quite likely both, emerges out of the process of filmmaking changed and imprinted by what has been a dynamic negotiation with the site. Neither the filmmaker nor the field stays the same as before the arrival of the camera. The field, as an epistemological object characterised by alterity or otherness, renders this encounter an ever-renewing process and thus makes demands on the documentarian’s active attention. In response, the filmmaker

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138  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema needs to exercise a high level of awareness of his own position – physical as well as symbolic – in order to give an evolving order or structure to the unknown environs and carve out an epistemological itinerary in its midst.57 The actual shape of this cinematic itinerary is one – doubtless a highly suggestive one – among many possible forms that the relationship between filmmaker and field can potentially take. That 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 ‘objective’ agent of knowledge, the filmmaker as an embodied subjectivity acquires a spatial dimension, as does the field. 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 film 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 intersubjective terms.58 While the filmmaker gains a little more knowledge about the phenomenal world, he also benefits from a self-vision in the course of his encounter, because the mutual configuration existent between subject and field reveals his position to be ‘within a matrix . . . irreducibly material and of necessity historical’.59   Chinese documentary filmmakers seem to be increasingly aware of the urgent need to ‘restore the author’ or filmmaker (huanyuan zuozhe) to his proper position. Guo Xizhi, for example, advocates a way out of the conventional, self-effacing and unifying narratives of history.60 Huang Wenhai, the director of Dream Walking (Mengyou, 2006) – an idiosyncratic and controversial documentary about artists that won the Grand Prize at the Cinéma du réel, an international documentary film festival in France – identifies his goal in filmmaking as striving at a ‘psychological realism’ (xinli xianshi zhuyi) with a distinct personal touch.61 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 specifically historically situated 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 Than 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 Chenyu’s 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 on.62 Furthermore, as we shall see in Chapter 5, Chinese women and queer filmmakers bring more experimental dimensions to personal documentary, evidencing a

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Personal Documentary  139 tendency that echoes Renov’s analysis of the rise of autobiographical film 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 filmmaker’s embodied subjectivity. These are Wang Guangli’s I Graduated and Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks. Both filmmakers insert a personal performance of their own in the midst of apparently observational documentation. The filmmaker, rather than being a fly on the wall, becomes a participating figure not so much in the actual life of the filmed subjects as on a contextual level, where the current journey of filmmaking 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 off 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 filmmakers apply their felt presence as attentive and caring subjectivities and engage in epistemological encounters with the phenomenal world, making palpable and raising awareness about the process through which the past is figured in the present and the present transforms into history.

I Graduated: Subject-ing the Past to the Present On 5 July 1992, Wang Guangli (b. 1966), a first-time filmmaker 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) filmed students graduating from this famous academy and a few other universities in Beijing, making what would later be known as I Graduated, an important film that helped announce the unmistakable advent of independent documentary in China.   Wang’s thematic focus on graduates who were bidding adieu to college life in a 1992 Beijing is a significant choice. As is clear from the seven lengthy interviews featured in the documentary, the filmed 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 filmmaker 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 representatives of a generation caught in a historical cleft that is obscure yet impactful. The emotive tones expressed by these voices and figures include bitterness, sadness,

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140  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema 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 figures 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 artificially lit presentation applied to the testimonials in Duan Jinchuan’s The Storm. They sit low on the floor, lounge about on the bottom part of a bunker bed or speak to an offscreen 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 filmed subjects testify to a close rapport between them and him, characterising the interviews not as one-sided presentations, but as communicational sharing.   More significant evidence of I Graduated as a personal documentary can be found in the opening, ending and non-interview sections of the film, because these parts, by way of a highly subjective camera and a deliberate performance on the part of the filmmaker, prove that this documentary does more than record the memoirs of several post-1989 graduates. Instead, not only does the filmmaker identify himself as a generational cohort sharing the interviewees’ 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 – particularly one that contests officially imposed amnesia – what plays a central role is the presence of a particular historical subjectivity that is formed as a result of the interchanges between the filmmaker and subjects and between the camera and the space. The felt presence and highlighted performance of the director is crucial in evoking a repressed past and preserving its memory.   To indicate the specific, independent and personal origin of this mnemonic investigation in the guise of an amateur graduation film, I Graduated presents the arrival of the filmmaker (and the camera) on the documentary field 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 4.1). Immediately indicative of the critically alternative status of the independent documentary, this extraordinary unofficial entry was necessitated by the political circumstances. Though 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

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Personal Documentary  141 surveillance, including careful identity checks at its gates. Wang’s 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 documentary, at one point his filming was, indeed, discovered, stopped and investigated by the university’s public security officers.

Figure 4.1  I Graduated (dir. Wang Guangli, 1992): An unofficial 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 structural brackets. At the beginning, three haunting travelling shots set the subtle elegiac tone of the documentary. The camera looks at an empty sports field from behind a metal netting divider. It floats past dormitory buildings with gaping windows, in front of which bicycles stand in disorder, as if they had been abandoned long before. The 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 ‘another climax of socialist labor contest’. In stylistic discordance

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142  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema with this official note of pride and progress are the yellowish colour filter and the over-exposure effect to which these three shots are subjected. The over-exposure effect works to the effect that the darker lines of the netting divider or the window frames have a skeletal scaffolding look, while lighter-coloured surfaces such as the walls and the sky tend to be whited out. Such deliberate visual effects communicate a highly subjective approach to the filmed space as a sort of emotional wasteland, where the past – indicated by the empty windows and ‘abandoned’ bikes – is being replaced by new urban constructions. The featuring of two dividing structures guarding the university and the city (construction), respectively, also communicates an uneasy sense of separation between the two spaces. The college graduates are leaving the university that, as a site of memory, registers their youthful dreams, as well as frustrations. They 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 filmed space in I Graduated is a poem spoken and sung by a male voice that sounds uniquely dispirited, melancholic, yet still desiring. The poem is authored and performed by Huang Jingang, an important sound artist who also worked on I Love XXX, Meng Jinghui’s 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 – two themes that find obvious resonances in 1989, if we understand the significance 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. The latter personal angle is exactly how director Lou Ye chooses to approach the subtle yet resounding after-effect of 1989 in his banned feature Summer Palace.63 ‘Go, 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 . . .’ 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 ‘I’ and ‘you’ in the poem refer to, the rest of the documentary interweaves interviews and the filmmaker’s wanderings on campuses, gradually revealing that these pronouns refer to the shared status of the filmmaker, the interviewees and the Forsaken Generation (exemplified by the filmmaker and the graduates), as a distinct group of subjects who try to figure out their status in contemporary Chinese history.   I Graduated concludes with the graduates seeing each other off at the railway station with tears, hugs and kisses, followed by a lengthy travelling shot that features a similar monologue presentation of the poem. The camera floats on the Chang’an Avenue (the Eternal Peace Avenue), the famous east–west 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 4.2 and 4.3). Alongside Huang Jingang’s

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Figure 4.2  I Graduated: An elegiac ending

Figure 4.3  I Graduated: An elegiac ending – closing image of the documentary

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144  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema 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. The itinerary along which the camera travels – the current long take showing the last part of it – 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 square.64 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 filming 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 filming 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.   The musical poem of Huang Jingang provides a vocal expression of the memory-charged and history-replete emotional overflow that Wang feels in his ritualistic performance through the embodied camera. Accompanying this take on the soundtrack, Huang’s melancholic monologue gathers emotional momentum and reveals dimensions of experience that go beyond the personal into the generational and historical realm: . . . I’m sad at how casually I have lost my virginity Nowadays I have no words or tears I have no home to go, only to make much ado about nothing Nowadays I am a lawless and jobless loafer . . . In those days, the organization accused me of my stammering unsteady stand In those days, I shared life with my brothers Often thinking of collective suicide In those days, I was criticized harshly, but girl, you remained silent Oh, in those days, my brothers and sisters were pure and clean . . . So many people have left, only I’m not scared of staying So many people have died, only I’m brave enough to live on I’ll live a hard life; I’ll often think of a big river I will miss you all, destined to write and sing songs for you . . . Nobody will know me any more once we say goodbye So long, so long, my darling So long, so long, my darling Loss of innocence, betrayal of love, the evocation of co-generational ‘brothers and sisters’, the idea of collective suicide, the sadness at inevitable forgetting and unfulfilled longing – all these connotations of the poem remind us of similar themes present in the creative works by other members of the Forsaken

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Personal Documentary  145 Generation (see Chapter 1). Two haunting cases of the kind of ‘collective suicide’ can be found in the film Summer Palace, in which Yu Hong and her best friend Li Ti, two fictional counterparts of the post-1989 graduates in Wang’s documentary, both try to take their own lives. As a component of what Michael Berry sees as ‘self-destructive cycles of repetition’ present in the life of Yu Hong, the film’s principal protagonist, Li Ti’s suicide, in the light of the ‘collective suicide’ that Huang Jingang and Wang Guangli contemplate in I Graduated, might be interpreted as a repetition of Yu Hong’s earlier abortive attempt and, in its sad accomplishment, succeeds as a form of ‘claiming a form of belated victimhood’.65   At this point, it is clear that the ‘I’ in the title of Wang’s documentary and in the early part of Huang’s musical poem refers to the collective persona of not only the graduates featured in the film, but also the Forsaken Generation, to which all of them, including the filmmaker and the musician, belong. Structured around the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’, 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 specifically placed collective persona. Compounding this vocal performance is the director’s own embodied cinematography, whose existential 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.   The 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. The camera encounters a somewhat disorderly group of people who are running across the street in slow motion. The strange noise becomes increasingly louder as the camera moves closer to the scurrying crowd, before freezing on the scene (Figure 4.3). Thus, 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.   The 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 final scene echoes the expressionist treatment already obvious at the beginning of the documentary. Doubtless caring little about direct cinema’s 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 flag-raising ceremony. The suggestive noise that replaces Huang’s vocal performance is actually that of a strong wind blowing on the microphone at the time of filming.66 Through 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 fiction and non-fiction without completely replacing the latter with the former (because the suggestive somberness of the final image makes one wonder about its status and meaning, rather than confidently mistake it for a piece of

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146  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema ‘factual’ data), Wang effectively conjures up a fleeting 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 filmmaker and his camera in this documentary is primarily of a subjective and performative nature. As a result, the selected phenomenal field is filtered through an epistemological 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 finished 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 graffiti-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 documentary, the self-inscription of the filmmaker proves crucial to the memorialisation of loss.67 It is through the presence of the subjectively mobilised camera of the filmmaker that the lived time of real history, whether the students’ 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 officially forced into invisibility, the filmmaker’s 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 Mekas’ Lost, Lost, Lost, Michael Renov evokes Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the Nietzschean signature and notes ‘the recurrence of the invested iconographic figure in Lost, Lost, Lost can be said to speak the artist’s subjectivity even as it reproduces the concreteness of historical detail’.68 Comparably, through a signature performance of the filmmaker’s 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 confirms the filmmaker’s 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 first documentary by the painter-turned-filmmaker Wang Bing, is a phenomenal cinematic epic about Tie Xi Qu (meaning ‘the district west of the railway tracks’), a former socialist industrial compound located in Shenyang, Liaoning Province.   Consisting of three parts: ‘Rust’, ‘Remnants’ and ‘Rails’, 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

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Personal Documentary  147 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. This is especially obvious in the first section, ‘Rust’, 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 day’s work and before going home. The impersonal nature of such an existence – which itself is a historical phenomenon, as the documentary gradually reveals that all this apparently timeless regularity is actually ending – is visually reinforced by the many long shots that frame the workers as tiny figures moving on the gigantic metallic structures within the diminishing vastness of the factory space. Although the second part of the documentary, ‘Remnants’, features the residential area, it focuses more on the children of the worker families. The 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 ‘Rust’, 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 specified locales. They talk to each other, but this verbal aspect remains insignificant and does not form a narrative core for the documentary. The spatiality of the factory represents a particular kind of existential economy that regulates individual life with the impersonal rhythm of industrial culture and socialist modernism.70   The apparent cyclical sameness of this socialist industrial time is not here to last. As the factories close one after another, the familiar spaces become abandoned and their previous temporal meanings are rendered irrelevant. Crucial to bringing out the historicity – the ‘once there and now no more’ sense of existence – implied in the gradual abandonment of the state factories in Tie Xi Qu is the embodied presence of the conscious subjectivity of the filmmaker. 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 five consecutive shots, indicating the camera’s gradual entry into the district. Lasting altogether for about five-and-a-half minutes, these opening shots have the same eye-level central perspective – a stylistic feature also characterising the rest of the ‘Rust’ section – and reveal the phenomenal field of the compound in a solemnly balanced composition. With such ‘a ritual entry into history’, we are led into a ghost town of disappearing socialist-planned economy (Figure 4.4).71   As the camera, obviously placed in the front of the train, moves forward ‘on’ the extending railway track, the encounter between the camera and the field is poetically accentuated by the snowflakes that visibly rush toward and rest on the camera lens, forming a perfect instance of what Michael Chanan calls ‘the element of visual noise’.72 According to Chanan, ‘the incursion of noise

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148  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema and accident provides evidence that the image is taken from the space of lived experience’.73 Whereas the camera, the filmmaker 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 snowflakes, 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 specific position of the camera is emphasised: it is in front of a train, fixed at eye level and in the process of visiting the industrial compound on a snowy day – all of which contribute to a certain mood characterising the resulting representation.

Figure 4.4  West of the Tracks (dir. Wang Bing, 2003): A ‘ritual entry’ into the historical space of Tie Xi Qu   Further raising our consciousness of the current moving image act of entering an unknown field 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 – namely, the repeated use of the central perspective – 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

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Personal Documentary  149 active. The train is moving slowly. In contrast to the train in Lumière Brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train à 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 confidence 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 manufacturing goals to be fulfilled. Comparable to the human train in Jia Zhangke’s Platform that progresses awkwardly to a symbolic destination no longer relevant or reliable, the train in Wang Bing’s 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: ‘the intention to go to a place creates historical time’, because the place has become a goal situated in the future.74 The sense of historicity in West of the Tracks is inseparable from the presence of the filmmaker faced with the space of Tie Xi Qu as a site of memory. Like I Graduated, West of the Tracks does not feature Wang Bing’s 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 4.5  West of the Tracks: Following the workers in their space [i]

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Figure 4.6  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 4.5 and 4.6). The composition of these shots, similar to the five tracking shots at the beginning of the documentary, is largely central and symmetrical. The worker moves ahead of the camera in a long narrow corridor walled in on both sides by dilapidated windows and doors. There is no other figure in view. From shot to shot, the calculated similarity and simplicity in framing calls attention to the mobility of the camera and the presence of the filmmaker who is following the worker. The meaning of such a persistent ‘tracking’ down of the workers is made obvious when, at later points, after the factories are closed down, one after another, the filmmaker comes back alone, walking down the corridors and aisles with no worker figure 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 director’s heavy breathing and footsteps, Wang Bing’s 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

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Personal Documentary  151 corridor and peeks in at the bathhouse. Everywhere the camera turns, the factory space looks completely deserted. Obviously, the filmmaker is the only human presence to witness the disappearance not only of the human figures, but also of a particular historical time that their way of life embodies.   Although presenting Tie Xi Qu’s historic transformation in largely chronological 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 filled with water; the shot dissolves into one that has exactly the same composition and available lighting, yet reveals two male bathers. The latter shot is obviously one taken from an earlier moment when the factory was still operating. This single flashback belongs to the filmmaker 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 ‘Rust’ section. The many mundane details of the workers’ 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 ‘home movie’ – aptly called film-souvenir in French – when she speaks about ‘the piecemeal specificity of the objective fragments of the film-souvenir [that is] set against our subjective activity of attempting to constitute the whole ensemble of evoked experiences as a coherence’.75 According to Sobchack, ‘the impossibility of realizing this objective (to rejoin and re-member the real “elsewhere” and in other times) leads to . . . an “empty sympathy” – what we call “nostalgia” – in relation to the screen image’.76 By repeating a familiar detail and emphasising its change with a subtle variation on the sameness of the image – for instance, the same composition and lighting effects of the bathhouse shots analysed above – 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 filmmaker, through his presence, observes the industrial place gradually changing back into natural space again and also participates in the transformation of this selected phenomenal field into represented history. To quote Yi-fu Tuan’s 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 life’s values, including those manifest in space.77 In West of the Tracks, the director, equipped with a movie camera and the epistemological intention of a historical nature, imposes a specific 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.

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152  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema   This particular schema is reflected 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 flashback mentioned above), Wang Bing chooses to, as François Bégaudeau observes, ‘guard [the repeated] opening and closing of doors that a professional montage would have quickly dismissed’.78 This assures the existence of the space of Tie Xi Qu ‘by way of a trajectory winding through it’, for the industrial compound is ‘the sum-up of the subjective itineraries’ that this trajectory covers.79 The presence 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-filtered cartography – one filled with emotions and epistemological intentions – and thus enables the current moving image representation of the industrial compound to enter the order of history and memory.   The many doors that Wang Bing, along with the workers, has opened, passed and closed will finally be removed and Tie Xi Qu will turn into something else, but their historical existence – the once-there-like-that-ness – 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 Three 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 flat ground covered with debris and decorated by several detached doors, Mr Qi constructs a mental map of the place’s past in front of the camera: Here was the cinema, here was the square . . . now we are standing at the cinema’s entrance . . . It’s 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, it’s really incredible . . . The sharp contrast between this detail-filled mental map of the place’s past and the visual blankness of the site powerfully evokes the shape of change and disappearance, which becomes palpable precisely due to the presence of conscious subjectivities, here enacted through both Mr Qi’s remembrance and Zhang’s filmmaking.   It is no accident that West of the Tracks, especially the section ‘Rust’, chooses to combine an embodied camera with a repeated use of central perspective composition (Figures 4.7 and 4.8). Applied to the long shots that present the monumental vastness of the factory space, a central perspective is able to visualise the

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Figure 4.7  West of the Tracks: Central perspectives [i]

Figure 4.8  West of the Tracks: Central perspectives [ii]

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154  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema apparent infiniteness of the receding space of the phenomenal world, in this case evoking a poetic sense of the classic socialist industry’s 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 specific position – that of the filmmaker as a conscious and intentional subjectivity – from where the current epistemological inspection and contemplation issues. Under the gaze of this specifically 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 conflate, all these forming a particular emotional landscape of the place.   Steve Neale’s 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 drive.80 Here, the filmmaker’s subjectivity becomes ‘the filter through which the real enters discourse, as well as a kind of experiential compass guiding the work toward its goal as embodied knowledge’.81 Each of his own gazes and steps is his navigator on this self-erasing map of postsocialist China. In that sense, the significance of Wang Bing’s documentary lies in its exemplification of a figurative mode of presenting an alternative historical account, as well as an alternative historiography. Instead of producing simply another different 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 specific historical subjectivity. Their embodied, personal vision not only demonstrates their difference, but also exemplifies a powerful way of contesting official historiography.

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Chapter 5 Performing Bodies in Experimental and Digital Media

Performing Bodies Independent documentaries have been recognised as a highly significant sector of contemporary Chinese cinema and media culture. Among these, the observational practice of direct cinema, while being undeniably a powerful method of examining the broad structures of, and massive changes in, contemporary Chinese society, runs the risk of being insensitive or even inaccurate when applied to the representation of those social realities characterised by alterity or otherness. This challenge is particularly obvious in projects that involve depictions of emotions, identities and subjectivities and especially those of traditionally underrepresented figures and groups, such as women, queer and ethnic minorities. Conversely, moving image works created by members from such communities present some of the most powerful critiques of mainstream assumptions and offer inspiring examples – in content as well as in form – that contest the boundary between filmmaker and filmed subject, observer and participant, documentary and fiction.   In the context of our discussion of independent cinema, personal filmmaking and personal documentary, minority productions not only enrich the growing alternative archive of underrepresented communities and identities, but also illustrate the theoretical strength of minority discourses to critically engage with social reality. For example, the experimental documentaries of the woman filmmaker Tang Danhong and queer filmmakers Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en offer some important insights in this light. Instead of maintaining a neutral, non-interfering process of representation, these filmmakers tend to mobilise an embodied camera and craft cinematic bodies as well as subjectivities that both play with, and criticise, the boundary between self and other. Through a provocatively engaged mode of moving image making, their works provide an insider’s view of personal experiences and visibly register particular (such as homosexual) identities. Also, significantly, these works exemplify cinematic strategies of not only recording, but also imagining and producing subjectivities that are shown or argued to be in concrete and conscious relations to each other, hence performing, in the very form of an unconventional moving image culture,

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156  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema critical interventions as regards a plethora of theoretical as well as social issues, including history, memory, identity, gender, the sex industry and migrant labour.1 Joined by other experimenters in experimental video and digital media, such as Li Ning, Feng Mengbo and Wang Qingsong, a rich variety of figures, identities and imaginaries shape forth as the felt registers, as well as embodied critiques, of the complex network of historical energy, social dynamic and cultural interaction out of which new subjects of the contemporary millennial China are born.

Nightingale, Not the Only Voice: A Performance of Inter-subjectivity Towards the end of 1999, Tang Danhong (b. 1965), a poet based in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, started shooting a documentary that would later cause a huge controversy at the 2003 Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival. It was Nightingale, Not the Only Voice (Yeying bushi weiyi de gehou, 2000).2 Shot from 1999 to 2000, this documentary follows the lives of three artists in Chengdu. Each of the three artists – painter Cui Ying, performance artist Yin Xiaofeng and Tang herself – is seen struggling for a better understanding of themselves amidst the challenges demanded by artistic creation and personal experience. Much like the son in Cheng Qingsong’s Born in 1966 (discussed in the introduction), Tang wants to understand the violence and abuse she suffered at home as a child, so much so that she finally confronts her parents with the camera. Cui Ying, in her turn, speaks about being trapped in her own immense artistic passion and the strange ‘inappropriateness’ of her memory of her mother’s death. Yin Xiaofeng asks Tang to film his various performances, one of which involves organising blind people to visit a sculpture exhibition. In the meantime, Yin also seems caught up in the ennui of quotidian life out of which he tries to find a meaningful outlet for selfexpression. Tang’s camera travels among these three subjects with an emphasis on herself, and gradually a video portrait of the trio takes shape in front of our eyes.   In many ways, Nightingale was and still is a singular piece among contemporary Chinese documentaries. The label of ‘self-indulgent’, which the public tends to attach to autobiographical forms of film and video, is exactly what this documentary faced in the controversy at the film festival in Yunnan.3 Tang inserts everything that strict practitioners of direct cinema would try to keep out: her voice, her body (completely naked at one moment), her provocative questions, her performance in front of the camera (such as taking off her clothes, bathing and commenting on the apparent ‘failure’ of her own intention to show all this), as well as the apparent rehearsal of some scenes. Given the fact that Chinese documentary filmmaking had very limited exposure to, and insufficient discussion of, performative or reflexive practices at the time when Tang was creating Nightingale, this idiosyncratic piece turns out to be an important experimental moment in that direction.4 Despite the impression of occasional pretentiousness and contrivance, Nightingale qualifies as a highly intriguing and thoughtful experimentation in the subgenre of ‘self-documentary’ that depicts non-fictional

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Performing Bodies  157 subjectivity and brings it into dialogue with wider considerations of the social and the historical.5   Nightingale features a variety of modes of articulation in dialogue with one another: Tang’s monologue voice-over, self-questioning, reading of her own poems and on-camera self-commentary, her communication with fellow artists and her psychiatrist, her confrontation with her parents and Cui’s soliloquylike confessions. Visual dialogues exist in Tang’s passing the camera to Yin and using the footage filmed by him. Parallels are found in featured behaviours and frame compositions: both Tang and Yin show their naked bodies and perform apparently private acts, such as undressing, bathing and even masturbating in front of the camera; both Tang and Cui reveal and elaborate on their emotional bursts on camera; and it is in private spaces, such as the residences of the artists and Tang’s parents or the clinic of Tang’s counsellor, that we see many of these manifestations and performances of personal feelings. For example, Tang inserts a dozen shots of household objects, such as furniture and decorative items in Cui Ying’s apartment, revealing not only the material condition and lived space of the painter, but also the attentive vision of the woman filmmaker herself, who is particularly sensitive to mundane and personal details. 6 Diverse visual materials like these are then combined in an almost essayistic editing and produce a kind of composite ‘self’, as in Renov’s theorisation, ‘through a plurality of voices’ and images that are marked by a dynamic indeterminacy and uncertainty.7 Because of her constant crossing of the boundary from behind the camera into the visual field in front of the camera, Tang gradually realises that by filming Cui and Yin she is actually filming fragments of herself. Rather than producing a group portrait of co-generational artists who are treated with equal strength (such as Wu Wenguang does in Bumming in Beijing and At Home in the World), Nightingale blends its three featured subjects into a cubist depiction of a composite persona.   When she started the documentary project, Tang seemed to have an illusion of the camera as an objectively reflecting device, like a mirror: ‘I beg [Cui and Yin] to allow me to use the video camera [on them] and document our confusions when my self-reflection becomes weak.’ However, the slippery secret of representation soon makes itself felt through the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between visibility and authenticity when it comes to inner or psychological truths. As the documentary unfolds, we realise Tang has been struggling with the shadows of physical abuse and emotional neglect that she suffered at home as a child, and part of her goal in making Nightingale is to come to a better understanding of herself and, if possible, arrive at some sense of alleviation and reparation. In order to haul out the gnawing pain in her memory, she tries a number of strategies of self-exposure and uncovering, such as sharing on camera her thoughts, feelings, poetry and even her body. However, the representational apparatus seems more distorting than neutrally reflecting. Tang faces the challenge of a technology – the movie camera – that seems to offer, or allow, access only to the surface of phenomena, including emotions, and even there guarantees no authenticity of the things thus captured. Having a trusted someone operate the device, she comes home, takes off her clothes and walks into a bath, commenting

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158  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema on her own ‘performance’ the whole time. Sitting in the bathtub, she breaks into embarrassed laughter and wonders aloud if her project looks like an X-rated movie. In the voice-over that follows this scene, she explains the emotional undercurrents that she finds frustratingly elusive from representation: I was very sad at that moment (in the bath), but when I was editing, I couldn’t see it at all. I know you can’t see it either because I was joking [about how this looks like making an X-rated movie]. I was pretending . . . Facing the camera that is now directed at me feels like facing the eyes from the world outside. I start blurting out nonsense . . . I wanted truth, yet that kind of filming is simply mindless exposure. Not only did the inner truth flee the camera, I also lost dignity. The pain and sadness that Tang wants to communicate is significantly rooted in her memory of home violence – an issue also central to Cheng Qingsong’s Born in 1966, which I discussed in the introduction. In Nightingale, such a traumatising early experience, together with Tang’s other memories and imaginings of ‘darkness . . . skeleton skulls . . . (hanging) tongues . . . shining fangs . . . long hair . . . fear . . . phantoms . . . (and) loneliness’, becomes a major drive behind the poetturned-filmmaker’s obsessive investigation of the psyche, before this culminates in her confrontation with her victimisers: her parents.8 In a particularly evocative and poetic language, Tang speaks of her personal experience of the Cultural Revolution that was relayed into her private household: I underwent a childhood filled with cursing and beating, yet they called it love. It completely messed up my mind and damaged my mood for a whole life. I grew up with a face on which had piled innumerable slaps. I painted it with red and black and tried to cover it with makeup, hoping people would find it lovely, yet at the same time I trashed those who loved that face. I perked up an ass that had received many beatings and breasts that had been pushed around; I used such a body to make love to people, yet I felt so worthless.9 In desperate search for a cure – or, in Tang’s own words, ‘cleansing’ – to restore her painfully bruised self-esteem, Tang turned the camera on an utterly private site of memory: none other than her own body. In Nightingale, Tang displays it and studies it, sharing the traumatic history suffered by her body (and psyche) through comments, confessions and poetry readings. As the physical surface of her personal past though, her body looks rather healthy and beautiful, free (at least those parts exhibited in front of the camera) of discernible scars, thus presenting a kind of visible evidence that seems almost defiantly neutral to the filmmaker’s strong emotions and expressions. Echoing the kind of denial that David MacDougall observes about the fate of ‘the experienced, functioning body’, due to ‘the sanitized body, the heroic body, and the beautiful body’ represented in contemporary moving image culture, Tang’s rather personal documentary encounters a similar challenge from the implicit, treacherous nature of cinematic

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Performing Bodies  159 representation.10 It shows as much as it conceals. Apart from the ‘troublesome’ natural beauty of her physique, Tang confesses and admits to her counsellor that she also feels self-conscious about her desire to please (a potential audience) in the presence of the camera. She wants to look good for it. Yet she feels equally insecure when seeing herself almost too presentable for the otherwise ‘experienced’ body or pained interiority to shape forth. Confronted by this visible yet elusive body on camera and also worried that she might not sound as articulate as her painter friend Cui Ying, Tang reacts verbally to the frustrating tension.   The many confessions and readings on camera turn out to be the filmmaker’s performative struggles to render evident – that is, to exhibit – the hidden, deep texture of the visible yet elusive body. The criticism of Nightingale being exhibitionistic is thus both correct and imprecise: the sense of excess, a quality often associated with exhibitionism, characterises both the bold image of Tang’s naked body and the extremely private nature of her poetically enunciated thoughts. In addition to these two contrasting layers that are often kept out of public sight, the filmmaker, out of a desire for effective communication and a theoretical interest in the treacherous terms of representational technology, probes into the invisible chasm between interior reality and documentary image as she wonders aloud why the more she wants to look like something she still looks like nothing. None of these three layers of image and sound effectively explicates or supports one another, such as more conventional narratives would try to achieve, in pursuit of an integral unity. It is precisely this subtle uneasiness and structural tension characterising Tang’s various roles and performances in Nightingale that produces the impression of it being too much and at the same time somewhat insufficient. Rather than being the result of an awkward handling of a sensitive subject, Nightingale’s multi-layered exhibitionistic excess is a highly provocative means to an evasive end. In Tang’s personal search for a hopefully reintegrated self-image, the intimate yet alienating presence of the camera both enables her to somehow re-image herself and challenges her to question the very nature of image making. Although a thoroughly cleansed and categorically renewed identity seems practically impossible, as the end of Nightingale assures the viewer that no such mission has been accomplished, Tang’s brave probing in emotion and memory and the resultant enriched screen identity, like what Michael Renov observes about Marceline’s dealing with her past in Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch, 1961), is indivisible from the participation of the discomforting camera.11 The filmmaker’s critical query about the nature of identity and history as a dynamic and inconclusive negotiation between fragmentation and integration, as we shall see in the discussion to follow, is comparable to the open exchanges between diverse bodies and mentalities characterising the experimental documentaries by queer filmmakers Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en.   Positioned somewhere between diary film and portrait film and, at a crucial moment (to be discussed shortly), even evoking home video (of an unusually dramatic kind), Nightingale, as a unique example from postsocialist China, brings to the concepts of identity and subjectivity in contemporary documentary not only thought-provoking formal experimentations, but also a necessary

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160  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema engagement with the socio-historical dimensions contained in moving images of a personal or even solipsistic kind. This relation between the personal and the socio-historical is translated into both exchanges between the singular (Tang) and the plural (Tang’s fellow artists Cui Ying and Yin Xiaofeng) and between present and past in the form of a direct confrontation between Tang and her parents as, respectively, the victim and victimisers in her personal history.   As two major parallels or components of Tang’s screen subjectivity, Cui Ying and Yin Xiaofeng also contribute exceptionally provocative performances to Nightingale. For example, due to the nature of his artistic pursuit, the performance artist Yin frequently uses the camera, with or without Tang behind it, to document performances, such as organising blind people to visit a sculpture exhibition or hanging his own head in public in imitation of a cruel postdecapitation ritual familiar from pre- and early modern Chinese history. The explicit performative nature of his work is certainly why Yin’s acts at first look the least staged or ‘the most natural’ among the three.12 However, when Tang completely trusted him with the camera and asked him to film himself whenever he felt like it, Yin put on an extremely provocative performance of masturbation, even though it is mainly presented with his back to the camera. While the exact motive for this highly unconventional decision is never quite explained, the image of Yin turning his back to the camera while performing a scandalous act forms an interesting visual parallel to the more frontal image of Tang’s own naked body. Whether presenting a front or a back, both artists demonstrate a similar urge to reach for an ultimate experiential boundary of some sort. Their naked, sexualised bodies have the power to rivet our attention to the immediate, physical dimensions of the image thus presented, yet also provoke us to look for deeper underlying reasons and meanings behind such an exhibitionist, yet at the same time enigmatic, surface of behaviours and psyches. Tang multiplies her bodily performance with layers of verbal expressions; Yin, in contrast, has much fewer words to share and chooses to be present in front of the camera with self-evident yet thought-provoking acts. For her part, the painter Cui brings us a screen presence with a tonality lying somewhere between Tang’s excess and Yin’s reticence (which is an excess of a reversed or inversed kind). Cui has the least bodily appearance of the trio, as she is often fully clothed and even topped with a woolly hat. Yet Cui is also the most verbally performative. With a powerful and surprisingly smooth flow of thought and description, Cui is able to relate her dreams in great detail and reminisce in vivid terms about, for example, a sort of blindingly white light that she saw or daydreamed when hearing about her mother’s death and which she reasons as the source of her tremendous emotional blockage experienced in her creative work.   Nightingale contains a highly memorable, extended sequence in which Cui has a nervous breakdown. Before that moment, Cui called Tang and asked her to come over. Since early in the project Tang suggested to her two friends to consider the video ‘as a sort of cleansing’ and ring her whenever they wanted to express and see their own ‘real’ state, Tang sensed that Cui, who was sobbing on the phone, must be ready for filming.13 Though not exactly staged or re-enacted,

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Performing Bodies  161 the revealed fact of Cui’s emotional ‘preparation’ and feeling ready for such a moment of representation challenges a more conventional notion of documentary as the capturing of spontaneous reality. The role of the camera here, even it is at first merely the expectation of its presence, resounds with Jean Rouch’s famous theorisation of the documentary camera as a catalyst and an accelerator for a reality that might not be brought forth in different circumstances.14 What is particularly revealing about Cui’s performance is that it has already somewhat started, even before the camera arrives. Informing the filmmaker that she is now ready, Cui has obviously been brooding over a possible filmable, if not photogenic, moment – a preparation prompted by the expectation of the camera’s presence. Not only do the filmed subjects become the so-called ‘vehicle’ for the representation of Tang’s self, here Tang’s own person and camera, because of their presence and participation, also become a necessary condition for the representation of Cui and Yin.15 Each carrying his or her own agenda and at the same time being superimposed onto one another, the artist trio of Tang, Cui and Yin emerges – to borrow the title of Lynn Hershman’s 1988 documentary – as a ‘first personal plural’, demonstrating the kind of ‘multiple . . . diverse . . . split, (and) sedimented’ qualities that Bill Nichols recognises in, or as, an identity in formation.16   While none of the three personas in Nightingale is shown as complete, because we see only bits and pieces of their creative and emotional lives, mostly from the current moment, their juxtaposition and interpenetration creates an aesthetic effect of cubism as well as collage, by which we are able to get a glimpse of the self-portrait and the inner affective landscape of a group – such as the Forsaken Generation in postsocialist China – to which all of these artists belong. The picture that results from their fragmented, neurotic and reflexive performances of the self is more evocative than definitive, prevailing more through its formal richness than through thematic unity. As a pluralistic attempt at autobiographical documentation, Nightingale exemplifies a methodologically innovative and theoretically significant moment in the development of independent, as well as personal, documentary by combining the exploration of subjectivity and identity with a critical contemplation on the epistemological implication of the non-fictional moving image. Because of her creative (and certainly poetic) propensity for dialogue and reflexivity, rather than for closure and unity, Tang Danhong is able to actually avoid uninteresting self-indulgence. Instead, she carries her exploration of the personal and the subjective beyond and toward the construction of something comparable to the kind of ‘a deeply social self’ that Michael Renov discovers in contemporary Western explorations of non-fictional subjectivity – that is, a ‘documentary self-inscription [that] enacts identities – fluid, multiple, even contradictory [ones] – while remaining fully embroiled with public discourse’.17   Besides its formal exploration of multiple subjectivities and its critical reflections on the representational dilemma presented by the camera, Nightingale exercises its social dimension particularly by taking historical matters personally, hereby joining her co-generational practices discussed in previous chapters

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162  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema of this book. Tang’s negotiation and struggle with the various dimensions of the self – the body, the camera, poetry and fellow artists – culminates in an on-camera confrontation with her parents. Like the documentary itself, which is exhibitionistic as well as evasive, this climatic moment of drama feels both too much and too little. This is because its brevity and reticence is contrasted with the richness and weightiness of its implications, in which the thorny issues of memory, trauma and family matters are brought up, yet then suppressed again as historical matters of a most painful and problematic kind. Camera at hand, Tang returns to her parents’ home and insists on an acknowledgement and explanation of the deeply scarring abuse they once inflicted on her as a child: Tang’s father: The past, I try to forget it. Tang: What do you try to forget, father? What is the thing that if you don’t forget, you can’t live till now? Tang’s father: (Silence, then) I won’t ask for your forgiveness, either. It’s been so long ago. And that’s that. More frustratingly than with her self-questionings and wonderings earlier in the documentary, Tang’s ultimate inquiry about the past encounters a gaping void of denial from the other. Instead of delivering her to a final cure, a concluded cleansing and a lucid new identity, Tang’s video journey in the realm of the personal finds itself confronted with a larger hollow of the historical of a particular, postsocialist kind. Withholding facile judgement of her father’s denial of history and memory, because of the unfathomable personal depths that he keeps out of sight, one feels brought face to face with the leviathan of the socialist past, its memory and especially forgetting, which is still powerfully present in the lives of its agents – whether victims, victimisers, witnesses or perhaps a combination of the three, such as Tang’s generation and her parents – even in the form of deliberate silence and absence. Finally evoking a structural contrast between excess and silence and between the presented and the unrepresentable that characterises its entirety, Nightingale succeeds in suggesting the shape, if not the image itself, of the personal and the historical as two deeply embroiled structures of emotion and experience in postsocialist China.   While the subject of home violence and child abuse during the Cultural Revolution and its after effects obviously need more systematic socio-psychological research than this book can possibly entertain, I want to mention that in my interviews with various members of the Forsaken Generation filmmakers, quite a number of them testified to this problem and described their relationships with parents as dominated by tension.18 The abuse that Tang suffered is most likely a second-hand suffering of the violence prevalent in the Cultural Revolution so that the parents – as social beings heavily politicised and abused outside of (and sometimes inside) the home – might tend to vent their repressed situations by imposing severe discipline or inflicting violence within the family and especially towards children. Even if direct testimony seems unorganised and the evidence is too flimsy for us to gain a clear view of such historical trauma played out in

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Performing Bodies  163 the private sphere, Tang’s documentary, through its difficult content and experimental form, is a courageous attempt at making visible an aspect of the past that frequently remains suppressed and neglected as the personal and the private. Although her parents choose to push into oblivion what might be painfully inconvenient memories, Tang finds it hard to come to terms with forgetting, because the violence of the era has eaten into her body and soul by way of its manifestations in the private arena of home and childhood. Using the camera to understand the violence of a historical era that impacted her through a troubled family relationship, Tang manages to go beyond the arena of personal experience and creates out of her dialogues – whether failed or successful – with the others an inter-text and an inter-subjectivity that powerfully suggest the shape of a larger socio-historical field on which her epistemological investigation takes place.   In this light, it is worth mentioning and perhaps unsurprising that documentaries about familial and personal emotional life happen to form a salient subgenre in the non-fictional practice by women. Apart from Nightingale, other examples that probe in the domestic past include More Than One Is Unhappy (Bu kuaile de buzhi yige, dir. Wang Fen, 2000) and Family Video (Jiating luxiang, dir. Yang Tianyi, 2001). Like Tang, both Wang Fen and Yang Tianyi employ the video camera as an investigative device with which they confront the uncomfortable subject of parental relationships (often of a deeply unhappy kind) and their impact on the children. In More Than One Is Unhappy, Wang Fen gives her father a moment by himself: facing the camera alone, the man acknowledges his pain of not being able to live with his true love in this life, very likely a major reason for his long emotional alienation from his legally married spouse, the director’s mother. Family Video is a more insistent inquiry of a domestic drama. Driven by the question about the real cause of her parents’ divorce, Yang Tianyi (aka actress Yang Lina, who plays Zhong Ping in Jia Zhangke’s Platform) undertook an on-camera revisit of her family members and interviewed them about what might have actually happened. Interestingly, it turns out that nobody’s memory or interpretation seems sufficiently reliable. Moving from personal memories to domestic and private spaces, such as those captured by the women filmmakers’ intimate camera, an open, inconclusive dialogue unfolds not only among the filmed subjects, but also between present and past. As with Nightingale, camera and screen become interfaces for communication between the filmmakers, their filmed subjects and the viewers for the articulation of multiple subject positions and subject relations. This theoretical interest in the connection and interchange between family/history, camera/field and self/other continues to characterise some of the most recent and highly innovative non-fictional works by women filmmakers, which, certainly worthy of a much more elaborate discussion elsewhere, points to yet another important approach of cinematic efforts at understanding the interpersonal, historical and social contingencies of individual emotions and identities.19 As we shall see in the discussion to follow, queer filmmakers Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en bring us comparable examples of an even more radical kind with their experimental documentaries on history, the body, women

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164  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema and queer identity, the responsibility of representation and spectatorship, as well as the intricacies of the camera in weaving a dialogue among all these valiant points of cinematic representation.20

Shi Tou: Women, Bodies and Herself In an earlier observational documentary on the subject of lesbian identity, The Box (Hezi, 2001), the director Ying Weiwei chooses to keep her presence invisible behind the camera and documents a lesbian couple’s enunciations in a largely interior and private space isolated from the outside world, hence presenting a quite specifically informed (and motivated) observation of the filmed subjects. In contrast to Ying’s valuable yet problematic attempt to represent homosexuality, Shi Tou subverts the quiet, divided and observational model of communication in her documentaries Dyke March (Nü tongzhi youxingri, 2004) and 50 Minutes of Women (Nüren wushi fenzhong, 2005).21 Through bodily gestures, such as dancing with the lesbian marchers or directing the camera at her own body, Shi breaks and blends boundaries by introducing an embodied vision that not only presents the queer selves in terms of their own definition, but also offers important contributions in surmising and engaging with other social topics, such as women’s status in China.   As Shi’s second documentary, 50 Minutes of Women is a compilation of various shots and impressions of her trip to her girlfriend’s hometown, as well as her daily wandering in Beijing. She takes pains to capture her own reflections – through a handheld camera – in the mirror of the motorcycle on which she rides with her girlfriend. The image presented thus develops in two directions. On the one hand, it rides into the street with the motorcycle and reveals an endless display of street scenes that, as we learn from her girlfriend’s on-camera comments, have changed drastically with numerous disappearances of both old sites and old ways of life. On the other hand, from the reflection in the mirror, we see the filmmaker herself with the street retreating behind her. In a highly pronounced manner, we see Shi’s reflected image, hence reinforcing the documentary’s anchor in a concrete personality.   Shi chooses to bracket 50 Minutes of Women with images of her own body from her paintings and photography (which feature various artistic expressions of the troubled and troubling female body and companionship). The documentary opens with a shot of Shi’s own naked body sitting in a full bathtub, her plump and healthy breasts soaking in water. Not trying to follow a linear narrative at all, the documentary is a collage of personal observations and expressions of womanhood and their encapsulation in the larger cultural framework of contemporary China, where a young lesbian couple can kiss fervently in the subway running beneath Tiananmen Square, and where, simultaneously, women in rural areas still follow traditional rules that foster gender inequality – for instance, they are expected to put on a sadder performance as the crying mourners (in comparison to the male relatives) at a funeral, yet are forbidden to go near the burial site where the funeral actually takes place. Focusing on scenes, figures and

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Performing Bodies  165 bodies of women, young and old, urban and rural, married and single, straight and lesbian – one of the most memorable being the scene of a steaming bathhouse full of naked, warm female bodies – 50 Minutes of Women becomes a bodily contemplation about Chinese women at various moments and in various locales. While making no apparent effort to summarise or theorise these disparate female experiences, Shi Tou expresses her personal attitude through particular choices of representation. For example, apart from her obvious interest in the female elements in a given visual field, she chooses to look at the portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square from an angle never before selected. In contrast to the central, frontal perspective that is often reserved for Mao’s portrait in the politically concentrated space of Tiananmen Square, she diminishes the portrait’s size and impact by framing it behind and between layers of obstruction. Mao’s portrait is looked at from the lower right angle of the frame and seen behind a traditional decorative lion statue and an iron railing; what is more, it is ‘uncomfortably’ framed within the tight space between the lion statue’s belly and paws. The effect is one of deliberate blocking and diminishment. Without comment or transition, the shot cuts to two young girls kissing passionately in an obviously public space, oblivious of others’ attention.   Weapons (Wuqi), a series of oils on canvas by Shi, reinvents the female body through prostheses of weapons, such as guns, bombs and knives, against a background of garishly red flowers in close-up. As Shi explains in an interview, weaponry integrated with a female body as such expresses an embattled attitude towards certain established social rules, as well as towards oneself; it is a sign of courage, candidacy, an expression of strength that will not be broken by reality. ‘Buddha Butterfly’ (Fo die), an oil on canvas from her Butterfly (Yuanyang hudie) series, depicts two women swimming happily, one hugging the other and both turning their heads to smile at the viewer outside the canvas. Similarly, in her painting entitled ‘Female Friends’ (Nüyou), gender and relationship becomes a fluid matter as the two figures, both with plump breasts, walk toward the viewer, one with feminine, long hair, the other with a bald head and a face that appears more ambiguous between male and female. The fact that Shi herself has kept her head shaved for a number of years confirms the bald figure as both self-reflexive and gender-blending.   Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en have worked closely together. Cui’s experimental video Shi Tou and That Nana (Shi Tou he nage Nana, 2005) features Shi, her partner Ming Ming and a few gay characters. Loosely centring on Shi’s claim of having a lover named Nana and her creation of an oil painting, the video links varied characters who travel freely across gender identities and romantic/sexual/ familial relationships and who frequently question and challenge each other in these blended configurations. When Shi starts working on her painting, she has as her model a young ‘woman’ who has recently had a sex change and reinvented her old male self. The fact that this young ‘woman’ is obviously played by a young man creates a mise-en-abyme effect, interchanging and blending the body and gender identity of the character and actor. S/He spends one night with Shi – the lesbian painter, who, in contrast, maintains a crisp neutral-sex look (Figure 5.1).

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Figure 5.1  Shi Tou and That Nana (dir. Cui Zi’en, 2005): Shi Tou in front of her paintings Later on, Shi starts a serious relationship with the model’s lesbian sister (played by Ming Ming and named as such) and claims that Ming Ming is the Nana she sees (and seeks) everywhere. As the three confront each other in intertwined relationships and conflicts as brothers, sisters, lovers – indeed, all these elements are mixed up – the camera, in a continuous long take, darts quickly and curiously between them, sometimes so close as to touch their faces and breathe against them, as if it were a fourth character witnessing and participating in these confrontations and cross-examinations of love, relationship, gender and identity. The camera waxes haptic and bodily as it follows Shi’s painting brush when it dips in paint and works back and forth across the canvas (Figure 5.2).   The camera follows the movement of the brush so closely that it practically mimics dipping on the palette, swerving back to the canvas, nodding and darting as the brush nods and darts on the canvas. The camera approaches, scuttles sideways, pulls out and moves around with freedom, confidence and curiosity in this concentrated yet plural gender space whose multivalent points of communication and convergence, curiously, resemble a spider web that happens to feature in many of Shi’s paintings. Accompanied by a parallel, fluid metamorphosis of gender, identity and relationship that various characters in the video register and represent, Shi’s painting comes into shape in front of the camera. It is a portrait of a strange, luxurious flower growing out of white clouds against a

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Performing Bodies  167 dark sky. The flower’s crown consists of three faces modelled on the visages of Nana, Nana’s transgendered sister/brother and Shi herself, respectively. The three flowering visages are grouped together as a continuum of gender identity, ranging vaguely from masculine (Nana) to neutral (Shi) to feminine (Nana’s sister/brother); however, there is no inner fixed logic between the representation and the ‘true’ identity of the models whatsoever. Much like the fluid camera movement throughout the whole video, the gender identities of the characters and their representations in the painting are suggested to be fluid and dialogic, rather than fixed and monological.

Figure 5.2  Shi Tou and That Nana: A haptic camera   In conversation with this central painting that gradually comes into shape in front of the camera, the walls of Shi’s residence (which are presented in Shi Tou and That Nana as precisely how they are in Shi’s real life) are covered with her paintings and photography that feature nude female bodies, shaved scalps, babies, flowers, spider webs, corn, water and fish. The movements she chooses to depict for the female bodies are mainly striding and swimming. Comparable to the famous oil on canvas series Bloodline: The Big Family discussed in Chapter 1, in which Zhang Xiaogang reinterprets childhood memory with generic countenances and washed-out colours rediscovered in typical family photos from the socialist era, Shi also re-imagines the past through reinventing the family photo. For example, in a family portrait modelled on traditional poses – with the man

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168  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema sitting and the woman standing – she inserts herself into the picture by having a bald figure modelled in her own image sit and pose like a ‘man’ (or perhaps it is more precise to say that Shi keeps the gender identity of the sitting person deliberately ambiguous and open for interpretation). Such an image, along with several others in a similar fashion, is both a family portrait and a depiction of friendship and camaraderie, which happen to be two genres of photography most prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, as Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings hauntingly testify. Shi’s play with the ambiguity of the message – be it gender identity or political stance – opens up socialist individual identity and human relationships for more nuanced interpretations.22 The suggestive notion of a lesbian or transgendered Red Guard or Little Red Guard is doubtless powerful in sabotaging the uniformly ‘clean’ image of high socialism and its heroes.

Cui Zi’en: Embodying Realities and Performing Identities When it comes to a more personal and individualised connection to the past and how it filters into one’s observation of present reality, it is interesting to find out that Cui Zi’en, though often regarded as the enfant terrible of contemporary Chinese cinema, because of the highly unconventional, rebellious contents, protagonists and styles of his work, was surprisingly a ‘mainstream’ figure in his childhood through late teens as he grew up in northeast China in the sixties and seventies. He was always the best student in school, always excelling in exams and working constantly as the little red cadre in the schools he attended. However, his definite awakening from such official mainstream experience began in the late seventies, as he recounts: When I looked back and realized that an age, an age belonging to childhood had ended . . . I looked back and felt everything in the past looked so pale. Empty of any content, that kind of feeling, very empty, very very empty, really with nothing at all. Nothing.23 While Cui has started working on his memories and reflections of the past in greater detail, one might link his works thus far that mostly concentrate on the present and the future (for instance, an imagined, science fiction future with a queer twist) with that early sense of a void.24 The apparent nullity of his early sense of being and his identity – be it in historical, experiential, political or gendered terms – might have contributed greatly to his later investment in exploring and representing plural and fluid identities. Compared to Shi Tou and many others, Cui as a film scholar and filmmaker has more systematically and consciously challenged the boundaries between documentary and performance, non-fiction and fiction, private and public spaces, as well as identities, in his experimental video works. In one of his earliest videos, The Pros and Cons of the WC (Gongce zhengfang fanfang, 2001), Cui sets up a performance: a scripted comical debate between two sides over questions such as whether male and female public toilets should be separated or integrated, a topic that obviously

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Performing Bodies  169 points to the problematic of the conventional gender divide. Instead of advocating a ‘third sex’, Cui claims: (E)very single person might have a sexuality of his or her own. I’m totally against the concept of sex. This can be seen in my science fiction series: Earthlings travel to a moon of Jupiter; they are required to present their passports and visas. The beings there discover to their surprise that the earthlings have a section called ‘sex’ on their passports. The distinction between male and female is totally beyond their comprehension.25 What Cui is interested in exploring is the relationship and possibility of communication between homosexuals, with heterosexuals and where and how the issue of responsibility evolves and subsumes such interactions.26 All of Cui’s video works provoke a rethinking of genre and gender-blending, in terms of their stylistic as well as thematic choices: the mixing of professional and non-professional actors, minimalist lighting and make-up, indefinite spaces (indoor and outdoor scenes that hang between real and set-up spaces) and the numerous transgendered, sometimes trans-terrestrial, characters and stories. Especially prominent examples include Enter the Clowns (Choujue dengchang, 2002), Feeding Boys, Ayaya (Aiyaya, qu buru, 2002), The Narrow Path (Wu yü, 2003), Night Scene (Yejing, 2004), The Old Testament (Jiuyue, 2002), Refrain (Fuge, 2005), Star Appeal (Xingxing xiang xi xi, 2004) and Withered in a Blooming Season (Shaonian huacao huang, 2005).   Among these, Night Scene is a particularly intriguing piece that straddles fiction and documentary. Cui states in the credits that all but the scholars and social workers are fictive; however, the video’s various realistic aesthetic features point to an extremely prominent sense of documentary. Built on a minimal storyline of a young boy named Yang Yang who discovers his father’s homosexuality, Night Scene completely eschews conventional linear narrative, as well as any stylistic strategy such as dissolves or inter-titles, which might be used to smooth the flow of the narrative.27 Instead, it wilfully cuts back and forth between scripted scenarios (for instance, Yang Yang follows his father and slaps his father’s lover; Yang Yang becomes attracted to a young man called Haobin and hangs out with him at school), ‘statements’ from various young male prostitutes called ‘money boys’, opinions of scholars sitting at a dinner table after a meal and entertainment performances in a gay nightclub. The make-up, if any, is realistic; the performance, if any, is extremely naturalistic (with accents and an undeniable lack of professionalism); the lighting is completely natural. Except for the electronic, squeaking noises that accompany, at times, the money boys’ statements, Cui mainly uses sounds recorded on location.28   Night Scene presents the personal accounts of various money boys – brief stories of their personal trajectories (for instance, their discovery of, and attitude towards, their own homosexuality, how they found themselves in this money boy business), their attitudes towards prostitution, their satisfactions, dissatisfactions and desires, scenes of these young men at work in the nightclub and

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170  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema so on. Juxtaposed with these ‘insider’ accounts are the observations of scholars and social workers, who speak about their understanding of the money-boy phenomenon and the status quo of the Chinese gay community and prostitution, one prominent figure being Li Yinhe – a renowned sociologist in China known for her outspoken advocacy of gay rights and a more enlightened and democratic understanding of gender and sex behaviour.29 Curiously, although the accounts of the money boys and those of the scholars and social workers are similarly presented through documentary-like realistic presentations, Cui makes it clear in the opening credits that all except the scholars are played by actors – or at least to be perceived as such – and that the money boys’ stories are not real in the documentary sense.   While one wonders whether one purpose of the disclaimer is to protect the young ‘actors’ who might run into legal troubles if they are identified as practising prostitution in real life, Cui’s insistence on presenting both the analytical, observational, expert opinions of the scholars and the enacted, experiential, personal expressions of the money boys utilising the same naturalistic lighting and featuring the same location sounds tends to make a clear differentiation between fiction and non-fiction difficult. As a matter of fact, while the scholars speak in more or less standard Mandarin Chinese, the money boys talk with different and heavy accents, revealing their ‘roots in elsewhere’ status and the temporariness of their life in metropolitan Beijing – a feature that often distinguishes independent documentaries in their naturalistic capturing of contemporary Chinese reality. In that sense, the presentation of the money boys is at least as real, if not more so, as the enunciation of the experts.   The young boys discuss their sentiments regarding being involved in the money boy profession, at times providing details of their sexual experiences, either in the profession or in their personal romantic life; they also speak about their hopes of finding an ideal lover. For example, one young man says: ‘my ideal one would be a guy from the city of Taiyuan, tall, big, with a good tan, who loves eating sour stuff and noodles’. Such details of an almost mundane nature flesh out the identities of both the enunciator and his imagined lover. While such personal self-presentations are hard to be exclusively categorised as responses to interview questions, confessions or, in the fictive framework, as ‘unmotivated’ monologues and performances – they are more a blend of all these – Cui presents them often in frontal shots framed in medium shots, creating a formal impression of serious statements, an effect that generates an interesting contrast to the somewhat ‘scandalous’ subject matter that these statements enunciate. What is more, the spaces in which such statements take place are as disparate and undecorated as the characters: outside an anonymous office or classroom building, inside a rented room, in an alley, in bed, in a bar and so on, all being temporary and transient spaces that seem to connect to the enunciators. We are not sure whether the relationship between these spaces and characters is arbitrary or generic or whether each enunciator is a student, a white-collar office professional, a jobless youngster, a male prostitute, a passer-by or a combination of these identities. All these young men speak about their experiences or

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Performing Bodies  171 attitudes towards prostitution as if they were insiders and participants in the profession. The spaces look very realistic and are accompanied by each location’s ambient noise (most often that of city traffic), which definitely tones down the ‘contrivedness’ of the supposedly fictive identities of the young money boys.   Along with such a realistic presentation of presumably fictive sequences, Cui blends in highly stylised elements. For example, Night Scene opens with an abrupt, swerving zoom-in shot accompanied by indistinct, electronically created metallic chiming, creating an impression that the camera flies onto the scene from outer space (reminding one of Cui’s The Narrow Path and Star Appeal, both of which depict relationships between earthlings and extraterrestrials). What is then revealed is a huge fish tank in which several big tropical fish swim by languidly, their tails slowly moving to reveal a human mouth behind the tank (Figures 5.3 and 5.4).

Figure 5.3  Night Scene (dir. Cui Zi’en, 2004): Queer identities and fish skins [i]   A young man is speaking about himself from behind the tank. As he speaks, the fish keep swimming across in front of the camera in close-up, so prominently that one could stop and study the bluish-grey pattern of their skin or count their scales. The apparently arbitrary combination of the fish with a young gay man’s self-presentation, while certainly resonating with the fish in Shi Tou’s paintings, points to something poetically suggestive. In his novel Pseudo-Science Fiction Stories (Wei kehuan gushi, 2003), Cui records in first person the extraterrestrial travels of an earthling named Mulan – an iconic name borrowed from the folklore

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172  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

Figure 5.4  Night Scene: Queer identities and fish skins [ii] Mulan that famously blurs the boundaries between gender identities.30 Cui’s Mulan travels between the Earth and the other planets and is re-educated by different extraterrestrial cultures and customs over issues like gender, relationships and family; occasionally, he also serves to corrupt the outer space societies by introducing Earthly hierarchies and systems. In ‘Endangered Species Rule!’, a Pardosaur on the Planet Ekaluse engineers a faction fight after being enlightened by Mulan’s Earthly wisdom and manages to rape and kill two of its fellow creatures, whose skins, however, remain after the murder: The skin of humans is softer. When a human is raped and killed, the rapist often feasts on every piece of the body, leaving nothing behind. The Pardosaurs, by contrast, have a skin that is so thick that Pardosaurs themselves, even with their sharp, strong teeth, cannot fully chew.   So when a Pardosaur is raped and killed, the skin is simply left on the ground unconsumed, which I think is a waste of resources. As their designated architect, I told the Ekalusians to dry the Pardosaur skin and use it to replace the banana leaves they used to build their roofs. This way, when the rainy season comes, their houses, classrooms, and theatres will no longer leak. But the skins of Pardosaurs #1 and #2 [who had been killed by Pardosaur #3] become available only after we have finish[ed] building everything, so it seems like there is no use for them. Zhe does not want to simply throw them away, and he suggests that we can hang them in the theatre, one to the left and the

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Performing Bodies  173 other to the right. His reasons sound quite interesting to me. He explains that, every time his gaze falls upon these two pieces of smooth-looking Pardosaur skin – with tails – he sees the scene of their rape and murder reenacted, as if the two pieces of Pardosaur skin were two movie screens.31 So the skins of the killed Pardosaurs, like a documentary film, are hung up and serve as an important interface to register the past, with its damage and pain. The space in which they are put on display thus becomes an exhibition hall of memories where only those who know how to look, like the character Zhe, can see what has been inflicted, experienced and written on them. In Night Scene, the eerily beautiful and prominent fish body both blocks and helps communicate the money boy’s personal story. Beyond the colourful fish body, inside the nightclub, fancy drag performances are being performed. Young male bodies covered with cheap bling-bling material and bikinis are staging and imagining themselves to be females or something more obscure. The camera acts both visually and haptically, travelling both near and far around the performing bodies: arms, legs, chests and groins. Instead of being presented as one consistent cinematic scene, the nightclub performances are interpolated with self-presentations of money boys and social workers. The performing bodies onscreen, instead of being offered as flattened containers for visual consumption, are constantly linked back to the subjectivities sustaining and assessing them.   While Cui Zi’en presents enacted statements of gay money boys in frontal visual terms such as those analysed above, he sometimes chooses to present the supposedly ‘objective’ opinions of real social workers in a slightly more dramatic and idiosyncratic manner. In a scene in which a social worker speaks of stories he hears about the money boys and their clients, the camera frames him sitting in front of (or perhaps behind) a fish tank similar to that which we see at the beginning of the film. He appears on the left side of the frame, speaking into the fish tank, not looking at the camera, and the fish tank takes up more screen space than he does. As he speaks of his encounters during social work and his views on male prostitution, the camera looks at him, moves in and pulls out and then moves to reveal the lower part of his body. What is often expected to be the ‘more’ objective presentation of non-fictional information is framed as subjective hearsay – the effect of which is perhaps less about debunking the social worker’s story than pointing to the subjectively conditioned status and possible contrivance of any statements regarding others.   In Cui’s video repertoire, the human body as well as the human skin features as a significant agent and register of meanings. While this topic deserves a much fuller discussion than can be provided here, it might be helpful to point out two examples that are directly relevant to the current discussion. In Enter the Clowns, a video that explores and radicalises the fluidity of gender and family relationships, Xiao Bo (Yu Bo) interacts with a transgendered father/mother (played by Cui himself) lying on his deathbed. The dying parent regrets the fact that he has never been able to breastfeed his son with his own milk. In what Chris Berry calls ‘a move that sums up the perverse reversals and recombinations of family and

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174  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema sexual norms that (dis)order so much of Cui’s work’, Cui, as the dying parent, reveals to Xiao Bo his/her last wish: that s/he could taste his milk. Full of love and sadness, Xiao Bo turns his back to the camera, unzips and tearfully allows his father/mother to suck him off.32   Another powerful example of the way in which the body is used in provocative rebellion against conventional rules is found in The Narrow Path. An eightyminute video filmed in two long takes, The Narrow Path is about four extraterrestrial beings who have, respectively, fallen from Venus, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto and who are forced into colonisation deals with the earthlings who abduct them. In the end, only one innocent, fearless and trusting earthling (also played by Yu Bo) is willing to leave with the aliens for their planets. Throughout the video, the four aliens, all played by young male actors, walk down a mountain road in bluish morning mist, their bodies naked but desexualised as they appear elongated within the slightly compressed frames. Significantly, the innocence and trustworthiness of the only uncorrupted earthling is expressed through his gesture of stripping himself off and happily walking away with the aliens, naked as them. Through unconventional solutions, such as those presented in Enter the Clowns and The Narrow Path, Cui transforms the body – sexy or sexless, human or animal, male or female, filial or parental – into a powerful receiver, container, giver and signifier of radical love for the forbidden and unquestioning faith in the extraterrestrial, perhaps two extreme forms of the queer other. For Cui, the body is irreducibly physical as the victim and performer of rape, violence, love, erotic desire and memory that has been written into the flesh. On the other hand, the body also seems to be the necessary nexus and vehicle through which to aspire for understanding and salvation beyond the physical and conventional barriers of identities and cultural meanings.   As in Shi Tou’s works, the body also becomes a powerful tool with which to ridicule official historiography. Apart from dance entertainment and a drag fashion show, the money boy nightclub run by Yang Yang’s father also presents a scathingly subversive, gay version of The White-haired Girl ballet performance – one of the eight revolutionary model operas officially choreographed, orchestrated and promulgated as the utmost type of propaganda and entertainment during the Cultural Revolution. However, in the postsocialist, commercialised and individualised space of the gay nightclub, the old socialist propaganda show is usurped from body to soul and turned into a hilarious (almost verging on vulgar) performance of hitherto invisible identities in, and relationships with, official socialist history. The repressed and abused White-haired Girl, whose rebellious spirit is nourished by the guidance of the Party and Mao, is now radically re-presented by a cross-dressed male performer. With a face caked with ridiculously heavy make-up (in a strangely faithful imitation of the dramatic make-up in the original version) and a body obviously puffed up with fake breasts, a queer version of socialist historiography and performance is being restaged in a space created by, and belonging to, a community of Chinese that had either zero or heavily disguised visibility in the official and mainstream mediascape. Later, a more radical gesture of ridiculing official history appears in a parodic

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Performing Bodies  175 skit: a Red Army soldier lies unconscious by the roadside, due to insufficient nutrition, fatigue and possibly wounds from battles during the Long March; a male performer with bursting fake breasts (made possible by inserting two water-filled balloons into his outfit) walks onto the stage, exclaims ‘her’ alarm and tries to comfort the swooned hero with nothing else but ‘her’ liquids – the ‘milk’ (or water) contained in the fake breasts. Wild screams and laughter break out from the audience; a familiar revolutionary history moment is turned upside down with relentless humour and sarcasm. The theme of feeding has been heavily exploited by official media in promoting the individual-less, public relationship between the Party, the Army and the People: the Party protects and guides the People, who nourish the Army, which is led by the Party. One way or another, the Party (and Mao) is the original, central and final nexus of political authority and historical legitimacy. Yet with Cui, in his depiction of an alternative postsocialist Chinese identity in the performative space of the gay nightclub, the propagandistic metaphor of feeding is returned to its extremely private, personal, physical and biological dimensions. Similar examples of him exploring the feeding theme can also be found in The Old Testament and Feeding Boys, Ayaya, the latter being a video filmed and finished at around the same time as Night Scene.   In many of Cui’s video works, there is rarely any establishing shot of a scale larger than the immediate space, whether private or public, in which the characters (mostly gay) find themselves. Cui presents alternative, often neglected or shunned, spaces in an almost mundanely matter-of-fact style. In Night Scene, he presents outdoor public spaces in broad daylight and situates the queer characters at the centre of these spaces as they tell their own stories. Natural lighting, sound recorded on location, heavily ‘unrefined’ accents and frequently ‘awkward’ acting are compounded by narrative dissipation, which is achieved through utilising an editing strategy paralleling, and intermingling, the various lines from a plethora of stories and scenes. All of these stylistic choices manage to create noises, conflicts and fissures on visual, audio and narrative levels, further blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, imagination and reality, opinion and document, queer and straight, self and other. To add to such an irreducibly individualised and embodied vision, Cui frequently chooses to appear in his own video works, much as Shi Tou does in hers, often as a sidekick character that offers one or two sarcastic remarks, creating yet another layer of defamiliarisation.  In Night Scene, Cui appears briefly as an apparently innocent passer-by who is stopped and kissed, with little resistance, by the frustrated Yang Yang, who has just discovered his father’s homosexuality. In a wintry park in Beijing, amidst a drab picture of a dusty path and leafless bushes and trees, Cui himself appears, happily walking down a path from behind the bushes in the centre of the frame. He wears an almost outlandishly big, downy, fur-fringed and hooded black overcoat, matched with a pair of red pants, and looks very warm and gay. He is carrying a stuffed toy lamb in his arms. However, Yang Yang, out of frustration, brusquely stops this buoyant figure and snatches the lamb away from Cui. After some nonsensical insistence that the lamb belongs to him, Yang Yang grabs

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176  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Cui and kisses him. Cui succumbs to this violent intimacy, in a trusting manner similar to Xiao Bo’s choosing to unclothe himself and leave with the aliens in The Narrow Path. For Cui, a Catholic queer Chinese intellectual and filmmaker who sees himself as occupying more than one single category of such identities, the only truly mutual understanding and deep communication between earthling and alien, straight and queer, self and other, emerges from the unreserved embrace of differences.33   Through Shi and Cui’s stylised visual representations of identities ranging across and intermingling categories such as women, gays, lesbians, prostitutes, migrants and the filmmakers themselves, what comes to be inscribed is not a passive body or singular subjectivity, but the concrete embodiment of discrete identities and multiple realities. Identity and reality are intricately connected to enunciating and performing subjects of mixed registers, on whom the forces of history, politics, gender and certainly class and ethnicity converse and interact, cooperate and collide. In each case, what is always in the foreground and in focus is the highly embodied vision of the minority filmmaker, who, instead of erasing traces of representation by holding his or her breath behind the camera or cutting them out during editing, always returns the film or video to its performer(s) and vision-provider(s), as well as to himself or herself. Such an embodied and implicated vision would doubtless contribute to the further maturing of various representational technologies in a quickly changing China, where individual identities, as an increasingly relevant subject, make greater demands on respect and reflexivity in representing others and (re)discovering oneselves.

Play with the Body of History: Experimental and Digital Media Independent filmmakers and artists give expression to contemporary Chinese identities as historically contingent subjectivities. In the process they also challenge and rewrite the underlying official and mainstream historiography that inform misrepresentations of those identities. This latter mission sees particularly impressive fruition in the playful subversions made possible by experimental and digital media, which demonstrate a curiously common interest in the issue of physicality and performance.   Take photography, for example. As a domain of historical imaging and cultural imagination exclusive to professional photojournalists hired at state-run media institutions and to a very few privileged ones as a luxurious hobby, Chinese photography between 1949 and 1979 tended to ‘[follow] the exacting standards of an absolute prescription concerning gesture, expression, and vision that left little room for individual interpretation’.34 Starting in the eighties, when the camera became widely accessible as a commodity and photography was recognised as a profession, as well as a means for artistic, personal expression, a series of critical experiments proposed to confront the rigid rules that determined the framing and posing of subjects. In the new experimental photography by contemporary artists such as Hong Hao (b. 1965), Liu Zheng (b. 1969), Song Yongping (b. 1961), Wang Qingsong (b. 1966) and Zhuang Hui (b. 1963), established icons, such as

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Performing Bodies  177 the theatrical gestures and postures from propagandistic entertainment, Peking Opera and the official socialist cinema, are usurped, re-imagined and re-imaged to communicate a perspective that is uniquely placed in the physicality of the human body (frequently that of the artist himself).35 Resulting from this mixture of physicality and fantasy is a strong sense of the felt presence of a specifically embodied critical subjectivity.   For instance, the work of Liu Zheng seems to have evolved from traditional realist portraiture of disenfranchised figures, such as workers, peasants, miners, convicts and strippers, to express a more radical fantasising of historical legacies. His photography series Four Beauties scandalises the legend of the four ancient Chinese beauties by having models – women with a physique that obviously does not conform to accepted standards of beauty – deliberately pose nude as the legendary historical figures.36 For his part, Hong Hao inserts his own person into his photographs of contemporary China, either as a tour guide that points out directions or sights for foreign tourists (Beijing Tour Guide series, 1999–2000) or as a nouveau-riche white-collar professional (‘Hello, Mr. Hong’ and ‘Come in Please, Mr. Hong’, 1998). The effectiveness of these works relies on the provocative centrality of the physical attributes of the represented figures: the obvious non-beauty, the apparent incongruence and the excessive similitude (such as of Hong Hao, who we know is neither a tour guide nor a white-collar professional). In his turn and in a more elaborate and consistent manner, Wang Qingsong brings us digital photography work and offers a rich figural as well as figurative archive, in which China’s past and present are re-imaged through the artist’s personal and physical performance.   Wang Qingsong manipulates his own image and appears in person in a series of digital ‘photographic mises-en-scène’ created since 1997.37 For example, he uses his own face and body in a strange postsocialist translation of familiar character tropes: he appears as two soldiers giving and receiving medals in ‘Old and Young Soldiers’ (1997), as an inspired young intellectual standing in front of a portrait of Lu Xun in ‘Take up the Pen, Fight till the End’ (1997), as a prisoner in ‘Prison’ (1998), as a thinker in ‘Thinker’ (1998), as a defeated military commander in the Another Battle series (2001) and as an organiser or attendant of grand-sounding international forums and conferences in ‘Forum’ (2001). In these photographs, the obviousness of the artist’s identity immediately strikes an ironic effect of defamiliarisation, making one laugh at (and with) the visible incongruence between figure and setting and also wonder about the critical underpinnings that inform the current unusual arrangement. Another Battle, for instance, stages a scathing commentary on the historical irrelevance of a typical socialist education that was once inundated with messages and images of patriotism, heroism, war and glorified violence. To show the out-of-date status of socialist teaching, Wang places tin cans of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the photographic frame, emphasising these icons of capitalism and consumerism not clearly as the enemy target (as a strict socialist ideology would indicate), but as the neutral, implicating background of a battle that soldiers of socialism are fighting. Born into a China of the mid-1960s, Wang as a historical entity

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178  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema has been directly influenced, like his contemporaries, by images from socialist propaganda movies such as Railroad Guerrilla (Tiedao youjidui, 1955), Mine Warfare (Dilei zhan, 1962) and Battle on Shangganling Mountain (Shang gan ling, 1956). Much like the young character Ma Xiaojun in the film In the Heat of the Sun, the iconoclastic artist has once dreamed of becoming a socialist soldier or hero.38 For him and his fellow ‘soldiers’, however, the familiar cinematic and historical battlefield against Western imperialism has now become a trickier field, where defence lines are strung with Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Red Bull cans. Bandaged, bloody and exhausted, as seen in Another Battle, Wang and his fellow soldiers assume poses of fighting, lounging and being caught or executed. While it is not completely clear if Wang and his fellow soldiers are fighting for or against Coco-Cola and its like, those symbols of global capitalism are everywhere in the background of the images, rendering the human figures ambiguous agents and victims of a will that is not their own.   Apart from such direct participation as a ‘character’ in the restaged scenes, Wang Qingsong also experiments with a more subtle metanarrative position as an onlooker who observes from outside the diegesis of the photographic mise-en-scène. In one of his most famous pieces, ‘Night Revels of Old Li’ (2000), Wang appropriates one of the most accomplished pieces in traditional Chinese figure painting, ‘Night Revel of Han Xizai’ (by Gu Hongzhong, 10th century), by replacing the central figure, Han Xizai, a disillusioned high official in the South Tang Dynasty, with Li Xianting, a highly renowned art critic and curator from contemporary China. Restaging four colourful party scenes and using modern figures, such as women wearing gaudy stockings and see-through underwear, Wang enacts a provocative vision of a state of persistent hopelessness experienced by Chinese intellectuals, who, in ancient and contemporary times alike, are unable to work freely for their ideas or ideals and resort to physical debauchery and materialistic indulgence for some degree of independence. Of particular interest to our discussion is the arrangement that, in all of the four scenes that are digitally combined into one continuous long scroll in imitation of the ancient Chinese scroll painting, Wang makes it a point to both include and exclude himself. The staged party, with women playing musical instruments and offering massages and men enjoying such sights and services, forms a self-complete narrative structure, in which the female bodies and gestures are perfectly answered by male gazes and reactions. Wang’s appearance, though, is of a different order. At a distance from the party crowds, the artist sits either against drapes in the background or half blocked by a trash bin and a screen. He looks at the party not from a higher vantage point; instead, he observes it either at the same eye level as the other figures or by looking up at them, lying on his stomach. Alone, the figure of the artist constitutes an independent point of observation that takes in the party narrative with inquisitive curiosity and placid contemplation. Having the famous art critic and his performative entourage re-enact a scene from traditional art, and then having himself perform a role of observation of that re-enactment, Wang achieves at least two levels of metanarrative commentary through his richly layered text. As the author, he is at the

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Performing Bodies  179 same time part of what he creates and then not quite so, enacting a complicated involved yet distanced relationship with history and representation that we have observed throughout this book.   The bystander/observer stance is also adapted in Wang’s triptych entitled ‘Past, Present, and Future’ (2001), particularly in the two pieces representing the past and the present. Appropriating official revolutionary sculptures that are found in many major cities in China and depict the Chinese people (and especially the proletariat) in group portraits struggling for or facing a common prospect together, Wang covers seventeen models with mud, golden and silver powder and has them assume poses and appearances as soldiers, the proletariat and present-day white-collar professionals, thus attempting to represent the country’s shift from the mud-covered revolutionary era all the way to the postsocialist, modern present and even future.39 Again, the artist appears in his work as a bystander looking up at the group sculpture he has created. Visually, Wang also manipulates the size of the figures in the images so that the sculpturelooking groups appear colossal in contrast to his own diminished single figure, emphasising the status of his act of looking as both humble and outstanding. In all these works, Wang Qingsong indefatigably explores the relationship between past and present by appropriating styles from history, ancient or recent, and prying open the space between experience and representation to insert his own calculated physicality, which is practically a figuration of his critical subjectivity. Not only do previous forms of representation become useful in highlighting the relevance of the past to the present, the current reality of China also gains a historical dimension, as it is reprocessed by Wang’s critical gaze, along whose trajectory we see the connections – although perhaps depressingly so – between different eras in history.   Most recently, in 2010, Wang presented yet another grander-than-ever-before piece called ‘The History of Monuments’, a 42-metre-long photograph using 200 models, all covered with mud, to stage various scenes from world and Chinese history, art and contemporary life. In this iconoclastic imitation of official historiography – its original model being the Monument of the Chinese People Heroes on Tiananmen Square – Wang juxtaposes heroic and ordinary, fictive and real figures in the style of socialist sculptural monuments and unmistakably caps it with his personal gesture. At the head of the scroll-like piece is the title ‘The History of Monuments, authored by Wang Qingsong’ (Lishi fengbei, Wang Qingsong ti), whereby the artist indicates a more personal account of history and inscribes his authorship in a place that was often reserved for the endorsing signatures of national leaders and revolutionary heroes.   Socialist China under Mao is a period inundated with uniform bodies, poses, gestures and their representations. Familiar examples of these are found, for example, in the tearful faces and waving arms holding the Little Red Book on Tiananmen Square or the famous ‘jet plane’ pose imposed on the so-called class enemy at denunciation meetings nationwide, the pose named as such because the victims’ arms were painfully flung behind, while their heads were pushed forwards, almost touching the ground. Both Zhou Hongxiang (b. 1969) and Li

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180  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Ning (b. 1972), two artists respectively based in Shanghai and Jinan, Shandong Province, choose to restage such bodily signs in their critique of the amnesia of the past. Having non-professional actors and dancers strike the poses and assume the gestures from the Cultural Revolution (even including shouting slogans from the era in Zhou’s piece), their experimental videos, The Red Flag Flies – A Movie without Story (Hongqi piao, dir. Zhou Hongxiang, 2002)40 and 1966/1986/2006 (dir. Li Ning, 2006), place apparently outmoded enactments in an uncaring present, such as near a busy freeway.41   Cao Kai, a Nanjing-based artist and critic, made a compilation film called Summer of 1969 (Liu jiu nian zhi xia, 2002), in which he reassembles fragments of archival footage from around 1969 – the year when he was born – and reorganises them according to a graphic principle based on the physicality of bodies and objects.42 Streamlining images of assembly meetings and crowds from locales as diverse as Latin America, China, Vietnam, Hungary, Paris and the Woodstock Festival, Cao categorises them into series of feverish faces, raised arms, slogan boards, as well as trumpet-shaped loudspeakers. Mixing the ‘gilded portraits’ of historical idols of the sixties, such as Mao, Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Malcolm X, Pol Pot and John Lennon, with ‘Red Guards in China, students of Mai Rouge Movement, Rock maniacs of Woodstock, Hippies, guerrillas in the jungles of Latin America, Vietnam Communists, and refugees from Prague’, in Cao’s own words, the hierarchy existent in conventional representation between the great men in power and the anonymous crowds in awe seems attenuated in such an emphasis on their comparable physicality.43 Great or small, they are all subjects of history. In addition to this equalising refiguration of historical subjects, Cao begins and ends his experimental film with the statement: ‘summer 1969, I was six months old, soundly asleep within the red Iron Curtain . . .’ and a superimposition of his own photo as a smiling infant, thus applying a personal imprint onto the official history and collective memory, as well as confirming his own status as a distinctive (though belated) subject of the historic sixties.44   As noted by Cao Kai, Zhou Xiaohu (b. 1960) transfigures the human faces, expressions, gestures and bodily movements familiar in official media representations into miniaturised and uniformly mud-coloured clay figures.45 In his mixed media project Utopian Machine (2002), Zhou presents such clay figures through both installations and stop-motion animation to demonstrate the status of the people as mannequins at the hands of official media. Recreating familiar figures and sites that range from Yan’an, the People’s Congress and court trials to diplomatic greetings and CCTV News, Zhou bares the mechanism of official media.46 Zhou’s observance of the symbolic parallel existing between politics and games sees a more direct rendition in The Gooey Gentleman (2002), a stop-frame digital animation in which the artist uses his own body as a canvas/stage and his own person as a character. Zhou paints a woman figure on his belly and performs interactions (through arm and hand movements) with the drawn woman figure. The two hug, kiss, quarrel and even sword-fight with each other through various painted expressions and gestures. Deceivingly simple and engagingly

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Performing Bodies  181 provocative, unfolding above the artist’s navel is a physically embodied drama of the relationship between man and woman, a real person and a drawn figure or, more precisely, to use Zhou’s own words, a power game between ‘the artist and his subjects’.47   A highly innovative and elaborate digital exploration of physicality and politics is found in the works of Feng Mengbo (b. 1966). As early as 1996, after two series of computer-based paintings that mix icons of communist Chinese history, such as Mao and the Long March, with contemporary commercial cultural artifacts, like taxis and Coca-Cola, Feng created an interactive CD-ROM foregrounding a notably personal position towards history and memory.48 Called My Private Album, this project is based on images originally collected for a documentary project. Juxtaposing official history with the life experiences of three generations in his family – grandparents, parents, Feng and his wife – Feng draws images from a wide variety of sources, including family photo albums, old gramophone records, pages from used books, old movies, drawings, paintings, postcards, his own digital movies and other memorabilia depicting the Chinese culture of the late twentieth century. These materials are processed on a Mac computer and projected onto a screen fringed with curtains to give the presentation the character of a miniature theatre.49 During exhibitions, the project invites viewers and visitors to choose and control the order in which they experience the sequences of the artist’s personal life, thus introducing the subjective volition of the player to further implode the linear flow of official history and conventional time.50   In 1997, Feng created a more radical interactive CD-ROM game installation: Taking Mt. Doom by Strategy. Using forty-two clips from the model opera film Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, the project mixes Cultural Revolution media heritage with the game Doom and strongly expresses Feng’s criticism of both socialist and contemporary media as ‘full of fighting about power, blood, and heroes’.51 Inviting the user to relive, as well as manipulate, the narrative and logic of high socialism, Feng places the present-day user in an imaginary space that blends past and present, media and experience, as well as criticism and entertainment. The socialist legacy is both embodied and disembodied in such a playful experience of the past.   Feng’s web-based animation Phantom Tales (2001) – consisting of three parts, ‘$1’, ‘The Bloody History of the Three Stones’ and ‘The Technology of Slide Shows’ – is a more direct reassessment of the rhetoric of violence and class antagonism to which he and his generation were once exposed.52 ‘$1’ (Yikuai yinyuan), for example, personalises the reading experience of the same-titled Chinese picture book by introducing a ‘camera-eye’ into the narrative: an iris – a moving round mask used in filmmaking to open or close a scene or to emphasise a detail – zooms in and out, sweeps across plates of images scanned from the said book, moves back and forth between a raised fist and an indignant peasant’s face and focuses on the sad or angry expressions of peasant characters. At times, flashes of light or repetitions of the same image are added to dramatise the intense emotion supposedly felt by the viewer or reader. As Feng explains, his goal in conceptualising Phantom Tales is to ‘look at the images from these stories in

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182  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema detail, to think about why, as children, his generation was repeatedly exposed to terrible stories, and to question what the violence meant to them then’.53 Animating the original propagandistic still images with an inquisitive vision, whose expressive and subjective movement communicates mixed feelings of fascination and incredulousness, Feng re-enacts his reading experience in childhood and manages to restructure generic propagandistic images and messages within the frame of a personalised vision. History becomes concrete and subject to independent reassessment.   For the second artwork in the series, ‘The Bloody History of the Three Stones’ – another generic propagandistic narrative about the class struggle between workers and the bourgeois – Feng creates an effect of alienation by imposing a technical noise over the choir singing ‘Internationale’: that of the clicking sound of slides being shifted and changed. The resultant cognitive awareness of the technical noise thus pulls the viewer out of the narrative and music and reminds him that this is another lesson being taught. The third piece, ‘The Technology of Slide Shows’, bares the mechanism of propaganda production through a more radical strategy. In creating this piece, Feng drew inspirations from The Painting, Editing, and Exhibition of Slide Shows (Huandengpian de bianhui yu fangying, 1982), a book that ‘documented methods developed by the People’s Liberation Army for creating animation effects with slide projections, which, in the absence of television and films, provided a major source of entertainment during Feng’s youth’.54 Innovatively, he lays bare the production process involved in political teaching – for instance, charts, diagrams, instructions on how to create characters of various sizes and proper proportions – and juxtaposes it with a propagandistic broadcast soundtrack of Fish and Water, a generic radio programme familiar to the ears of those who grew up in the sixties and seventies. The story compares the relationship between the army and the people as close and interdependent as that between fish and water.   The beginning of Feng’s piece is particularly interesting in its digital ‘fleshing’ out of an abstract lesson. A chart indicates the various muscles in the human body and their respective technical names. Following this is a picture of a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with the same arrows pointing to the various muscles in his body, the proper proportion of which is crucial to the credibility and realism of the figure thus produced. A number of headshots quickly shift to show similar proportions and depictions of a human skull and then a peasant’s head. Interestingly, in this process of deconstruction and analysis, the highly politicised body – of soldiers, peasants and workers – is restored to its biological, as well as representational, dimension.55 While the narrative and the voice on the soundtrack retain a typical revolutionary zeal, the accompanying images progress in their own cool, distanced and technical cycle. Everything presented turns out to be dissectible, analysable and controllable: lines, shapes, colours, expressions, muscles and veins. The myth of political representation is shown to be the result of a process of meticulous technical construction. While the soundtrack has its own self-complete narrative, the images are generic drawings extracted from various children’s picture books, all of which belong to the

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Performing Bodies  183 same political context as the soundtracks. In a way, the piece could be read as a string of visual memories evoked by the Fish and Water broadcast, whose full comprehension, with the technical revelation at the beginning and end, is to be achieved within the larger framework of the mechanism of its creation.   In sum, through examples like Tang Danhong and her friends’ neurotic investigations into personal history, Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en’s negotiations for fluid, individualistic gender identities, as well as the various artistic and digitally enhanced explorations of how history has been embodied in official media and how it can be (dis)embodied and rewritten in radically new ways, we witness a joint effort to reconsider and reconstruct the relationship between Chinese identities and the country’s recent history. The question comes down to, and remains open for discussion: what does it mean to be a Chinese in this postsocialist and new millennial era? The brutally simplistic and uniform images of the Chinese created by socialist historiography – such as those of the revolutionary workers, peasants, soldiers and certainly women and children in absolute support of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party – have been questioned, deconstructed, multiplied and restored to more personal and concrete versions. In lieu of the socialist proletariat and class enemy arise a plethora of Chinese identities that are attentive, neurotic, nostalgic, observant, sensitive, thoughtful and constantly negotiating with history, reality, the other and the self. Such an ongoing negotiation and formation of identity goes hand in hand with the cultivation of an individual-based and socially informed consciousness about the cultural and historical contingencies of human existence. It is out of the confluent efforts of all these that the strength and wisdom to build a better future would arise.

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Conclusion: China’s Luckless but Hopeful Angels of History

Conclusion The Forsaken Generation, to which the filmmakers and artists discussed in this book belong, were the youngest children of Maoism. Due to the paradigmatic shift in China from Maoism to a hybrid form of postsocialism, in which economic reforms are still anticipating a corresponding political change, this generation, as the transitional era’s direct yet also neglected agents, detect in their experience a significantly spectral relationship to the past, as well as the present. This sense of spectrality – the invisible yet felt shape of a disappearance, a status of being both present and absent and also a desire for realisation and materialisation – characterises both the apparent irrelevance of past ideological values and the felt indefiniteness of the generation’s place as the problematic yet creative carriers of memories of a particular historical world once saturated with those values. Their mission to understand their position on the map of a modernising and postsocialist China is inseparable from the task of remapping that past (and also the present) in relation to their unique coordinates. This is why, as seen across a number of examples discussed in this book, these filmmakers and artists demonstrate a particular interest in, and insight into, the exploration of subjectivity and spatiality in images and narratives, behind which, I emphasise, we can detect a highly inspiring sensitivity to issues of structure and agency in historical representation. Besides fate and chance – such as the unpredictability of one’s birth into a particular moment and space – there is room for critical understanding and responsible agency so that pains might be understood, wrongs could be addressed and things would become better, however slightly and gradually so.   In working through this spectral experience of history and the self, the Forsaken Generation necessarily needs to counter the sense of alienation and obscurity with strategies of making concrete and analysable what remains vague or general. Taking history personally and taking the personal historically are the two sides of their epistemological coin, which is also applicable to their approach to issues of representation. The various alternative narratives, self-conscious subjectivities, meaningful cinematic spaces and visibly embodied performances that we have witnessed across the chapters are among the most representative efforts made in that direction. Like subjectivity and space or narrative and modes

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Conclusion  185 of narration, text and context interest them equally and in close relation to each other. Their vision in cinema and of history is bifocal – one eye on the particular account or image presented within the frame, the other on the framing mechanism itself.   To deal with the spectralisation of an impactful past that has been officially sent into amnesia, the filmmakers and artists try different means and demonstrate different and changing degrees of critical acumen in representing their particular relationship to postsocialism. From the early nineties till the present, there have been important successes, such as this book examines, but there are also some (and later) thought-provoking productions whose peculiar, sometimes puzzling, choice of cinematic grammar evidences the powerful pull of ideological habits (often translated into the films’ stylistic aspects).1   Recent works by Jiang Wen, the director of In the Heat of the Sun, which marks an impressive early point of creative breakthrough for independent cinema and the Forsaken Generation’s visual engagement with memory and history, present perhaps the most intriguing case. Following In the Heat of the Sun and Devils on the Doorstep – the latter’s bold approach to history resulting in a five-year ban of the director from directing – Jiang continued to experiment with his talent for cinematic storytelling and made The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang zhaochang shengqi, 2007) and Let the Bullets Fly (Rang zidan fei, 2010). Compared to the complicated yet unmistakable attitude of critical sarcasm and irony exercised toward authority and storytelling in his first two films, The Sun and especially Bullets seem to be more fantastically lost in their head-spinning narrative playfulness, eye-popping visual bravura and the highly stylised appearances and performances of all actors (including Jiang’s own role of authority, playing the charismatic head bandit Zhang Mazi in Bullets). Due to the obvious historical backgrounds of the two films and their strong characters – The Sun set in the late fifties and mid-seventies (right before the end of the Cultural Revolution), Bullets staged in the early Republican period with its two opposing protagonists, Zhang Mazi and Huang Silang (Chow Yun-fat), once being revolutionaries fighting for China’s transition to a democratic republic – it is understandable that one expects to find epistemological intentions and wants to understand what kind of content-form or subject–story–history relationships are embodied in their particular arrangement onscreen as such. However, the answer seems not as easy to find as in Jiang’s early films.   The Sun is a rollercoaster of a film, running restlessly across four episodes and six characters, the relationship and order of which, even when reconstructed according to narrative clues, do not quite produce a consistent picture, because of major ellipses in story information.2 In contrast to such narrative fragmentation and interpretive evasiveness, the film stands out as a collection of highly stylised and idiosyncratic visual, as well as verbal, attractions. Character behaviours of fast, rhythmic walking or running around are featured next to short-lined, emphatic conversations, in which statements and questions tend to be repeated in replacement of the discursive logic needed for communication. The colours are bold and saturated; the lighting is bright and clear. All these are combined with quick cutting, expressing the flow – one that is not necessarily smooth, but

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186  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema definitely forceful and affective – of an unusually hyper energy that also characterises Bullets and, by now, has become a hallmark of Jiang Wen’s cinema. Partly because The Sun did not do too well at the box office, Bullets, in the director’s own words, is a ‘translation’ of certain aspects of The Sun into more accessible terms for the audience (and certainly in money terms for his producers): Bullets became China’s highest grossing domestic film in 2010 and possibly of all time.3 Compared to its humongous financial success though, the imbalance or contrast between the formal force and thematic ambiguity in Bullets is of such a degree that critical receptions are drastically divided.4 The film’s climax is particularly controversial: the head bandit Zhang Mazi (Jiang Wen) and the local despot Huang Silang (Chow Yun-fat) compete, both with questionable scruples, to win the support of an unflatteringly faceless and malleable mass.   The cinema of Jiang Wen presents intriguing contradictions, which is why both liberal critics and fundamentalist defenders of Maoism label him rather changefully as a liberal, a conservative, a critical thinker reflecting on socialist legacy or a failed one who remains helplessly enmeshed in unreflecting nostalgia. The Beijing-based film critic Cui Weiping sees in the director a figure that ‘jumps around’, due to, in her opinion, a lack of determination or even an inability for clear commitment to his imaginary world.5 In a scathingly insightful discussion of the treatment of sex and women in The Sun, Cui reveals how sex is presented throughout the film as an attractive, dirty and forbidden topic and how all its three female characters are shown to be kept desiring, yet never satisfied by, their men. For Cui, such submission of one sex to the control of another implies an unconscious identification with, or even sycophancy to, sexist and ultimately political authority, lying at the root of which is a profound fear of that authority – namely, Maoism. Therefore, we see the resultant directorial incapacity to deal with the past in a truly creative and liberating manner.6   While finding a large part of Cui’s analysis refreshing and illuminating, I think her insistence on the division of characters into opposing male–female camps is too readily conclusive and therefore risks excluding perspectives or questions that, while perhaps not as clearly directional in providing a critical trajectory, might help us acquire a more complete and accurate mapping of Jiang Wen’s cinema. For one thing, at least two out of the three women in The Sun – Dr Lin and Mrs Tang – are actually interpretable as strong characters. Dr Lin is unabashed about her feelings and possibly plays a more centrally scheming role in the ass-grabbing scandal than at first appearance.7 Mrs Tang is always shown as an outspoken woman in front of her husband and eventually cheats on him as punishment for his neglect. Neither of these women gets punished by male authority, as a truly sexist scenario would have it. Furthermore, as might be compared with my analysis of In the Heat of the Sun in Chapter 2, I disagree with Cui’s somewhat simplistic reading of the character of Ma Xiaojun in that film: namely, that Ma is a passive container stuffed with ideological trash, and The Sun is essentially a repetition of that passive and helpless attitude toward the socialist past.8   Instead, I would suggest that Jiang Wen’s cinema deserves a much more open and spacious attitude than it currently receives. Rather than drawing quick judgements or praise by placing his work in one exclusive camp of political reading or

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Conclusion  187 another, we need to remain patient when examining his rich and porous texts, seeing them as inconclusive efforts, rather than the fundamental results, of a challenging process of negotiating with present and past. In other words, it is still too soon to draw a conclusion about the value, potential or problem of either Jiang Wen’s cinema or the moving image works of the Forsaken Generation in general. As complicated historical, as well as creative, personae striding a historic divide in modern Chinese history, Jiang Wen and his co-generational filmmakers and artists – including the much more unanimously praised Jia Zhangke – acquire an experimental mindset in their negotiations with a problematic legacy and an equally challenging present or future.9 The particular nature of their work or historical mission also requires, on our part, a more flexible, although by no means limp, attention, so as to exercise more effective responses to their movement on the cultural map.   In the case of The Sun, I tend to see in its apparent contradictory situation of stylistic excess and thematic obscuration not the absence but the presence of a critical attitude, albeit a very subtle and actually painful and struggling one. While this implied critical subjectivity is not gratifyingly confident in overcoming the burden of history and even appears verging on self-cancellation – two out of the three deaths in the film being suicides – like In the Heat of the Sun it does not give up on storytelling that is essentially an effort of trying to understand. The confusion and obscuration in its narrative is less an inability or unwillingness to deal with the story in a clear way than a circuitous effort of approaching something that is extremely complicated and difficult, not merely, as Cui suggests, ‘something inappropriate’.10   The dilemma facing Jiang Wen, the Forsaken Generation and China as a whole is still the ongoing and unending question of socialist legacy and what kind of ‘appropriate’ place in history and memory it deserves. As evidenced by the various works discussed in this book, a conventional causal-effect chain of logic proves unfitting for the narratives that Jiang Wen and his co-generational filmmakers need to tell, because of their unique involvement with the past. In the case of The Sun, formal design, especially mise-en-scène, almost takes over the role of delivering story information and attracts our attention with their idiosyncratic highlights. Examples of this include the elaborately embroidered red ‘fish shoes’ that trigger the mother’s craziness, the strange colourful bird that sings ‘I know, I know’, the mysterious boulder hut in the middle of a forest, the highly symbolic final scene of a baby boy born at sunrise onto a railroad covered with flowers, as well as the various bodily acts and postures, such as the kitchen maids raising their bare legs (in imitation of ballet moves of female militia fighters in the model operatic ballet The Red Detachment of Women), Dr Lin’s panting whenever she speaks and the twisting and contortion of her body in a mostly suggestive manner, Mr Tang’s gun shooting and the strange investigation scene of butt-pinching. It is inaccurate to accuse Jiang Wen of clamming the screen with ‘intact’ socialist memorabilia, because, as is clear from the examples just listed, such contents – objects, places, gestures and speeches – though taken from, or inspired by, the past, have undergone imaginative transformation in the new text and their meanings cannot possibly stay imprisoned in the more familiar associations.

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188  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema   The most outstanding example in this aspect is the hut in the forest made of white boulders – most likely, the work of the crazy mother, who has been seen collecting boulders. On an excursion, her son discovers the round hut and finds various objects within it – oil lamps, bowls, an abacus and a mirror – stuff from the past that both he and his mother have broken in a fit of madness early on. Here, however, the broken objects appear restored to their previous intact form. The most meaningful piece among these is the mirror, on which is pasted the son’s photo, right next to an image of Li Tiemei, the revolutionary heroine from the model opera The Red Lantern. Their images are of similar size and close juxtaposition, as if the two were husband and wife, even though their countenances – one smiling and ordinary, the other dramatic and revolutionary – do not quite match. Such an unmistakable affinity between personal and political images, contained in a highly suggestive space of interiority whose egg shape and mother-related origin suggest associations with the womb, might be readily taken as a sign of retreating into the past and pretending that the bygone times are still intact. However, the director immediately shows us that the intactness or restoration of a broken past is an illusion. The son starts sneezing, and in slightly emphatic slow motion, all the objects fall apart again, showing that they are nothing but botched jobs of patching and piecing together an irretrievable brokenness. The hut remains whole, holding inside of it a conscious brokenness; shortly after this incident, the mother comes back to consciousness and commits suicide.   Suicide, as an ultimate form of self-cancellation, is at the same time a most drastic form of protest in a time when few other options of critique are available. On the surface, The Sun seems populated by hyperactive subjects who are each identified with a particular busyness: the crazy mother’s running away, her son’s running after her, Mr Tang’s roaming in the forest with a rifle, Mrs. Tang’s housework and Dr Lin’s unusually constant panting and desiring. Such restless movements, however, form at best futile or purposeless trajectories, until coming to a stop through death, such as that of the mother, the son and Mr Liang (Tang’s friend). Interestingly, death itself is not futile, as on each occasion there is a moment of awakening before the final act. The mother regains her reason before committing suicide. Liang also experiences a subtle moment of seeing the ridicule of his, and the time’s, situation. Apparently the only passivelooking character in The Sun, Liang is mostly seen seated or lying in bed and is, in turn, investigated by the authorities, advised (wrongly) by Tang and confessed to by women who desire him. Even his accusation is the result of a ridiculous situation of activity becoming passivity, as he runs in front of a chasing crowd in the dark and somehow ends up as the chased one on the night of the assgrabbing incident. Before his suicide, however, Liang discovers the intimate relationship that has been forged between his friend, Tang, and the accuser, Dr Lin. The only object Liang expresses an active intention for is the belt of the rifle that Tang takes from him as a gift. It is with that belt that he hangs himself. Hands in pockets, his body has a peculiarly calm and nonchalant look, suggesting his death is both a disgusted and dignified farewell to the troubled times. The death of the son is also associated with revelation and knowledge, as he provokes

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Conclusion  189 Tang’s shooting by verifying, of his own accord, an ‘inappropriate’ piece of information in regard to Mrs Tang’s belly skin. All three deaths are of knowing and thinking subjectivities, rather than of helpless or unconscious characters, a conclusion that also seems applicable to the endings of In the Heat of the Sun and Devils on the Doorstep. Also interestingly, death, when carried into Bullets, takes a three-fold form: the suicide (of Brother Six, in order to prove his innocence), the killing of an icon (the double of the bad guy Huang) and the killing in the form of a suicide (Zhang suggests that Huang takes care of himself), evoking the various connotations of, and relations between, death, self and power in Jiang Wen’s cinema. Of particular significance in these deaths is that of Huang, the local despot who is an obvious symbol of authoritarianism: he dies twice in the film, first as an icon, then as a person. Such an emphatic narrative arrangement, in my view, offers a strong argument for the director’s thoughtful treatment of political legacy, including socialism: it is anything but slavish and unreflective.   Suicide might hardly seem a recommendable way of dealing with a challenging situation, yet it qualifies as an understandable and even predictable narrative turn – as a narrative figuration of self-inspection, cancellation and cleansing – in the creative psyche of the Forsaken Generation, the reason being their need to deal with a painful and problematic part in their origin. The cinema of Lou Ye, even though dealing with apparently very different stories and characters than Jiang Wen’s, is also filled with deaths, suicides and self-doubting reflections that deserve a much more elaborate discussion than can be accommodated here. I emphasise that some of the other apparently more positively empowered forms of representing history, memory and self in the chapters of this book should not be separated from this darker side of the Forsaken Generation. Despite his obvious nostalgia for the past, Jiang Wen, in my opinion, is much too creative a spirit to allow his stories and characters to be completely absorbed and consumed by a slavish attachment. In The Sun, it is a wish to defy the arrangement according to familiar memory – in contrast with the more helpless deaths and suicides in the Fifth Generation’s To Live and Farewell, My Concubine – that sends the elements and episodes into disarray and posits suicidal death in the midst of colour and energy. It is this pull of creative, as well as historical, consciousness against that of nostalgia that creates the intriguing tension between the formal excitement and thematic obscuration in the film. Essentially an epistemological tension (and effort) disguised as a formal discord, the mixed image of hyperness and death in The Sun communicates a complex and struggling figure not running around without a purpose, but trudging back and forth between contradictory sentiments about history and historical understanding.   In a discussion of the Brechtian concept of the ‘social gest’ – ‘a gesture or set of gestures (but never a gesticulation) in which a whole social situation can be read’ – Roland Barthes mentions gestures such as a ‘poorly dressed’ man ‘struggling against guard-dogs’ – an example that would sound highly familiar to a Chinese person who has been exposed to socialist representation of class struggle.11 The synecdochical capacity of the gest (including a gesture, an instance, a moment) to evoke a whole situation or context can be expanded to rhetorical forms, because ‘form, aesthetic, [and] rhetoric can be socially responsible if they are handled

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190  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema with deliberation’.12 In the case of the moving image works by Jiang Wen and the Forsaken Generation, we can certainly expand the concept of social gest to that of ‘historical gest’, which includes the movement in earnest hesitation between past and present and between story and consciousness, such as discussed above. Other typical artistic gestures of the group include convoluted narration, subjective implication in the text, a directorial tendency to highlight and historicise the frame of looking (and narrating), a performative desire to return to a scene pregnant with memory and re-establish one’s concrete position in relation to it and the frequent and diverse recourse to the body through which to perform and stage critical play with the past. All these qualify as ‘historical gests’ of a particular kind, through which we discern and feel a specific historical situation and a particular relationship with history: as complexly involved yet actively searching subjects, the Forsaken Generation is at the same time a representative persona, a representational figure and a figuration of critical thinking on representation and history in and for postsocialist China.   If the most exciting memory of Mao’s presence for the Red Guards was Mao’s welcoming smile and waving hand at Tiananmen Square on 18 August 1966 (and seven more times after that), the most powerful memory of the Forsaken Generation about Mao is his decease, which Guan Hu chooses to reminisce about in silence in the scrap film footage in Dirt. The Forsaken Generation’s relationship with Mao could be summarised as a slow, long and painful process of embalming the questionable father figure and endowing his spectre with the physicality of a fallible mortal, which partly explains Jiang Wen’s interest in playing Mao in possible future films, regardless of his distrust of authoritarianism.13 In his contemplation of the so-called ‘death of communism and the fate of Marxism’, Jacques Derrida, dissatisfied with Francis Fukuyama’s notion of the ‘end of history’, points out its ‘datedness’ in sounding the old apocalyptic alarm and, more importantly, the deeper layer of fear and its desire to cancel out the chance of truly understanding the continuity of fears, issues and history.14 Through an exhaustive semantic discussion of the haunting spectre in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the densely compact French verb conjurer or conjuration, together with a reflection on Marx’s own evocation of spectrality (such as at the very beginning of The Communist Manifesto), Derrida urges us to remember reflexively, in the face of disappearance and (wilful) forgetting, the legacy of Marxism. His is a reflection on the European and Western engagement with Marxism. Nevertheless, his caution against forgetting and dismissal is imbued with a sense of responsibility that I see as necessary and crucial for the assessment and understanding of the Chinese scenario in this collective, global forgetting of Marxism, communism and socialism in all their multiple forms. Derrida’s exclamation of the urgent need to address ‘our ghosts’ resounds with the historical mission of China’s Forsaken Generation: If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice . . . It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost, and with it . . . No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some

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Conclusion  191 responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism.15   In the case of the Forsaken Generation’s position and mission in postsocialist China, the first and foremost ghost that they need to face and understand properly before, or while, they take up the other ghosts of history is that of Mao. Historical irony has it that Mao himself also became a victim of official historiography, as a haunting spectre made to oversee China. Mao died on 9 September 1976, and almost immediately his body was cleansed, cut open, squeezed and stuffed with formalin. Against his personal will that his body be cremated and, perhaps rather romantically, fed to the fish in the Yangtze River so as to make up for the fish he had eaten during his lifetime, Mao might not have predicted that his own body would be preserved and rendered an icon that symbolises the correct course of Party politics and the persistence of the Party (or some larger collective) ideal.16 On the other hand, such iconic continuity is being contradicted by paradigmatic changes in economic policies. The end of the Cultural Revolution and of Mao’s reign certainly signifies ‘a time out of joint’ – a period that seems derailed and deranged from its theoretically intended socialist/communist course for almost three decades.17 The Forsaken Generation, fortunately or unfortunately, was born into a transitional position, where they must learn to choose and decide on the basis of insufficient knowledge (due to the censorial and distortive nature of official historiography). For them, the redress of history necessarily involves the rewriting of, and with, the self.   To extend Derrida’s evocation of Hamlet in the same discussion of the spectres of Marx, the Forsaken Generation are socialist China’s Hamlet, in terms of the posthumous historical position they were born into. Hamlet’s pain lies in his fate of being born to redress a wrong that involves violence and that is against his will. The poignancy of the Forsaken Generation – and the strength and vision born out of their experiences – lies in their (dis)position of standing between experience and observation, between the end of an era and the beginning of another, and yet never forgetting the concurrences and confluences between the two. Their vision of history is necessarily complicated, hesitant, doubtful and observant; their actions, thoughtful, reflexive, both burdened and enlivened by their memory of the past. For the Forsaken Generation, while their dilemma does not involve avenging a human life through murder as is the case with Hamlet, redressing of the crime – the violence of Maoism – necessarily involves a deep level of self-negation, as their own life and experience has been imbricated in what they were born to criticise. What Derrida recognises as a murderous origin proves to be partly suicidal in the case of the Forsaken Generation. Whether they choose to remember or forget, they will have to remember or forget part of themselves and without the benefit of knowing for sure, hence the peculiar creative gestures of struggling or being torn between push and pull in the cinema of Jiang Wen, Lou Ye and others.

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192  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema   The term ‘generation’ gains special resonance and weight with this segment of Chinese society, precisely because of the sense of time as out of joint. If the political and ideological connection between two periods has been interrupted, the Forsaken Generation, serving as the live tissues and joints between socialist and postsocialist China, feel the pain of stretching and tearing that is also the cause of their strength. In this sense, we can see why both Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’ and Heiner Müller’s ‘luckless angel’ apply to their historical image. Born out of the ruins of history, the Forsaken Generation casts its gaze backward, while finding itself also sucked into the future. Walter Benjamin describes the angel of history as such: His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.18   And Müller writes of his angel: Behind him swims the past, shaking thunder from wing and shoulder, with a noise like buried drums, while before him the future jams up, his eyes pressed in, the eyeballs explode like a star, the word wound up into a vibrating mouthgag, strangling him with his breath. For a long time one still sees his wings beating, hears in the roaring the hail of stones fall down before over behind him, the louder the more violent the movement in vain, scattered, when they become slower. Then the moment closes over him: on the quickly rubble-filled standing place the luckless angel comes to rest, waiting for History in the petrification of flight breath glance. Till the renewed roaring of mighty wingbeats reproduces itself in waves through the stone and indicates his flight.19   For the Forsaken Generation and China, there is always a sense of (be)longing for a more continuous relation between past and future. The question of that relation is not yet answered; the Forsaken Generation is still in the process of figuring it out. Unsurprisingly, like in Sunflower (Xiangrikui, dir. Zhang Yang, 2005), Little Red Flowers (Kan shang qu hen mei, dir. Zhang Yuan, 2006) and 11 Flowers (Wo 11, dir. Wang Xiaoshuai, 2011), we should expect to see, in cinematic form or otherwise, continuous reminiscences, reflections and aspiring dashes into a more liberated position, pulled, at the same time, by habit and inertia carried from the socialist past. As postsocialist China’s angels of history, the Forsaken Generation connects what came before and after this particular historical (dis)joint. For them, as Derrida puts it, ‘the passage of this time of the present comes from the future to go toward the past, toward the going of the gone’, just as the spectre of Mao and the spirits of the Forsaken Generation might

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Conclusion  193 meet on Tiananmen Square in the strange historical space of Wang Guangli’s documentary I Graduated.20 In this sense, our understanding of postsocialism will necessarily be continuous, because socialism has not yet ended, particularly so as a structure of feeling. Derrida was dissatisfied with Fukuyama’s celebration of the end of (Cold War) history – that the spectre of Marxism and communism now has its body in the grave and will stay there and move no more – because the latter statement grows out of fear, rather than out of a truly sincere will to understand.21 A healthier understanding of history and identity might bring us closer to a more accurate understanding of both history and ourselves.   As postsocialist China’s luckless angels of history, the Forsaken Generation has been trying to move forward with the spectre of the past on their back. As Wang Chao (b. 1964), the director of neorealist independent features like Orphan of Anyang (Anyang ying’er, 2001) and Day and Night (Riri yeye, 2004), responded to my thoughts on the connection between Mao’s spectre and his generation: Cui Jian used to say that we are ‘the eggs laid by the Red Flag’. Did the efforts we made after breaking out of the shell actually mean for us to fly across the Square? Hopefully the shoot-down in 1989 is not the end of our destiny. Yes, we are still being chained in the sky above the Memorial Hall of Chairman Mao. To fly or not to fly, that is always the question. This Hamletian awakening is also what constructs our humble pride.22 The image that Wang Chao envisions of his generation – ‘chained’ and ‘hovering’ – conjures up an existence that is both here and there, physical and spectral. Destined to experience and analyse this contradiction, the Forsaken Generation lingers over the legacy of their spiritual father, while their present bodies have to learn to adapt to new historical situations of postsocialism and globalisation. They move in two directions at the same time: forward with the flow of time; backward in gests of hovering, lingering, haunting, reminiscing and revisiting. They are postsocialist China’s torn angels of history.   Yet strength and hope can be born out of this state of being historically luckless and torn. As I have analysed across the chapters, a desire to understand historical, as well as subjective, spectrality gives rise to innovative strategies of subjectivising experiences, embodying visions, concretising identities and baring representations. The internal contradiction lying in the Forsaken Generation’s historical identity is a crucial formative force for their independent vision and historical consciousness, a critical capacity that proves exigent as China increases its pace in reform. As they work hard to define their own unique historical position, their moving image making also helps nurture an awareness of similar issues – such as those of representation and identity – regarding other social groups and individuals. Such awareness will prove increasingly important as China embraces globalisation and as consumerism cultivates a growing middle class attentiveness to rule of law and individual rights. The powerfully permeating forces of globalisation and consumerism also tend to complicate previous issues of collective identities with increasingly atomised and individualised understandings of identity. For instance, as exemplified in The Silent Holy Stones (Lhing vjags kyi ma ni rdo vbum, 2006), a

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194  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema film by Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, while cultural or ethnic differences still hold true for individuals from disparate groups or communities, a young Tibetan monk whose teenage experience is characterised by a passion for a popular Han television programme might find it insufficient to account for his life and identity on the basis of his indigenous culture alone.   With the fast development of, and increasing access to, personalised digital image technologies, personal media, including filmmaking, is becoming an important direction for popular visual engagement with history and reality. Future forms of personal media might become as varied as there are personal perspectives and experiences. In contemporary China, attention must thus be paid to the efforts of filmmaking (and writing in general) by underprivileged communities and individuals who have largely remained passive subjects to be represented. The practice of an increasingly subgrouped and individualised auto-history-writing might represent the ultimate ideal to produce a highly nuanced understanding of multiple identities. Besides the Forsaken Generation, younger generations surge forth and globally informed Chinese identities are being newly formed. The Forsaken Generation then, with their particular gestures, habits, memories and visions, are historically contingent subjectivities engaged in a constant negotiation between memory and forgetting and between an indefinite tempo-space and a concrete temporary existence. Thus, this book also hopes to serve as a record of a possibly passing historical phenomenon and gives form to a collective ethos and a generational identity that carries traces of the yesteryears and contains seeds of new identities in the years to come. The little bodies that were once seated in front of the screens of state propaganda became the bodies marching into Tiananmen Square in 1989, demanding a belated yet critically conscious meeting with their spiritual father. One of them – one concrete little body for the whole world to see – confronted and stopped the military tanks. And there were those other bodies killed or wounded on the early morning of 4 June 1989.   As the author of this book and as a concrete, conscious and critical subject who was born slightly later than this generation, I would like to conclude my epistemological journey across the memories, texts and images hitherto discussed with a performance of my own. In the form of a poetic remembrance, let me share a dream that I had during the writing of this text: On the other side of the street A procession of young students is passing by Burning torches in hand, They are humming a sad tune They are collecting broken limbs of the dead They pick them up and place them in baskets It is then I see After being touched by the young hands the dead start to bleed

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Notes

Notes

Introduction 1. Throughout the book, all the Chinese filmmakers and authors who publish in Chinese are referred to in the Chinese manner: the family name precedes the given name. This is because that is how they are known in international media. Examples are: Jia Zhangke, Zhang Yimou, etc. The names of Chinese authors who publish in English appear how they do so in the quoted sources: mostly, the given name precedes the family name. Examples are: Yingjin Zhang, Xiaobing Tang or myself, Qi Wang. There are a few exceptions to the latter case, such as scholars Zhang Zhen and Gao Minglu, who publish in English, but whose names follow the Chinese style of presentation. In those cases, I, of course, refer to their names as how they appear in the cited publications. 2. The original short story from which the screenplay is adapted was published under the same title, see Cheng Qingsong, ‘Born in 1966’ (Sheng yu 1966), TV, Film, Literature (Dianshi dianying wenxue) 5 (1995), pp. 154–9; Cheng Qingsong and Huang Ou (eds), My Camera Doesn’t Lie: Dossiers of Vanguard Filmmakers – Born in 1961–1970 (Wo de sheyingji bu sahuang: xianfeng dianyingren dangan – shengyu 1961–1970 (Beijing: China Youyi Publishing House, 2002). 3. Author’s interview with Wang Guangli, 1 November 2005, Beijing. 4. Cheng, ‘Born in 1966’, pp. 158–9. 5. Two salient examples are the official bans on Zhang Yihe’s personal memoirs of the communist decades, The Past Is Not Smoky (Wangshi bingbu ruyan, Beijing: People’s Press, 2004), and on Lou Ye’s film Summer Palace (Yiheyuan, 2006), which includes explicit references to the taboo subject of the state’s armed crackdown on the student-led democratic movement on the morning of 4 June 1989. 6. Rubie S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), p. 82; Liu Binyan, A Higher Kind of Loyalty: A Memoir by China’s Foremost Journalist, trans. Zhu Hong (New York: Pantheon, 1990). 7. Liu Xiaobo, ‘The Specter of Mao Zedong’, in Geremie R. Barmé (ed.), Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), p. 280. Liu’s article was originally written in 1994. 8. Martin Jay, ‘Foreword’, in Aleš Erjavec (ed.), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2003), p. xvi. 9. The much-used term is, of course, ‘really (or actually) existing socialism’, in, for example, Erjavec (ed.), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, pp. xvii, 11. 10. Arif Dirlik, ‘Post-socialism? Reflections on “Socialism with Chinese Charactersitics”’,

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

in Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner (eds), Marxism and the Chinese Experience (Armond: Shark, 1989), pp. 362–84. Paul G. Pickowicz, ‘Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism’, in Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau (eds), New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 60–3, 84–5. Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), pp. 204–8; Xiaoping Lin, Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), pp. 22–3. Lydia H. Liu, ‘Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideology in Global Media Culture’, positions: east asia cultures critique 7: 3 (1999), pp. 791–2. Ibid. pp. 777–8. Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 12–13. Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 14–15, 205. Gao Minglu, ‘Post-Utopian Avant Garde Art in China’, in Erjavec (ed.), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, p. 283, footnote 1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Chichester: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 38–9; McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, pp. 7–18. Yingjin Zhang deals primarily with the various manifestations and implications of space in and around contemporary Chinese cinema in a recent book. See Yingjin Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010). As Yingjin Zhang summarises, postsocialism is a label of historical periodisation, a regime of political economy and also a structure of feelings and a set of aesthetic practices. See Yingjin Zhang, ‘Rebel without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking’, in Zhang Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 50–4. Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics, p. 11. Having a rather common usage in contemporary Chinese cultural history, the generational discourse reflects the intricate relation between national politics and collective, as well as personal, experience. In the second half of the twentieth century, for example, China, in turn, tried to build a new socialist nation in the 1950s, fell into the blind zeal of Maoism in the 1960s and 1970s and then worked hard to reform and rebuild the national economy while retaining the legitimacy of the reigning CCP from the late 1970s on until the present. During this process, policies and values have been frequently changed, abandoned and rebuilt. The quickly shifting sociopolitical scene left indelible marks on the experiences and subjectivities of the Chinese people, particularly the intellectuals, who found themselves born into and living through specific periods of policy shifting and spiritual reorientation. For instance, apart from the earlier ‘4 May Generation’ (wu si yidai), who were born around the beginning of the twentieth century and started modernising China following the anti-imperialist 4 May Movement of 1919, cultural critic Liu Xiaofeng also identifies the ‘Liberation Generation’ (jiefang yidai, who were born in the 1930s and 1940s and started contributing to socialist nation building after the founding of PRC in 1949), the ‘5 April Generation’ (si wu yidai, who were about the same age as the PRC and participated in the 5 April Movement in 1976) and the ‘Playful Generation’ (youxi de yidai, which is actually an equivalent of our current term of the Forsaken Generation). See Liu Xiaofeng, ‘Sociological Thoughts and Notes on the 5 April Generation’ (Guanyu ‘siwu’ yidai de shehuixue sikao zhaji), Dushu 5 (1989),

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23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

pp. 35–42. Together with the other generational terms I will raise in the following discussions, these generational titles are not final, often overlapping and sometimes even confusing. Together they point to the richly layered and dynamically shifting topography of the contemporary Chinese cultural landscape. Also, see endnote 28. As pointed out by Yang Jian in a comprehensive study of the history and literature of the educated youth, the programme of sending educated youth (back) to the countryside started as early as the fifties, when educated rural youth were encouraged to stay in or return to the countryside. The more famous ‘sent-down (educated) youth’ (xiaxiang zhishi qingnian) that were encouraged to leave their urban origins for the countryside after 1968 is but (although highly significant) the middle stage of this cultural phenomenon. According to an estimate, between the early 1960s and early 1970s, about 17 million youth in total went through this. See Yang Jian, A Literary History of the Chinese Educated Youth (Zhongguo zhiqing wenxue shi) (Beijing: Zhongguo gongren chubanshe, 2002); Thomas P. Bernstein, Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). Also see, Martin Singer, Educated Youth and the Cultural Revolution in China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971); Ding Yizhuang, A History of China Sent-down Youth: The First Wave 1953–1968 (Zhongguo zhiqing shi: chu lan 1953–1968) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1998); Liu Xiaomeng, A History of China’s Sent-down Youth: The Great Wave 1966–1980 (Zhongguo zhiqing shi: da chao 1966–1980) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan chubanshe, 1998). In a comparison made between the educated youth writers and those belonging to an older generation (as being nurtured in an earlier period of socialism in the fifties, a literary equivalent of the ‘5 April Generation’, according to Liu Xiaofeng’s terminology), Meng Fanhua discovers in the educated youth writers distinct expressions of ‘doubt, indignation, and (an urge of) root-searching’ (in contrast to the older generation’s stronger belief in socialism). See endnote 22; Meng Fanhua, 1978: A Time of Passion, 2nd edn (1978: jiqing suiyue) (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002), p. 5. Yang, A Literary History of the Chinese Educated Youth. Ibid. pp. 417–20, 446–51. Also see Liao Yiwu (ed.), Sinking Holy Palace: Death Pictures of Underground Poetry in China’s 1970s (Chenlun de shengdian – zhongguo ershi shiji qishi niandai dixia shige yizhao) (Urumqi: Xinjiang qingshaonian chubanshe, 1999); Yang Jian, Underground Literature in the Cultural Revolution (Wenhua dageming zhong de dixia wenxue) (Beijing: Zhaohua chubanshe, 1993). Yang, A Literary History of the Chinese Educated Youth, pp. 333–6, 425–32. Paul Clark provides a historical account of the Fifth Generation and its films. Calling them ‘children of Mao’, the book starts with a collective biography constructed from the life stories of ten directors. Out of this group, which includes famous Fifth Generation directors like Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Wu Ziniu and Peng Xiaolian, nine were born in the fifties, five were once Red Guards or ‘educated youth’ and eight later studied at the Directing Department of Beijing Film Academy class of 1982. See Paul Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and its Films (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005), pp. 28–36. Reflecting a general tendency characterising the discussion of Chinese intellectual history (as explicated above in endnote 22), the generational discourse is also applied in Chinese cinema. It is from the Fifth Generation that film critics began to track backward and forward in Chinese filmography to group filmmakers into roughly defined ‘generations’. As the Fifth Generation largely flourished in the 1980s, directors immediately before them – that is, those who made films in the late 1970s (mainly in 1979) – are considered the ‘Fourth Generation’. Since the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) produced a cultural blank period with an extremely limited number of cultural productions (for example, the eight revolutionary model operas and their equivalents), the ‘Third

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29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

Generation’ is used to refer to the group of directors who worked largely between 1949 and 1966. Going back from this point, the ‘Second Generation’ includes directors of the 1930s and 1940s, when sound film started to dominate the scene, while the ‘First Generation’ refers to those early filmmakers who set the cornerstone of Chinese cinema and mainly worked in silent film. See Dai Jinhua, A Scene in the Fog: Chinese Cinema Culture 1978–1998 (Wu zhong fengjing: zhongguo dianying wenhua 1978–98) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2000), pp. 382–4. An elaborate discussion of the Fifth Generation’s peculiar narrative treatment of the past is provided at the beginning of Chapter 2 of this book. For an elaborate study of the characterisation in Zhang Yimou’s cinema and particularly their common noncommittal or disinterest in truth or ideals, see Cui Weiping, ‘The Wanderer’s Consciousness in Zhang Yimou’s Films’ (Zhang Yimou dianying zhong de youmin yishi), in Cui Weiping, The Narrative of Our Times (Women shidai de xushi) (Guangzhou: Huacheng Press, 2008), pp. 127–52. I borrowed the word ‘forsaken’ from Xiaoping Lin, ‘New Chinese Cinema of the “Sixth Generation”: A Distant Cry of Forsaken Children’, Third Text 16: 3 (September 2002), pp. 261–84, reprinted in Children of Marx and Coca-Cola, pp. 91–114, see especially pp. 112–14. Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 3–4, my emphasis. Ibid. p. 5. For an exemplar personal account of the educational power of propagandistic children’s books, see Zhu Xiaodi, Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), pp. 29–33. Author’s interview with Cheng Qingsong, 21 November 2005, Beijing. L, ‘Shengming de qiji’ (Miracle of Life), dated 2 July 1972, in Earth-shaking Elegies – A Collection of Youth Poems and Writings after the Cultural Revolution (Gan you ge yin dong di ai – wenhua dageming hou zhongguo qingnian shiwen xuan) (Hong Kong: Seventies Bimonthly, 1974), p. 65. Cui Weiping, ‘The Age of Experience’ (Jingyan de niandai). Available online at: http:// blog.sina.com.cn/u/473d066b0100081t (accessed 7 February 2014). Originally published in Cao Baoyin (ed.), Passages of the Spirit: Narrations of 36 Contemporary Intellectuals (Jingshen licheng – 36 wei dangdai xueren zishu) (Beijing: dangdai zhongguo chubanshe, 2006). Xu Hui, ‘Shu Li’ (Distantiation), in Xu Hui (ed.), Nineteen Sixties Personality (Liushi niandai qizhi) (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 2000), p. 248 and back cover. Zhang Hongjie, ‘The Seventies Generation Caught in the Cracks between Old and New’. Available online at: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/488d2478010002zg (accessed 7 February 2014). Representative works of Zhang Hongjie include: Another Facet – Alternative Biographies of Historical Figures (Ling yi mian – lishi renwu de linglei zhuanji) (Tianjin: Baihua Wenyi Chubanshe, 2004); Seven Visages from the Great Ming Dynasty (Daming wangchao de qi zhang miankong) (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2006). Wang Shuo (b. 1958) made the comment on ‘infant[s] of Mao Zedong’ in March 2007 on a talk show called ‘Behind the Headlines with Wen Tao’, produced at the Hong Kong-produced Phoenix Television. Wang Shuo’s own personal experience has entered his novels, such as Ferocious Animals (Dongwu xiongmeng) and It Looked Beautiful (Kan shang qu hen mei), which are adapted into films by the Forsaken Generation directors as, respectively, In the Heat of the Sun and Little Red Flowers (Kan shang qu hen mei, dir. Zhang Yuan, 2006). A detailed discussion of In the Heat of the Sun is found in Chapter 2. A collection of oral histories of members of this generation also testifies to similar sentiments of distance, confusion and feeling history (or the reality of the Cultural Revolution at the time) at a second remove. For example,

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Notes  199

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

accounts and memories of strained, complicated relationships with parents are often mentioned in Chihua Wen, The Red Mirror: Children of China’s Cultural Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). Perry Link notes in the writing of the novelist Ha Jin (b. 1956) this caution against contaminating habits learned from previous discursive and ideological exposures. Having ‘[taken] the unusual step of departing not only China but the Chinese language’, Ha Jin ‘writes only in English, in part to be sure that even subconscious influences do not affect his expression’. See Perry Link, ‘Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?’, The New York Review of Books, 6 December 2012. Available online at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/ ?pagination=false (accessed 7 February 2014). Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 3. Ibid. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. ix. Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘The Future of the Past: Film and the Beginnings of Postmodern History’, in Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History, p. 206. Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 67, 39. ‘Angle of incidence’ and ‘angle of reflection’ are terms found in a gemstone glossary, referring respectively to the angle at which a ray of light enters a stone and the angle at which a (or that) reflected ray of light leaves a surface, as measured from normal. The directorial and critical excitement over new observational documentaries about previously underrepresented aspects of Chinese society (for example, daily life, private spaces and personal memoirs) is captured by the term of, and discussion on, ‘New Documentary Movement’ (xin jilu yundong), see Lu Xinyu, Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement in Contemporary China (Jilu zhongguo: dangdai zhongguo xin jilu yundong) (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2003), pp. 13–22. For a concise description of this ‘movement’, see Qi Wang, ‘New Documentary Movement’, in Edward Davis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 428–9. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2009); Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, after Marker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Alisa Lebow (ed.), The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary (London and New York: Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2012). John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1988] 1995), p. 65.

Chapter 1 1. Yomi Braester, Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 3–4. See also, Watson (ed.), Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism; Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000); Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Ching Kwan Lee and Guobin Yang (eds), Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2007). 2. Wang, Illuminations from the Past, p. 5.

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200  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

Ibid. p. 11; Braester, Witness against History, p. 9. Watson (ed.), Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, pp. 1–3. Lee and Yang (eds), Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution, p. 5. Wang, Illuminations from the Past, p. 108. Ibid. pp. 8, 13. Tang, Chinese Modern; Braester, Witness against History; Wang, Illuminations from the Past. An interesting and perhaps encouraging example of a similar awareness (though seemingly of a different temperament) of such an entrenched relationship to a socialist legacy – that ‘(we) cannot pull ourselves out by our own hair’ – can be found in the works of Russian painter Erik Bulatov. Bulatov explores the relationship between space, perspective, figure and socialist signs, see Erjavec (ed.), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, pp. 28–9, 34, 82–3. The word ‘yangbanxi’ has had different English translations: ‘revolutionary model plays’ (geming yangbanxi), ‘model theatre’, ‘model opera’ or ‘model drama’. For these different but similar usages, see Constantine Tung, ‘Introduction’, in Constantine Tung and Colin MacKerras (eds), Drama in the People’s Republic of China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 13; Xiaomei Chen, ‘The Making of a Revolutionary Stage’, in Claire Sponsler and Xiaomei Chen (eds), East of West: Cross-Cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 125–40; Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), p. 114; Kirk A. Denton, ‘Model Drama as Myth: A Semiotic Analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’, in Tung and MacKerras (eds), Drama in the People’s Republic of China, pp. 119–36. I tend to use these different translations freely with a greater tendency towards ‘model theatre’ when referring to the whole group and ‘model plays’ or ‘model operas’ when referring to specific pieces. Yao Wenyuan, ‘A Critique of the New Historical Play Hai Rui’s Dismissal from Office’ (Ping xinbian lishiju ‘Hai Rui baguan’), Wenhui News, 10 November 1965. Ibid. Reprint in People’s Daily, 30 November 1965, editorial. For a discussion of Wu Han’s play and the abusive political interpretation it excited and suffered, see Zhang Longxi, Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 228–38. John E. Boeult makes a highly relevant observation about the suppression of individual authorship as an essential transformation that socialism brings on the practice and function of art. In his study of avant-garde Russian art and its transformation in the Soviet Union period, Boeult points out that Socialist Realists emerged from various groups of avant-garde art and became the only acceptable form of art in which ‘conscious collectivism transforms the whole meaning of the artist’s work and gives it new stimuli. [Whereas] the old artist sees the revelation of his individuality in his work [,] the new artist will understand and feel that within his work and throughout his work he is creating a grand totality – collectivism’. See John E. Boeult, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde 1902–1934 (New York: Viking, 1976), p. 179. Chen, ‘The Making of a Revolutionary Stage’, pp. 126–7; Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, p. 115. For a brief account of the revolutionary model theatre, see Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, Ten-year History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Wenhua dageming shinian shi) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1986), pp. 457–62. For an introduction to these model works in English, which was aimed at promoting the Cultural Revolution and its model theatre to a readership outside of China, see Unidentified, ‘Magnificent Ode to the Worker, Peasant, and Soldier Heroes’, Chinese Literature 12 (1968), pp. 107–16. For English translations of the plays, see White-Haired Girl, trans. Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi (Beijing: Beijing waiwen chubanshe, 1954); Taking the Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Chinese Literature 8 (1967), pp. 129–81; Sha Jia Bang, Hongqi 6 (1970),

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Notes  201

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

pp. 8–39, Chinese Literature 11 (1970), pp. 3–62; The Red Detachment of Women, Hongqi 7 (1970), pp. 35–65; Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, Hongqi 11 (1972), pp. 26–54, Chinese Literature 3 (1973), pp. 3–54. Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, p. 115. Chen, ‘The Making of a Revolutionary Stage’, p. 127. Ibid. p. 136. Of the eight major model plays, five are direct representations of the revolutionary war experience: the Second Revolutionary Civil War (1927–47) in The Red Detachment of Women; the Anti-Japanese War (1937–45) in The Red Lantern and Sha Jia Bang; the Civil War (1946–9) in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy; the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (aka the Korean War, 1950–3) in Raid on the White Tiger Regiment. Chen, ‘The Making of a Revolutionary Stage’, pp. 127–8. Denton, ‘Model Drama as Myth’, pp. 119–36. Ibid. pp. 123–4. Ibid. p. 121. Ibid. pp. 127–8, 116. China Ballet Troupe, The Red Detachment of Women – A Modern Revolutionary Ballet (Beijing: Waiwen chubanshe, 1972), p. 2. Xiaobin Yang, ‘Whence and Whither the Postmodern/Post-Mao-Deng: Historical Subjectivity and Literary Subjectivity in Modern China’, in Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang (eds), Postmodernism and China (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 381–2. I discuss cinematic subjectivity and narrative space in the Fifth Generation at the beginning of Chapter 2. Chris Berry, ‘The Viewing Subject in Li Shuangshuang and The In-Laws’, in Chris Berry (ed.), Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991), pp. 31–9, 38; ‘Neither One Thing Nor Another: Toward a Study of the Viewing Subject and Chinese Cinema in the 1980s’, in Browne et al. (eds), New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, p. 89. Berry, ‘Neither One Thing Nor Another’, p. 89. Ibid. pp. 93–4. Ibid. pp. 88–113. Ibid. p. 109. Browne et al. (eds), New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, pp. 15–114. Nick Browne, ‘Society and Subjectivity: On the Political Economy of Chinese Melodrama’, in Browne et al. (eds), New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, p. 54, footnote 1. Ma Ning, ‘Spatiality and Subjectivity in Xie Jin’s Film Melodrama of the New Period’, in Browne et al. (eds), New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, pp. 15–39. Browne, ‘Society and Subjectivity’, pp. 46–7, my emphasis. For example, where male subjects oscillate between an empowered macho and a powerless infant figure in Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang, dir. Zhang Yimou, 1987) and Girl from Hunan (Xiangnü Xiaoxiao, dir. Xie Fei, 1986), female subjects demonstrate an equally unstable and even self-contradictory quality, speaking both more and less about themselves and tending to slip away for elusiveness, melancholia and even death when their interpellation becomes too prominent in Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, dir. Chen Kaige, 1985), Sacrificed Youth (Qingchun ji, dir. Zhang Nuanxin, 1985) and Red Sorghum, see Berry, ‘Neither One Thing Nor Another’, p. 108. Berry, ‘Neither One Thing Nor Another’, pp. 109, 95. Chris Berry notes this largely biannual rhythm of political control: the critique of the film Bitter Love and of its writer Bai Hua in 1981, the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign of 1983, the AntiBourgeois Liberalisation Campaign of 1987 and the Tiananmen Incident of 1989. See ibid. p. 116, footnote 16.

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202  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema 40. Ibid. p. 110. 41. Rainclouds over Wushan (Wushan yunyu, dir. Zhang Ming, 1996) and Still Life (Sanxia haoren, dir. Jia Zhangke, 2006) are among the more obvious examples with their direct evocation of the same locale – the upper Yangtze River area near today’s Three Gorges Dam – and their similarly subdued and sidelined collective cast. 42. Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’. Available online at: http:// foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (accessed 11 February 2014). 43. Night Rain in Bashan and The Legend of Tianyun Mountain were the co-winners of Best Picture at the 1981 Golden Rooster Award, arguably the Chinese version of the American Academy Awards. On the same occasion, Night Rain also won Best Screenplay, Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best Supporting Cast and Best Music awards. Ma Ning provides an elaborate analysis of spatial relocation of female characters in The Legend of Tianyun Mountain, arguing that its offering of a flexible solution still exists ‘within the moral framework of the social and political institutions of the People’s Republic’, see Ma, ‘Spatiality and Subjectivity’, pp. 24–30, 29. For an account of the critique of Bitter Love and its solution, see Paul Clark, ‘Film-Making in China: From the Cultural Revolution to 1981’, The China Quarterly 94 (1983), pp. 318–21. 44. Chen, ‘The Making of a Revolutionary Stage’, p. 130. The model ballet White-Haired Girl was collectively written and produced by the Shanghai Dance School in 1966. The first edition of its opera version was collectively written by the Yan’an Lu Xun Literature and Art Academy, with He Jingzhi, Ding Yi and Wang Bin as scriptwriters and Ma Ke, Zhang Lu and Huo Wei as composers, first published by the Yan’an Xinhua Shudian, June 1946. 45. Xia Yan, ‘Wish There Are More Great Films with Unique Styles’ (Xiwang you gengduo dute fengge de hao yingpian), People’s Daily, 14 January 1981. 46. Denton, ‘Model Drama as Myth’, p. 126. 47. Ye Nan, ‘Why Night Rain in Bashan Doesn’t Write About Bad People’ (Bashan yeyu weishenme mei xie huairen), People’s Daily, 20 December 1980. 48. Han Shangyi, ‘Three Praises of the Silver Screen’ (Yinmu san zan), People’s Daily, 21 February 1981. 49. For comment on the use of flowers to create containment and control in posters, see Stephanie Donald, ‘Children as Political Messengers: Art, Childhood, and Continuity’, in Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald (eds), Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 86. 50. Li Xigeng, ‘Remarks on Poppy Flowers’ (Yingsuhua zayi), Dianying yishu 4 (1979), p. 52. 51. Ibid. p. 53. Jerome Silbergeld comments on the colour politics in the revolutionary Chinese context, noting that, while in the mid-1970s darker-looking ‘black’ paintings cost many artists their freedom, this formerly negative aesthetic surged back in the early 1980s, a prominent example of which is found in the works of painter Li Huasheng. In ‘Bashan yeyu’, an ink painting that bears the same title as the film Night Rain in Bashan (translated as ‘Night Rain in the Mountains of Sichuan’ in Silbergeld’s writing), Li produces a blackness that ‘had never been so black before’. Silbergeld provides a vivid analysis of this painting, in which the dark power of the raining night is expansive, surmounting, drenching, breathtaking and sweeping, pointing to the painting’s status, like that of the film Night Rain, as a depiction of both exterior and interior landscapes in post-revolutionary China. See Jerome Silbergeld and Gong Jisui, Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993), pp. 125, 129. 52. Anchee Min, Red Azalea (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). 53. Berry, ‘Neither One Nor Another’, p. 93.

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Notes  203 54. The translation is found in Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860) (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), p. 351. The temporal sense of the original Chinese poem is less clear than indicated in this translation though. A subjectivity that is mobile in space, but particularly in time, commands the poem. Mixing visions of present, past and future (where the present is remembered as another past), the poet pictures how he and his wife might one day trim the candle together again, as they must have done in the past, and at that future moment how they might be talking about missing each other on this ‘current’ rainy night in the Ba Mountain. The vision embedded in, and encouraged by, this poem is both personal and impersonal, time-bound and timeless, space-bound and transcendental, giving rise to an aesthetic experience comparable to that of traditional Chinese landscape paintings. 55. Ye Lan, Night Rain in Bashan (screenplay), written in January 1980, see An Anthology of Chinese Film Screenplays, vol. 12 (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1986), p. 115. 56. Ibid. p. 111. 57. The ‘eggs laid by or under the red flag’ comes from Hongqi xia de dan, a popular rock album from 1994 by Cui Jian, China’s most famous rock star. Cui Weiping, ‘The Age of Experience’ (Jingyan de niandai). Available online at: http://blog.sina. com.cn/u/473d066b0100081t (accessed 7 February 2014); Xu Hui (ed.), Nineteen Sixties Personality (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 2000); Zhang Hongjie, ‘The Seventies Generation Caught in the Cracks between Old and New’. Available online at: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/488d2478010002zg (accessed 11 February 2014). 58. For an elaborate and insightful analysis of subjectivity and history in the fictions of Yu Hua and Su Tong, see Tang, Chinese Modern, pp. 196–244. 59. Wang Ping (ed.), New Generation: Poems from China Today (Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 1999), introduction by John Yau, pp. 12, 27–8. In this collection of poetry, two-thirds of the selected poets were born in the 1960s (ranging from 1961 to 1966) and the other third are slightly older, born in a range from 1954 (Yu Jian) to 1959. Similar to the situation in which independent filmmakers found themselves during the nineties, these experimental poets of the nineties had much fewer outlets than their counterparts in the eighties. Their writing in a condition of relative obscurity might be another shaping condition of their writing about, and in the shadow of, mainstream history. 60. Ibid. p. 155, poem ‘Nostalgia’ by Xue Di. 61. Ibid. p. 116, poem ‘Black Night’ by Tang Yaping. 62. Andrew F. Jones, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Ithaca: East Asia Programme, Cornell University, 1992); Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For a discussion of the connection between rock music and the Sixth Generation cinema, see Yingjin Zhang, ‘Rebel without a Cause?’, pp. 61–4. 63. Baranovitch, China’s New Voices, pp. 26–7. 64. Ibid. p. 28. Jin Zhaojun, ‘A Unique Cultural Phenomenon: Casual Discussion on “Prison Songs”’ 1 (Yi zhong dute de wenhua xianxiang: ‘Qiu ge’ manyi zhi yi), People’s Daily, 3 March 1989; Cheap Sentimentality: Casual Discussion on “Prison Songs” 2 ( ‘Lianjia de ganshang: “Qiu ge” manyi zhi er’), People’s Daily, 4 March 1989. 65. Baranovitch, China’s New Voices, p. 238. 66. Ibid. p. 238; Zhao Jianwei, Cui Jian: Cry Out in ‘Having Nothing’ – A Memorandum on Chinese Rock (Cui Jian: zai Yiwusuoyou zhong nahan – Zhongguo yaogun beiwanglu) (Beijing: Beijing Normal University Press, 1992), pp. 41–2. 67. Li Xiaojiang (ed.), Literature, Art and Gender (Wenxue, yishu yu xingbie) (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2002), p. 253. The First Generation refers to the painters who studied overseas before 1949, the Second Generation to those who matured in

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68.

69.

70. 71. 72.

73.

communist China after 1949, the Third Generation to the ‘educated youth’ painters and the Fourth Generation to the current ‘Newborn Generation’. For images of such infant-themed works, see Valerie C. Doran (ed.), China’s New Art, Post-1989 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Center, in association with Hanart T Z Gallery and Hong Kong Arts Festival Society, 1993, exhibition catalog), p. 76; John Clark (ed.), Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium (Hong Kong: New Art Media Ltd, 1999–2000), p. 82; Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips (eds), Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 80. Zhang Xiaogang, ‘Memory’s Eye and Existence’s Meaning’ (Huiyi de muguang he cunzai de yiwei), interviewed by Ouyang Jianghe, Dongfang Yishu – Dajia, 11 January 2007. Available online at: http://news.artron.net/show_news.php?newid=20524 (accessed 11 November 2014). Ibid. Zhang Xiaogang, ‘Self Portrait’. Available online at: http://www.ynarts.com/shop/ new_view.asp?id=190 (accessed 11 February 2014), my emphasis. For an introduction to the series, see Li (ed.), Literature, Art and Gender, pp. 343–4. Tang’s observation occurred during a discussion of Yin’s painting and other artworks from contemporary China at the Scenes and Visions: Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture Conference, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 6 April 2007. Yingjin Zhang, ‘Rebel without a Cause?’, p. 54.

Chapter 2 1. Pickowicz, ‘Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism’, pp. 57–87; for Pickowicz’s discussion of The Black Cannon Incident in particular, see pp. 63–73. Also see Jason McGrath, ‘Black Cannon Incident: Countering the Counter-espionage Fantasy’, in Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus II (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 25–31. 2. As Yingjin Zhang observed, the international success of the Fifth Generation has triggered a spate of studies in English on Chinese cinema; see Yingjin Zhang, Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 4. Book-length studies on the subject poured forth from the mid-nineties on. As many of these studies focus on films produced after the Cultural Revolution, the Fifth Generation cinema appeared understandably as a highly relevant, if not the central subject, for examination. See, for example, Chris Berry (ed.), Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, [1985] 1991); Chris Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004); Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (London: British Film Institute, 2004); Braester, Witness Against History; Nick Browne et al. (eds), New Chinese Cinemas; Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema, Culture, and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Cui Shuqin, Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003); Dai Jinhua, Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, eds Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow (London and New York: Verso, 2002); Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000); Harry H. Kuoshu (ed.), Celluloid China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002); Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (ed.), Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997); Tonglin Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); George S. Semsel, Chen Xihe and Xia

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Notes  205

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

Hong (eds), Film in Contemporary China: Critical Debates, 1979–1989 (Westport and London: Praeger Publishers, 1993); George S. Semsel (ed.), Chinese Film: The State of Art in the People’s Republic (New York: Praeger, 1987); Jerome Silbergeld, China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (London: Reaktion, 1999); Yingjin Zhang, Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies Publications, 2002). For a critical response to some of these publications and an important discussion on the methodological challenges encountered by Western studies on Chinese cinema, see Nick Browne, ‘On Western Critiques of Chinese Film’, Asian Cinema 16: 2 (Fall/Winter 2005), pp. 23–35. Blue Kite focuses on the socialist years from the 1950s to the 1970s. Browne et al. (eds), New Chinese Cinemas, pp. 15–56. Cheng and Huang (eds), My Camera Doesn’t Lie, p. 110. From 23 February through to 8 March 2001, the US Film Society of Lincoln Center presented ‘The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema in Transformation’ – a two-week eleven-film retrospective. From 2 March through to 8 March 2001, the New York Screening Room presented ‘Beijing Underground’ – a week-long six-film tribute. In Europe and America, apart from being known as China’s new ‘Urban Generation’, the Sixth Generation and their works were endowed with more politically charged appellations like ‘China’s underground film’, ‘China’s dissident film’ and ‘Beijing underground’. The shifting connections and fuzzy boundaries between ‘underground’ and ‘independent’ Chinese cinema are registered in Paul G. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (eds), From Underground to Independent (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Yingjin Zhang, ‘Rebel without a Cause?’, in Zhang Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 54; Chris Berry, ‘Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism’, in Zhang (ed.), The Urban Generation, p. 128. In another article, Berry introduces nuances in understanding the ‘independent’ status of new documentaries as a relational concept that needs to define itself through negotiating with ‘a three-legged system, composed of the party-state apparatus, the marketized economy, and the foreign media and art organizations that have built up a presence in China today’. See Chris Berry, ‘Independently Chinese: Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue, and Chinese Documentary’, in Pickowicz and Zhang (eds), From Underground to Independent, p. 109. On the notion of ‘unofficial’ in the context of contemporary China, see Richard Madsen, Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz (eds), Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic (Boulder: Westview, 1989); Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). For a brief but highly insightful and lucid account of the shadow in human psyche in both individual and collective dimensions, see Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, ed. William Booth (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988). Jay Leyda tries to retain the Chinese word for film or movie – dianying, meaning literally ‘electric shadow’ – for his book on Chinese cinema. See Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). Alexander Astruc’s famous essay ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo’ was first published in L’Ecran français in 1948, see Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), pp. 17–23. For two of the few most recent booklength discussions on these overlapping genres, see Rascaroli, The Personal Camera; Corrigan, The Essay Film. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 105. Ibid. p. 104. For an elaborate discussion by Renov on the role of subjectivity in

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13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

non-fictional cinematic representations of historical matters in particular, see pp. 69–89, 104–19. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 105. Tamara Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 355; quoted in Carolyn Steedman, Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1992), pp. 22–3. Meng Jinghui has made an interesting film called Chicken Poets (Xiang jimao yiyang fei, 2002). A discussion of the film can be found in Rossella Ferrari, ‘Disenchanted Presents, Haunted Pasts, and Dystopian Futures: Deferred Millenialism in the Cinema of Meng Jinghui’, Journal of Contemporary China 20: 71: (2011), pp. 699–721. I also discussed Chicken Poets from the angle of textual and poetic subjectivity, see Qi Wang, ‘Chicken Poets and Rough Poetry: Figuring the Poet and His Subject(s) in Independent Chinese Cinema’, in Marlisa Santos (ed.), Verse, Voice, and Vision: Cinema and Poetry (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013), pp. 67–77. I Love XXX, script by Meng Jinghui, Huang Jingang (b. 1960), Wang Xiaoli and Shi Hang (b. 1971). The script is published in Meng Jinghui (ed.), Avant-Garde Theatre Dossier (Xianfeng xiju dangan) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, [c2000] 2004). Author’s interview with Meng Jinghui, 13 November 2005, Beijing. For the volume, see Ding Zuxin (supervising editor), Chronicle of the 20th Century (Ershi shiji da bolan), trans. Wang Shangsheng et al. (Changchun: Jilin renmin chubanshe, 1989); translated from Clifton Daniel, Chronicle of the 20th Century (Mount Kisco: Chronicle Publications, 1987). Daniel, Chronicle of the 20th Century, pp. 667–78, 956–7, 1104–5, 1115. Shi Hang, ‘Count it as a Footnote to the Avant-Garde Theatre Dossier’ (Suanshi gei xianfeng xiju dangan zuo yixie zhushi). Available online at: http://blog.ifeng.com/ article/653406.html (accessed 11 February 2014). Meng, Avant-Garde Theatre Dossier, pp. 117–41. Ying Hong, ‘Meng Jinghui Tells You – I Love XXX’ (Meng Jinghui gen ni shuo – Wo ai XXX), Shanghai Drama 1 (1995), p. 20. The actors are: Guo Tao (b. 1967), Zhao Yu (b. 1967), Zhao Hai (b. 1970), Ge Dali (b. 1970) and Dai Mingyu, (b. 1972). The actresses are: Li Mei (b. 1972), Wang Xiaoli (b. 1970), Ru Xian (b. 1971) and Xu Jinglei (b. 1974). Meng, Avant-Garde Theatre Dossier, pp. 133–4. Ibid. p. 123. Ibid. p. 117. Ibid. p. 124. Chen Kaige, The Dragon-Blood Tree (Longxue shu) (Hong Kong: Cosmos, 1992); republished as Adolescent Kaige (Shaonian Kaige) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2001). For a discussion of K’s experience and its illuminating implications regarding the interaction between history and memory, see Braester, Witness Against History, pp. 1–6, 13. Peter Micic, ‘A Summary of the Cultural Mapping Reports: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou’. Available online at: www.artsfoundation.nl/.../091105_Update_ theatre_dansbeeldendekunst_sept2009.pdf (accessed 11 February 2014), p. 78. Meng, Avant-Garde Theatre Dossier, p. 129. Lu Xun, ‘Diary of a Madman’, in Lu Xun (ed.), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), p. 32. Meng, Avant-Garde Theatre Dossier, pp. 130–2. Shi, ‘Count it as a Footnote to the Avant-Garde Theatre Dossier’. Jiang Wen first rose to international acclaim with his performance in Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987), in which he plays Gong Li’s lover. His other notable performances include Hibiscus Town (Furong zhen, 1986), Black Snow (Ben ming nian, 1990), Li Lianying, The Imperial Eunuch (Da taijian Li Lianying, 1991), The Emperor’s

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Notes  207

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

Shadow (Qin song, 1996), The Soong Sisters (Song jia huangchao, 1997), Keep Cool (You hua haohao shuo, 1997), The Missing Gun (Xun qiang, 2002) and so on. He also stars in a highly acclaimed 1993 TV drama series A Native of Beijing in New York (Beijing ren zai niuyue), in which he plays an out-of-work cellist caught among the various pressures of an immigrant’s life. As his directorial debut, In the Heat of the Sun won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for its young lead Xia Yu (1994), Best Feature at the Singapore Film Festival and six Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan (1996). Richard Corliss lists it in Time as the best film of 1995. Devils on the Doorstep, his second directing piece, won the Grand Prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. His most two recent films are The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang zhaochang shengqi, 2007) and Let the Bullets Fly (Rang zidan fei, 2010). Wang Dongcheng, ‘Distorting and Misreading the Historical Truth – A Discussion with Jiang Wen and His Kind’ (Dui lishi zhenshi de waiqu yu wudu – yu Jiang Wen men shangque). Available online at: http://www.cnd.org/CR/ZK03/cr173.hz8. html#6 (accessed 11 February 2014). Alison Dakota Gee and Anne Naham, ‘Wang Shuo: The Outsider’, Asiaweek, 8 August 1996. Available online at: http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/96/0809/feat2.html (accessed 11 February 2014). The writer Liang Xiaosheng offers a testimony about the acoustic loudness in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. See Lu Xing, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), p. 103. Jiang Wen et al., Birth (Dansheng) (Beijing: Huayi chubanshe, 1997), pp. 51, 53. Volker Schlöndorff made it possible for Jiang Wen to do mixing at the German Bexburg Studio. Ibid. p. 53. Jerome Silbergeld discusses a similar misremembrance or what he calls ‘staged uncertainty’ through the case of a stamp bearing a ‘flag-of-no-nation’. See Jerome Silbergeld, Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 46–8. Robin Wood, Hitchcock’s Film Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 108–30. Braester, Witness against History, pp. 192–205. Mytimemyway, ‘Voyeurism on Mi Lan, Surmising Jiang Wen, Remembering the Self: In the Heat of the Sun’ (Kuishi Mi Lan, yice Jiang Wen, huiyi ziji: Yanguang canlan de rizi). Available online at: http://look.itv.mop.com/ron6286.html (accessed 12 February 2014). My own viewing experience testifies to this removal. I remember seeing this sequence in spring 1995 when the film was shown to a packed dining hall of students at Peking University. Jiang et al., Birth, pp. 393–8. Ibid. pp. 249–56. Ibid. p. 399. Ibid. p. 256. See online at: http://www.cgcmall.com/Sweeping_the_White_Tiger_Regiment_p/ cd00qixi1.htm (accessed July 2006). ‘Kulunmu’ and ‘oba’ are apparently Korean words meaning ‘cloud’ and ‘over’ (the latter being a Korean transcription of the English word ‘over’), respectively. Such a combination was in common use in the military as greeting codes in battles. My use of the metaphor of the broken halberd is largely inspired by Stephen Owen’s analysis of the representation of memory in the poetry of Du Mu (803–53), a renowned poet from the Tang Dynasty. Owen points out that ‘the beauty of this poem lies in the obliquity of the mind’s motions’. See Stephen Owen, Remembrance: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 51–2.

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208  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema 49. Ibid. 50. Wang Shuo, Ferocious Animals, in Jiang et al., Birth (Beijing: Huayi chubanshe, 1997), pp. 484–5. 51. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 14. 52. Ibid. p. 30. 53. Ibid. p. 30. 54. Ibid. p. 31. 55. Ibid. pp. 35–6. 56. Ibid. p. 94. 57. Ibid. p. 99. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. I also offer a discussion of Jiang Wen’s 2007 film, The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang zhaochang shengqi), in the conclusion of this book. 61. Gary G. Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), pp. 50–60. 62. Zhang, ‘Rebel without a Cause?’, p. 55. 63. Author’s interview with Wang Guangli on 1 November 2005, Beijing. 64. Zhang, ‘Rebel without a cause?’, p. 59.

Chapter 3 1. Roger Cardinal, ‘Pausing over Peripheral Detail’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 30/31 (1986), pp. 114, 126. 2. Browne et al. (eds), New Chinese Cinemas, p. 52. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Stephen Heath, ‘Narrative Space’, in Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 19–75. 6. John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel (eds), Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. xiii; Cardinal, ‘Pausing over Peripheral Detail’, pp. 112–30. 7. For example, Jerome Silbergeld has offered a quite elaborate thematic analysis of Lou Ye’s Suzhou River, mostly focusing on the characters and their symbolic or even moralistic significances, such as attaching values like sincerity, innocence, faith in love and purity to the female figures of Mudan/Meimei. Silbergeld’s reading, with all its insight in character analysis and its value in calling our attention to Lou Ye’s cinema as a kind of women’s cinema, shows the limitations of a textual analysis confined to the thematic interpretation of its story. For example, the ‘cynicism’ of the videographer character, instead of being recognised as a central narrative as well as visual mechanism by which Lou Ye challenges the closure of story and meaning, seems to mainly offer an occasion for moralist criticism. The videographer’s apparent ennui becomes interpreted as a lack of commitment that basically needs to be corrected and improved in the light of the innocent leap of faith of the woman character(s) Mudan/Meimei. However, one should also bear in mind that Silbergeld’s analysis was offered at a relatively early stage of Lou’s filmmaking; by the time the article came out, Lou had made only four films, about half of his current repertoire in total. My analysis of Lou Ye’s cinema in this book has doubtless benefitted from access to a fuller body (and hopefully a rounder consideration) of the director’s works. See Jerome Silbergeld, Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), pp. 11–46, particularly 32–45. 8. Stephen Teo, ‘Cinema with an Accent – Interview with Jia’. Available online at:

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Notes  209

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/feature-articles/zhangke_interview/ (accessed 23 February 2014). Chris Berry, ‘Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By’, in Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus II, p. 251. Ibid. p. 254. Ibid. Jason McGrath, ‘The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic’, in Zhang (ed.), The Urban Generation, p. 94. For Chris Berry’s comment on the opening of Xiao Wu, see Berry, ‘Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By’, p. 250. An allegedly original version of ‘Train Heading for Shaoshan’ sung by members of the Shanghai Yangpu District Children’s Palace in 1975 is available online at: http:// video.sina.com.cn/v/b/56217218-1733204862.html (accessed 3 November 2011). The video sequence that accompanies this version is exactly the section of ‘Little Train Please Take Us to Beijing Fast’ from We Are All Sunflowers. The fact that the Shanghai-produced song was created in the same year as the film evidences the popularity of the latter and its qualification for being an important piece of cultural memory. Michael Berry, Xiao Wu. Platform. Unknown Pleasures. Jia Zhangke’s ‘Home Trilogy’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 84. McGrath, ‘The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke’, pp. 96, 101. Berry, Jia Zhangke’s ‘Home Trilogy’, pp. 75–80. Unidentified, ‘Jia Zhangke: Pickpocket Director’, Beijing Scene Online 5: 23 (27 August 1999 to 2 September 1999). Available online at: http://www.beijingscene. com/V05I023/feature/feature.htm (accessed 13 February 2014). Seymour Chatman, Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 2. Ibid. pp. 90–1. Ibid. p. 96. Berry, Jia Zhangke’s ‘Home Trilogy’, p. 65. Ibid. See also McGrath, ‘The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke’, p. 100. Tonglin Lu, ‘Trapped Freedom and Localized Globalism’, in Pickowicz and Zhang (eds), From Underground to Independent, p. 136. In a more expansive but also different discussion, Yingjin Zhang provides an illuminating study of the remapping of Beijing as a space of polylocality through means of transportation (for example, taxi, bicycle, motorcycle and airplane) featured in a number of contemporary films. See Yingjin Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), pp. 75–89. Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, pp. 88–9. Author’s interview with Lou Ye, 28 November 2005, Beijing. Named after Mada, a man obsessed with his ex-girlfriend that Meimei often mentions, the motorcyclist is involved in kidnapping Mudan (also played by Zhou Xun), the daughter of a rich bootlegger. Mudan gradually falls in love with Mada and feels betrayed after learning his true intention. She throws herself into the Suzhou River and is never seen again. After coming out of jail, Mada starts looking for Mudan and ends up harassing Meimei who looks like her. Meimei refuses to believe Mada’s story until when she sees their bodies discovered in the river one day. Meimei leaves the videographer with a note saying ‘Come look for me’, suggesting that he try what Mada had done for Mudan, a tale of amour fou that she seems obsessed with throughout the film. The videographer is back on the river wandering again, continuing to dream about love stories, as he does at the beginning of the film. Norman Brock and Placius Schelbert, interview of Lou Ye on Suzhou River, 12 February 2000. Available online at: http://www.msgproduction.com/artist/louye-c. htm (accessed 13 February 2014).

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210  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema 30. Gary G. Xu suggests this dynamic between different layers of story or different sets of characters as being linked by the motif of ‘lie’. See Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema, pp. 84–5. 31. Cheng and Huang (eds), My Camera Doesn’t Lie. 32. Li Jun, ‘Lou Ye: Sex is an Inseparable Part of Nature’ (Lou Ye: xing shi ziranshijie wufa geshe de yibufen), The Bund (Waitan huabao). Available online at: http://www. bundpic.com/2011/09/15813.shtml (accessed 13 February 2014). 33. Ibid.

Chapter 4 1. Fang Fang, A History of Documentaries in China (Zhongguo jilupian fazhan shi) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2003), pp. 177–265, 271–82. The only exception relatively free from the tight control of propaganda during this period seems to be the scientific education films (kejiao pian) that were in production from the early fifties to the mid-sixties, see Fang, A History of Documentaries in China, pp. 198–9, 243–7. 2. Ibid. pp. 271, 274–5. 3. Li Zhensheng, Red-Color News Soldier: A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey through the Cultural Revolution, ed. Robert Pledge (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003). 4. Ibid. pp. 118–19. The documented screening seems to be one of the many ‘xinwen jianbao’ (news briefing) often shown prior to a feature presentation. Kang Zhengguo recalls a similar experience, see Kang Zhengguo, ‘Realisticness and Verité’ (Jishi yu zhenshi), in Ping Jie (ed.), Reel China: A New Look at Contemporary Chinese Documentary (Ling yan xiang kan: haiwai xuezhe ping dangdai zhongguo jilupian) (Shanghai: Wenhui Publishing House, 2006), p. 118. 5. Cheng Kai, ‘What Kind of Humanism, What Kind of History?’ (Hezhong renwen, hezhong lishi?), Dushu (October 2006), pp. 21–7. Also see in this issue of Dushu, ‘Documentary, Memory and Interference – The Path of Chinese Humanistic Documentary Symposium’ (Jilu, jiyi yu jieru – zhongguo renwen jilupian zhilu zuotan), pp. 3–11; Lu Xinyu, ‘What Does “Humanistic” Documentary Intend to Do?’ (Jintian, “renwen” jilu yiyuhewei?), pp. 12–17; Guo Xizhi, ‘Counter-Reaction Is the Only Way Out’ (Fandong shi weiyi de chulu), pp. 27–32; Liu Hongmei, ‘What Sort of Humanistic Concern?’ (Shenmeyang de renwen guanhuai?), pp. 32–8. 6. For an earlier discussion of Wu Wenguang’s documentary work, see Bérénice Reynaud, ‘Dancing with Myself, Drifting with My Camera: The Emotional Vagabonds of China’s New Documentary’. Available online at: http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/ feature-articles/chinas_new_documentary/ (accessed 23 February 2014). 7. Interview with Shi Jian. See Lu, Documenting China, p. 149. 8. Ibid. p. 151. 9. For an analysis of Tiananmen, see Paola Voci, ‘From the Center to the Periphery: Chinese Documentary’s Visual Conjectures’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16: 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 80–90. 10. Lu, Documenting China, pp. 13–22. For a concise description of this ‘movement’, see Qi Wang, ‘New Documentary Movement’, in Edward Davis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 428–9. 11. Michael Renov, ‘Toward a Poetics of Documentary’, in Michael Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 21–32. 12. Lin Xudong, ‘Documentary in Mainland China’, Documentary Box 26 (2005). Available online at: http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/26/box26-3-e.html (accessed 17 February 2014). 13. Ibid. 14. I discuss the reasons for the initial neglect of this more reflexive mode of independent documentary in Qi Wang, ‘Performing Documentation: Wu Wenguang

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Notes  211

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

and the Performative Turn of New Chinese Documentary’, in Yingjin Zhang (ed.), A Companion to Chinese Cinema (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2012), pp. 302–4. Chris Berry points out the ‘relational’ status of independent documentary filmmaking, as it is contingent upon ‘a three-legged system . . . composed of the party-state apparatus, the marketized economy, and the foreign media and art organizations that have built up a presence in China today’. As for its unique gritty verité aesthetic, Matthew David Johnson cautions us about its risking losing the critical edge, as it might be ‘co-opted, canonized, replaced, or forgotten’ as a result of increasing institutionalisation of this style in official television. See Berry, ‘Independently Chinese: Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue, and Chinese Documentary’, p. 109; and Johnson, ‘“A Scene beyond Our Line of Sight”: Wu Wenguang and New Documentary Cinema’s Politics of Independence’, p. 72. Philip Rosen, ‘Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts’, in Michael Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 82, 84, 87. These six are: Jiang Yue with Catholicism in Tibet (1992); Hao Zhiqiang with Big Tree County (1993); Wang Guangli with I Graduated (1992); Wu Wenguang with 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1993); Wen Pulin and Duan Jinchuan with The Holy Land for Ascetics (1992); Fu Hongxing with Tibetan Opera Troupe in the Khams (1993). List available online at: http://www.yidff.jp/93/93list-e.html (accessed 17 February 2014). Interviews with Duan Jinchuan and Wu Wenguang, see Lu, Documenting China, pp. 6–7, 71; Zhu Jingjiang and Mei Bing (eds), Dossiers of Independent Chinese Documentaries (Zhongguo duli jilupian dangan) (Xi’an: Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2004), pp. 103–4. Zhu and Mei, Dossiers of Independent Chinese Documentaries, p. 107. Ibid. pp. 107–8; Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 210–16, 233–6. Nichols, Ideology and the Image, p. 209; Zhu and Mei, Dossiers of Independent Chinese Documentaries, p. 108. ‘E-mail Interview with Duan Jinchuan’ (Duan Jinchuan de E-mail fangtan). Available online at: http://movie.newyouth.beida-online.com/data/data. php3?db=movie&id=djcdeft (updated on 23 November 2000). Pierre Nora, ‘General Introduction: Between Memory and History’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 1–20. For a discussion of the richness of Tiananmen Square as an inspiring site for artistic imagination and political intervention, see Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Chapter 5, ‘Art of the Square: From Subject to Site’, pp. 165–234. Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 179, original emphasis. Barry Keith Grant, ‘Ethnography in the First Person: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies’, in Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds), Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), pp. 238–53. Ibid. p. 239. Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 210–33. Ibid. pp. 233–4. Zhu and Mei, Dossiers of Independent Chinese Documentaries, p. 113. The unity of action requires the play to dramatise only one central story or action and eliminate action not relevant to the plot. Ibid. p. 132. The original novel is by Zhou Libo, a primary figure who played a major role in

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32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

conceptualising and implementing the Land Reform in the village in question. See Zhou Libo, The Storm (Baofeng zhouyu) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1961). The Storm does not identify the titles of the historical documentaries that it excerpts from. Two communist documentaries about the region are The Great Land Reform (Weida de tudi gaige, dir. Jiang Yunchuan and Ye Hua, 1953) and Democratic Northeast (Minzhu dongbei, 1947–9). The Nationalists made Look at the Northeast (Kan dongbei, dir. Zhang Tianci, 1948). See Fang, A History of Documentaries in China, pp. 139–42, 171–2, 183–4. Rubie S. Watson mentions how through ‘speaking bitterness’, the Land Reform Campaign of 1950 to 1952 managed to turn ‘my past’ into ‘our past’ through a process of violent exclusion, in which the mobilisation campaign became intertwined with the exercise of class vengeance. See Watson, Memory, History, and Opposition, p. 83. Williams, ‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and The Thin Blue Line’, p. 387. Ibid. pp. 385, 386. Ibid. p. 386. Rosen, ‘Document and Documentary’, p. 70. Lu Xinyu, ‘Documentary: Why Did We Start’ (Jilupian: women weishenme yao chufa). Available online at: http://www.gdtv.com.cn/southtv/articleaaX.htm (accessed 9 November 2009); ‘What Does “Humanistic” Documentary Intend to Do?’ (Jintian, “renwen” jilu yiyuhewei?), Dushu 10 (2006), p. 15. Yingjin Zhang, ‘Styles, Subjects and Special Points of View: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 2: 2 (2004), pp. 119–35. For a detailed critique of Houjie Township, see Qi Wang, ‘Who Is the Man With a Movie Camera? (Chi sheyingji de ren shi shui?), in Ping Jie (ed.), Reel China, pp. 155–63. I was able to share my views expressed in this article with Zhou Hao. It is interesting to see that Using (Long Ge, 2008), Zhou’s third documentary, explicitly displays the director’s interaction with the filmed subject, a drug addict named Long Ge, and even discusses onscreen that their collaboration on the making of the documentary is a complex relationship not free from mutual ‘using’. Interview with Wu Wenguang. See Lu, Documenting China, p. 21. Interview with Wang Bing. Available online at: http://www.yidff.jp/2003/ interviews/03i030-e.html (accessed 17 February 2014). Michael Renov discusses the issue of subjectivity present in many of these genres through specific case studies. See Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Specifically, the ‘I’ film refers to an unfinished experiment of Joris Ivens employing an exclusively subjective camera, and Jonas Mekas calls for a new or ‘personal cinema’ through Film Culture and the ‘Movie Journal’ column in the Village Voice. See The Subject of Documentary, pp. xix, 81. While ‘self-documentary’ is a Japanese invention, its development is very much informed and nurtured by similar practices in the West. See Nada Hisashi, ‘Self-Documentary: Its Origins and Present State’, Documentary Box 26 (October 2005), pp. 15–23. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, p. 70. Ibid. p. 118. The most recent and award-winning discussion on the topic is found in Corrigan, The Essay Film: from Montaigne, after Marker. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, pp. 176–7, xxiii. Cynthia Lucia, ‘When the Personal Becomes Political: An Interview with Ross McElwee’, Cineaste 20: 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 32–6. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, pp. 104, 110. For these two illuminations, mainly see the chapters ‘Lost, Lost, Lost: Mekas as Essayist’ and ‘The Subject in History: The New Autobiography in Film and Video’, pp. 69–89, 104–19. Interview with Wu Wenguang. See Lu, Documenting China, pp. 3–34.

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Notes  213 51. For a detailed discussion of Wu Wenguang’s documentary work and its persistent intimate relationship with performance, see Qi Wang, ‘Performing Documentation: Wu Wenguang and the Performative Turn of New Chinese Documentary’, in Yingjin Zhang (ed.), A Companion to Chinese Cinema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 299–317. 52. Zhang, ‘Styles, Subjects and Special Points of View’, pp. 119–35. 53. Wang, ‘Performing Documentation’. 54. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, pp. 152, 112; David MacDougall, ‘Beyond Observational Cinema’, in Paul Hockings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 118–19. 55. Yiman Wang, ‘The Amateur’s Lightning Rod’, Film Quarterly 58: 4 (June 2005), p. 22. 56. Renov, Theorizing Documentary, p. 6; Wang, ‘The Amateur’s Lightning Rod’, p. 22; Jia Zhangke, ‘I, As Myself, Express What I See’ (Wo duli biaoda wo suo kandao de shijie). Available online at: http://ent.tom.com/1002/1011/20031111-59933.html (accessed 20 November 2003); Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), p. 243. 57. Thanks to Vinicius Navarro for a very inspiring conversation in which he justifies our need for documentary in terms of the human desire to give an order to the flow of life. 58. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, p. 105. 59. Ibid. 60. Guo, ‘Counter-Reaction Is the Only Way Out’, p. 31. 61. Huang Wenhai, ‘From Naturalism to Psychological Realism’ (Cong ziran zhuyi dao xinli xianshi zhuyi), in email correspondence with the author. 62. For a discussion of Li Ning’s Tape, see Qi Wang, ‘The Recalcitrance of Reality: Performances, Subjects, and Filmmakers in 24 City and Tape’, in Angela Zito and Zhang Zhen (eds), DV-Made China, forthcoming. An earlier version of the article was presented as ‘Portraiture, Performance, and Documentary in 24 City and Tape’ at the DV-Made China Workshop: Digital Objects, Everyday Subjects, New York University, 17–18 December 2010. 63. For a brief analysis of Summer Palace, see Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film, pp. 341–8. 64. Author’s interview of Wang Guangli, 1 November 2005, Beijing. 65. Berry, A History of Pain, p. 345. 66. Ibid. 67. About the act of mourning as an important instance of self-inscription, see Renov, The Subject of Documentary, pp. 120–9. 68. Ibid. p. 79. 69. An earlier version of this section on West of the Tracks is published in Asian Cinema. See Qi Wang, ‘Navigating on the Ruins: Space, Power and History in Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentaries’, Asian Cinema 17: 1 (Spring/Summer 2006), pp. 246–55. 70. A comparable documenting project is the photography of Zhou Hai (b. 1970) of workers and labourers: Industrial Heaviness (Gongye de chenzhong). See Zhou Hai, Turn of the Century: Visual Memories of Social Changes in China (Shiji zhuanshen: zhongguo shehui bianqian de shijue jiyi), ed. Gu Zheng (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2004), pp. 172–200. Zhou Hai focuses on the actual faces and bodies (sometimes body parts, such as the much-laboured, creased and mud-and-grease covered feet of a worker). 71. Lu Xinyu, ‘West of the Tracks: History and Class Consciousness’ (Tie Xi Qu: lishi yu jieji yishi). Available online at: http://www.menggang.com/movie/documentary/ china/wangbing/tiexi/tiexi-a.html (accessed 17 February 2014). 72. Michael Chanan, ‘The Documentary Chronotope’, Jump Cut 43 (2000), p. 59.

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214  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema 73. Ibid. 74. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [c1977] 2005), p. 130. 75. Vivian Sobchack, ‘Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience’, in Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (eds), Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 248. Sobchack is glossing Jean-Pierre Meunier, Les Structure de l’expérience filmique: L’Identification filmique (Louvain: Librarie Universitaire, 1969). 76. Ibid. 77. Tuan, Space and Place, pp. 36–7. 78. François Bégaudeau, ‘Après le siècle, en marche’, Cahiers du cinéma 591 (June 2004), p. 33; my translation. 79. Ibid. 80. Steve Neale, ‘Triumph of the Will: Notes on Documentary and Spectacle’, Screen 20: 1 (1979), p. 85. 81. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, p. 176.

Chapter 5 1. For example, one of Cui’s gestures in engaging with social issues beyond gay rights is We Are the . . . of Communism (Women shi gongcanzhuyi shengluehao, 2007), a documentary on the loss of schooling suffered by the children of migrant workers, who contribute immensely to China’s rapid urbanisation, but whose interests and existences are brutally subject to neglect and sacrifice in the process. 2. The title of Tang’s documentary is inspired by an English novel by Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1987), which was later adapted into a TV drama with the same title (dir. Beeban Kidron, 1990). Winterson’s book title itself borrows from Nell Gwynn, a seventeenth-century English actress who was also the mistress of King Charles II. A somewhat autobiographical story about a lesbian orphan who manages to cultivate her own identity amongst a Christian fundamentalist family, Winterson’s first novel is noted for its postmodernist metanarrative (personal accounts interrupted or punctuated with fragments of fairy tales and myths), a feature that is also manifest in her other novel, Sexing the Cherry. We observe a comparable mix of genres in the current documentary by Tang Danhong. See Zhu and Mei, Dossiers of Independent Chinese Documentaries, p. 350; Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Grove Press, 1985); Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 3. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, p. 201. Curiously, Huang Wenhai’s documentary Dream Walking (Mengyou, 2006) seemed to attract similar suspicion at the 2006 REEL CHINA Documentary Biennial (Shanghai and New York). A jury member lamented at Dream Walking: ‘There is an unspoken social contract between documentary directors and their audiences. The directors promise to give viewers something worth watching, something they should care about. The audience, in turn, agrees to give over to the director a portion of their lives equal in length to the running time of the documentary. The problem with Dream Walking is that it violates this contract. There is nothing that makes me want to care about the people portrayed. They strike me as more self-indulgent than anything else . . . Perhaps the need to shock is an inherent element in the artists’ psyche. Yet this documentary seems to revel in shock for its own sake, and its characters are so enamored with themselves there is no room left for an audience.’ On the other hand, Dream Walking won the Grand Prix at the 2006 Cinéma du réel in France. Such divided responses are certainly thoughtprovoking. For me, the issue in point here concerns not so much the quality of the actual documentary as the varied definitions and expectations of documentary when it crosses from documentation to performance.

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Notes  215 4. For a detailed discussion of the strong, yet at first neglected, performative tendency in independent documentary, such as embodied in the works of Wu Wenguang, see Wang, ‘Performing Documentation’. 5. Hisashi, ‘Self-Documentary: Its Origins and Present State’. 6. An interesting coincidence in this kind of directorial attention to private and domestic details is found in In Search of the Cobra (Xunzhao yanjingshe, 1998), a documentary by woman filmmaker Liu Xiaojin about the work and life of several female artists. Liu is also generous in spending screen time on small details that apparently contribute little to the narrative development of her documentary. For example, when Liu is engaged in a conversation with Yang Keqin, an artist who came to Beijing from Xinjiang in northwest China, her camera captures ordinary objects of everyday life, such as bowls, plates and soy sauce bottles that stand on the floor. For an earlier discussion of documentary filmmaking by women including In Search of the Cobra, see Zhang Zhen, ‘Women With a Movie Camera: An Overview of Contemporary Chinese Documentary Filmmaking by Female Filmmakers’, in Ping Jie (ed.), Reel China, pp. 84–95. 7. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, p. 70. 8. Interview with Tang Danhong. Available online at: http://www.xlmz.net/forum/ viewthread.php?tid=2938 (accessed 23 February 2014). 9. Ibid. 10. David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 19. 11. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, p. 178. 12. Wu Mei, ‘The Neurotic History of an Artist’ (Yige yishujia de shenjingzheng shi). Available online at: http://www.xlmz.net/forum/viewthread.php?tid=2938 (accessed 23 February 2014). 13. Ibid. 14. Mick Eaton, ‘The Production of Cinematic Reality’, in Mick Eaton (ed.), Anthropology – Reality – Cinema: The Films of Jean Rouch (London: British Film Institute, 1979), p. 51. 15. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 11. 16. Ibid. p. 1. 17. Renov, The Subject of Documentary, p. 178. 18. For an illuminating sample of stories about the ‘second-hand’ experiences of the Cultural Revolution’s violence and force through parents, see Chihua Wen, The Red Mirror: Children of China’s Cultural Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). On the strategies and behaviours of family adaptation and children’s adaptation during the Cultural Revolution, see Xiaowei Zang, Children of the Cultural Revolution: Family Life and Political Behavior in Mao’s China (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 66–72, 96–102. 19. Very recent examples of documentary-like or non-fictional works by women filmmakers that invoke intersubjectivity and/or history and memory include Women Directors (Nü daoyan, dir. Yang Mingming, 2012), Hungry Village (Ji’e de cunzi, dir. Zou Xueping, 2010), Satiated Village (Chibao de cunzi, dir. Zou Xueping, 2011) and Listening to Third Grandma’s Stories (Ting san nainai jiang guoqu de gushi, dir. Wen Hui, 2012). For a brief discussion on three of these works, see Qi Wang, ‘Closed and Open Screens: The 9th Beijing Independent Film Festival’, Film Criticism 37: 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 65–6, 68–9. 20. A slightly different version of the following discussion on Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en was published as Qi Wang, ‘Embodied Visions: Chinese Queer Experimental Documentaries by Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en’, positions: east asia cultures critique 21: 3 (Summer 2013), pp. 659–81. Shi Tou is a renowned lesbian painter who has turned to the video camera for expression in recent years. Her works include oil paintings – Weapons (Wuqi) series, Joy Clock (Huanle zhong) series, Butterfly (Yuanyang

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216  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema hudie) series, Female Friends (Nüyou) series; installation – Convex and Concave (Ao tu) series; photography – Be Together (Zai yiqi); videos – Dyke March (Nü tongzhi youxingri, 2004), 50 Minutes of Women (Nüren wushi fenzhong, 2005), Wenda Gu: Art. Politics. Life. Sexuality (Gu Wenda fangtan: yishu, zhengzhi, rensheng, xing qingxiang, 2005). She also performs the lead role in Li Yu’s film about lesbian love: Elephant and Fish (Jinnian xiatian, 2001). Cui Zi’en is a renowned gay writer, filmmaker and scholar known for his iconoclastic science fiction with a queer twist and various feature-length videos that are remarkable for their queer subject matter and extremely rigorous and rebellious stylistic features. He has published nine novels in China and Hong Kong, one of which – Uncle’s Past (Jiujiu de renjian yanhuo) – won the 2001 Radio Literature Award in Germany. He is also the author of six books on criticism and theory, as well as a columnist for four magazines. Frequently referred to as a ‘queer auteur’, Cui Zi’en is one of the most avant-garde filmmakers in Chinese underground cinema. His major films include such internationally renowned titles as Enter the Clowns (Choujue dengchang, 2002) and The Old Testament (Jiuyue, 2002). On Cui’s work, see Chris Berry, ‘The Sacred, the Profane, and the Domestic in Cui Zi’en’s Cinema’, positions 12: 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 195–201; Qi Wang, ‘The Ruin Is Already a New Outcome: An Interview with Cui Zi’en’, positions 12: 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 181–94. 21. In his comparative reading of The Box and Dyke March, Shiyan Chao, while acknowledging Ying’s work for its efforts to make visible the hitherto underrepresented lesbian identities, highlights and criticises the existence of the invisible borderline between ‘straight’ curiosity and lesbian existence that informs the static camera, as well as the interview questions addressed to the filmed subjects. See Shiyan Chao, ‘The Erotic Politics Inside and Outside The Box – A Discussion on Dyke March’ (Hezi neiwai de qingyu zhengzhi – jianlun Nü tongzhi youxing ri), in Ping Jie (ed.), Reel China, pp. 143–51. Yingjin Zhang also notes Ying’s intention to aestheticise and ‘spiritualise’ her lesbian subjects in his elaborate analysis of The Box that highlights the emotively performative mechanism hidden in the apparently observational mode. Using The Box as a rich example, Zhang emphasises the exigency of considering multiple levels of representation and mediation at which independent documentaries operate as sources of information and truth. See Yingjin Zhang, ‘Thinking Outside the Box: Mediation of Imaging and Information in Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary’, Screen 48: 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 179–92, 184. 22. Another recurring motif in Shi’s paintings is fish, which appear repeatedly in an unusually prominent manner comparable to what happens in Cui’s experimental documentary Night Scene. In the private exhibition that Shi stages in the domestic space of her condominium – which I visited during an interview in early 2005 – paintings containing faces, bodies, flowers and fish are juxtaposed with photographic self-portraits featuring Shi in the bath and looking into a mirror at her own naked self. It is tempting to surmise the mysterious linkage between icons like fish and water to the fluidity of gender identity or subtle political criticism. For example, an interesting coincidence in evoking the figure of fish is Lu Hao’s transparent Plexiglass sculpture ‘Tiananmen Fish Tank’ (1998). In this piece, as Wu Hung points out, Lu Hao ‘empties’ the iconic, often opaque Tiananmen Gate by replacing its staunch red walls with transparent glass in which gold fish swim. The often square-faced, political sign of Tiananmen Square goes through a leisurely, playful and domestic reinvention, dissolved and ridiculed in a similar effect to which Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en apply their political rewriting through the individualised, concretely gendered bodies. It is also interesting to note the prominent, huge, fantastic-looking corns in Shi’s paintings that seem to coincide with the Corn series of the contemporary painter Pan Dehai, who hides or embeds mystic human faces among corn formations. As Pan states: ‘Corn kernels evoke for me the most basic physical unit that comprises the world. They are a perfect manifestation of the origin of life, the very substance of life and matter,

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23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

and a profound symbol of the inner life spirit. They are not limited to any particular emotions, but I feel they can best express a sense of loss, tragedy, helplessness and other expressions of human frailty. The space formed by these round kernels is like a dense petrified rock that blocks the human mind from penetrating the basic nature of the world.’ It is amazing to see how Pan’s reflections on the irreducible, physical quality of corn as a unit in experience, perception and reality are also applicable to the implication of the body – gay or straight, present or past – as employed in Shi and Cui’s works. However, I would argue that the body, when occupied and approached from inside and deployed as a (self-)conscious, experiential and performing unit, would help facilitate rather than block communication and understanding. For Lu Hao’s ‘Tiananmen Fish Tank’, see Wu, Remaking Beijing, p. 207. For Pan’s paintings, see China’s New Art, Post-1989, ed. Valerie C. Doran (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Center, in association with Hanart T Z Gallery and Hong Kong Arts Festival Society, 1993), pp. 126–31. Author’s interview of Cui Zi’en, 29 October 2005, Beijing. Ibid. At the time of the interview, Cui had just started working on a book that would be based specifically on personal memories and in which he plans to ‘restore childhood, the past, and the family in the past’. That book has just come out: see Cui Zi’en, Beidou There Are Seven Stars: A Spiritual Biography of My Family (Beidou you qi xing: wo jiazu de jingshen zhuanji) (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2012). While some of Cui’s fictional works are set in the past, often the historical context in which such stories take place is vague enough, as if set at a deliberate distance from the typical representations or understandings of the period – that is, the Cultural Revolution. However, Cui’s video works thus far mainly evoke the present and the future. Wang, ‘The Ruin Is Already a New Outcome’, p. 184. Ibid. As it is hard to summarise Night Scene because of its dissipated multiple plot lines that appear more like fragments than consistent stories and that are further confused by Cui’s blending of fiction and non-fiction, I hereby try to provide an account based on the synopsis provided by Cui himself. However, it is perhaps advisable to bear in mind that Cui’s works are always open to the reader/viewer’s own understanding, so the summary here is by no means conclusive. Synopsis of Night Scene: Yang Yang is a college student who happens to find out that his father is a homosexual. He stalks him and beats up his father’s lover, Xiaoyong. Yang Yang does not know that his father also runs a male prostitute house and nightclub; neither does he expect that he himself will later fall in love at first sight with a boy named Haobin. Haobin turns out to be a money boy, who works at the nightclub run by Yang Yang’s father. Yang Yang takes Haobin to his school and their relationship gets more intense day by day. When Yang Yang finds out about Haobin’s profession, he falls into such depression that he becomes defiant and indulges himself in sex with people he barely knows. A money boy called Xiaobin comes from a small city in Shandong and says that his experience in prostitution will shadow the rest of his life. Xiaobin falls in love with another money boy at the nightclub. Yang Yang’s father is hosting a show. The money boys in his shop get on stage one by one to display their talents and among them is Haobin. The increasing use of local accents or dialects in Chinese cinema is a phenomenon worthy of full-scale research on its own, as the tremendous linguistic and cultural diversity implies the overlooked multiplicity of the Chinese national, as well as cultural, identity. Part of the power and effectiveness of the New Documentary Movement lies in its representation of hitherto unseen faces and unheard voices – heavily accented or in dialects – that more truthfully present a grassroots, everyday China than the standard, officially ordained Mandarin voice of the official media. Li Yu – director of what is hailed as the first lesbian narrative film in postsocialist China, Fish and Elephant, in which Shi Tou plays the lead role – speaks about her interest and insistence on using dialects in her films, that the sound of the language

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29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

shapes and changes a film’s ‘character’ (qizhi). See Guan Yadi, ‘A Secular Discourse from a Woman’s Perspective – An Interview with Li Yu’ (Nüxing shijiao xia de shisu yanshuo – Li Yu fangtan), Dianying yishu 306 (January 2006), p. 36. For the most recent comprehensive study on this aspect, see Jin Liu, Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013). As early as 1992, Li Yinhe undertook a study on the gay community with her late husband, writer Wang Xiaobo, Their World: A Study of the Gay Communities in China (Tamen de shijie: zhongguo nan tongxinglian qunluo toushi) (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1992). Also see Li Yinhe, The Subculture of Sadomasochism (Nüelian yawenhua) (Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chuban gongsi, 2002); You Need Comforting So Much: A Dialogue on Love (Ni ruci xuyao anwei: guanyu ai de duihua) (Beijing: Dangdai shijie chubanshe, 2005); Sex and Gender (Liangxing guanxi) (Shanghai: China East Normal University Press, 2005). Cui Zi’en, Pseudo-Science Fiction Stories (Wei kehuan gushi) (Zhuhai: Zhuhai Publishing House, 2003). Cui Zi’en, ‘Endangered Species Rule!’, trans. Petrus Liu, positions 12: 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 176–7. It is interesting to compare the depiction of the movie theatre – screening violence and rape – with one of Cui’s childhood memories. Asked to comment on his early experience of movie-going, Cui mentioned that he found the official socialist cinema violent, bloody and scary. Author’s interview with Cui, 29 October 2005, Beijing. Berry, ‘The Sacred, the Profane, and the Domestic in Cui Zi’en’s Cinema’, p. 200. For Cui’s discussion of his Catholic background in conjunction with his queer identity, see Wang, ‘The Ruin Is Already a New Outcome’, pp. 185–6. Annelie Lütgens, ‘Of Spiritual Happiness and Material Knowledge’, in Annelie Lütgens, Karen Smith, and Gijs Van Tuyl (eds), The Chinese: Photography and Video from China (Wolfsburg: The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2004), p. 9; Karen Smith, ‘Photography in China from 1949 to the Present’, in Lütgens et al. (eds), The Chinese: Photography and Video from China, p. 14. Smith, ‘Photography in China from 1949 to the Present’, p. 17. Lütgens et al., The Chinese: Photography and Video from China, pp. 40–3. Lütgens, ‘Of Spiritual Happiness and Material Knowledge’, p. 9. João Ribas, Interview with Wang Qingsong, ArtInfo, 2006. Available online at: http://www. wangqingsong.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=177%3A wang-qingsong-by-joao-ribas-2006&catid=76%3A2006-reviews&lang=en (accessed 18 February 2014). For Wang’s repertoire, see his website available online at: www. wangqingsong.com (accessed 18 February 2014). http://www.wangqingsong.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= 59&Itemid=13 (accessed 19 February 2014). Lütgens et al., The Chinese: Photography and Video from China, p. 63. Ibid. pp. 90–3; also see Cao Kai, Document and Experiment: A Pre-History of the DV Image (Jilu yu shiyan: DV yingxiang qianshi) (Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2005), pp. 222–4. I locate typical although personal evidence in a childhood photograph of my sisters, both born in the sixties in China. Though only kids of barely ten years of age, they wear heavy, theatrical make-up, looking like they are getting ready for, or have just finished, a performance of sorts. The photograph has a caption that explains that this is actually a record of the ‘Xiang Yang Yuan’ (Sunward Yard) phenomenon. The Sunward Yard was a form of community organisation in the late Cultural Revolution years. It grouped households, especially the kids in a given neighbourhood, and put on performances that were mostly amateur reproductions of official numbers, such as from the model operas. The practice is exemplified in the film Stories in the Sunward Yard (Xiang yang yuan de gushi, dir. Yuan Naichen, 1974).

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Notes  219 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

For selected images of Summer of 1969, see Cao, Document and Experiment, p. 221. Ibid. p. 220. Ibid. Ibid. pp. 225–8. In 2002, Zhou Xiaohu was invited to participate in an art project based loosely on the theme of a re-creation of the Long March. The project was originally intended to be shown at Yan’an, ‘a critical site in modern Chinese history and on the original Long March, for this was the place where Mao made camp with the Eighth Route Army, and where he gave his Talks on Art and Literature’ that had contained the central guidelines for art and entertainment in socialist China for several decades. See Lütgens et al., The Chinese: Photography and Video from China, pp. 94–7, 126. http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/contemporaryartfromchina/ exhibitionguide.htm (accessed 18 February 2014); Li Yingzi, ‘Zhou Xiaohu and Mannequins’ (Zhou Xiaohu yu wan’ou). Available online at: http://www.rwabc.com/ diqurenwu/diqudanyirenwu.asp?p_name=%D6%DC%D0%A5%BB%A2&people_ id=1537&id=2034 (accessed 18 February 2014). Also see Cao, Document and Experiment, pp. 225–6. Curtis L. Carter, ‘On the Future of the Present: Art, Technology, and Popular Culture’. Available online at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1077&context=phil_fac (accessed 24 February 2014) Ibid. A comparable project of filtering the past through personal life experiences is Women/Here, a mixed media installation created by The Three Men United Studio (Sui Jianguo b. 1956, Yu Fan b. 1966 and Zhan Wang b. 1962). Based on the life trajectories of Lan Fengying, Pu Shuping, Qu Yunping and Li Aidong, mothers and wife of the three artists, Women/Here amasses and exhibits private traces and public achievements, such as photographs since early childhood, various award certificates in the socialist educational system and so on. A visual biography, yet never totally complete, the installation shows and hides, exposes and suggests. See Wu and Phillips (eds), Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, pp. 72–3; also see http://leapleapleap.com/2010/10/women-here/ (accessed 24 February 2014). Carter, ‘On the Future of the Present: Art, Technology, and Popular Culture’. Phantom Tales online at: http://www.diacenter.org/mengbo/phantomtales.html (accessed 18 February 2014). Also see Sara Tucker, ‘Introduction to Phantom Tales’. Available online at: http://www.diacenter.org/mengbo/intro.html (accessed 18 February 2014). Ibid. Ibid. A comparable and perhaps more obvious example of ‘biologising’ official history is a painting by Zhang Hongtu called ‘Chart of Acupuncture Points and Meridians: The Physiology of a Revolutionary’. This painting represents the physical figure of nobody else than Chairman Mao, showing it as a chubby and half-naked body marked with lines, dots and traditional Chinese medical terms naming the various pressure points. See Barmé, Shades of Mao, p. 102.

Conclusion 1. Certainly, the kind of critical interest and aesthetic capacity in dealing with China’s past and present is not reserved for the Forsaken Generation only. Much younger and newer practitioners of independent filmmaking born in the mid-seventies and after – a prominent representative of which would be Ying Liang – have continued this still contemporary practice of critical thinking through the moving image and mobilise their camera in an imaginative and powerful engagement with Chinese reality. It seems still open to question whether and when independent cinema might see its next

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2.

3.

4.

5.

distinct group of works, such as the Forsaken Generation has contributed. In his very recent opinion, the Nanjing-based experimental filmmaker and veteran critic Cao Kai sounds not particularly optimistic about the potential for independent filmmaking of the younger, post-1980 generation of filmmakers. One way to assess and approach that question is, of course, to continue the investigation and produce more systematic and in-depth analyses of newer independent auteurs (such as Ying Liang). For Cao Kai’s comments, see his interview. Available online at: http://contemporary.artron. net/20130717/n478543_3.html (accessed 20 February 2014). The six main characters include a crazy mother and a concerned son; Mr Liang and an unabashed admirer of his, Dr Lin; Mr Tang – played by Jiang Wen himself – and Mrs Tang. A chronological reordering of the four episodes of The Sun Also Rises might look like this: episode four, one, two and three (the number referring to the actual order in which they appear in the film; however, the closeness between events in episode one and two also suggests that the order could be four, two, one and then three). That is: in episode four, which is set in 1958, Liang and Tang are working together in northwest China; this is also the period when Mrs Tang encounters the mother character (who is to appear crazy later), when both women are on their way to visit their husbands. The husband of the mother character has just died (with a mistress), leaving his wife some personal relics. Time then fast forwards to the spring of 1976 and to episode one: the mother, now living in a remote village in southwest China, loses her mind after a dream and thus keeps her teenage son busy as he constantly has to come to her rescue. After a brief moment of sanity, she commits suicide. At that point, Mr Tang arrives at the village with his wife as a sent-down intellectual. The film then moves to episode two and to the summer of 1976: Mr Liang, apparently a favourite romantic target of the women around him, is involved in a ridiculous case of harassment investigation: a woman’s butt gets pinched at an open-air movie screening, and in the ensuing confusion Liang gets caught and becomes a suspect. To make things easier, his friend Tang advises him to confess to what he has not done. As the investigation continues and various confessions take place (including a confession from the forever panting and wanting Dr Lin, a most obvious pursuer of Liang’s), Liang’s name finally gets cleared. However, he chooses that moment to commit suicide by hanging himself. Time then moves forward to episode three: Tang and his wife arrive in the mountain village where the son has just lost his crazy mother. Tang is carrying with him the rifle that is a gift from Liang right before the latter decides to commit suicide. Tang spends his days hunting in the mountains with local kids. Soon he discovers that his wife is having an affair with the son character. In the end, Tang shoots the young man. Zhou Liming, ‘Jiang Wen: Treat the Audience Like Your Date’ (Jiang Wen: ba guanzhong dangzuo lian’ai duixiang), interview with Jiang Wen. Available online at: http://i.mtime.com/617855/blog/5775577/ (accessed 19 February 2014); Sebastian Veg, ‘Propaganda and Pastiche: Visions of Mao in Founding of a Republic, Beginning of the Great Revival, and Let the Bullets Fly’, China Perspectives 2 (2012), pp. 44, 45. For an elaborate critique of The Sun Also Rises, see Cui Weiping, ‘Jiang Wen Who Jumps Around’ (Tiao lai tiao qu de Jiang Wen). Available online at: http://blog. sina.com.cn/s/blog_473d066b01000c0b.html (accessed 19 February 2014). On Let the Bullets Fly and the controversies it caused, see Veg, ‘Propaganda and Pastiche’, pp. 51–2; Wo Chung-hau, ‘Let the Bullets Fly Unleashes a Political-Allegory Craze’ (Rang zidan fei yinbao zhengzhi yinyu kuanghuan), Yazhou Zhoukan (9 January 2011). Available online at: http://www.aisixiang.com/data/38353.html (accessed 19 February 2014). For an interesting ‘leftist’ critique, see Xia Ge, ‘Is Director Jiang Wen on the Left or Right? – On Let the Bullets Fly’ (Daoyan Jiang Wen shi zuo haishi you? Xie zai Rang zidan fei guanying zhihou). Available online at: http://www.douban. com/note/121658011/ (accessed 19 February 2014). Cui, ‘Jiang Wen Who Jumps Around’.

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Notes  221 6. Ibid. 7. Three clues in the film suggest that Dr Lin and Mr Tang might have a very close ‘friendship’: on the night of the ass-grabbing incident, she is also hiding hanging on the wall behind Tang’s apartment, her hair covered with soap foam as Tang’s hair also appears; she and Tang share a secret language of their own – when he blows a special tune on his horn, she will come to his apartment and signals her arrival by stomping her sandals on the floor; she is the woman who claims that her butt got pinched, while Tang is the one who advises Liang to take the blame, even though Liang did not do it. Could Liang’s suicide be at least partly attributable to his sense of betrayal by a close friend? 8. Ibid. 9. I discuss elsewhere how Jia Zhangke slips into a representational trap between fiction and non-fiction and between an earnest wish to uncover the underrepresented part of socialist Chinese history and perhaps too eager an intention to make that story alternative and different. See Wang, ‘The Recalcitrance of Reality: Performances, Subjects, and Filmmakers in 24 City and Tape’. 10. Cui, ‘Jiang Wen Who Jumps Around’. 11. Roland Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, [c1977] 1978), pp. 73–4. 12. Ibid. p. 74. 13. Zhou, ‘Jiang Wen: Treat the Audience Like Your Date’. 14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf and intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994). 15. Ibid. p. xix, original emphasis. 16. In 1956, Mao and other leaders of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee signed an agreement that their bodies would be cremated and no tomb or mausoleum would be built in their names after their death. However, on 8 October 1976, the decision to build Mao’s memorial hall was announced. See online at: http:// cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64162/64164/4416105.html (accessed 19 February 2014); Wang Zimian, ‘China’s No. 1 Project: Preserving Mao Zedong’s Body’ (Zhongguo yihao gongcheng: baocun Mao Zedong yiti). Available online at: http://blog.boxun. com/hero/mao/8_1.shtml (accessed 25 February 2014). Details of the decision to preserve Mao’s body and the building of the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall can also be found in Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician, trans. Dai Hongzhao (New York: Random House, c1994). During the Maoist era, representations of the Great Leader mainly took two forms: a reallife Mao who appeared as such in documentary newsreels and photographs, and numerous mediated reproductions of Mao that flooded the popular imagination. His image was admired and remembered through numerous statues, posters, buttons, badges, paintings and photographs – the most prominent example being his portrait, which has gazed over Tiananmen Square and symbolically the whole nation of China since 1949. For fictional narratives about the socialist revolution, such as the model operas and their cinematic reproductions, the imaging of Mao presents an extremely intriguing and challenging case, because of an ideologically imposed tension over the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Both media representations would require the performances of live actors if Mao were to appear in the represented space, yet that did not happen. Despite the omnipresence of Mao as a source of guidance in the narratives of all the revolutionary model operas, he is symbolised as the sun, sunshine, dawn, the East or through iconic representations (such as a painted or engraved portrait). Mao’s person, fictional or non-fictional, has been significantly absent from mimetic representations, such as re-enactments by actors – until, that is, after the Cultural Revolution. Mao was not to be performed before his death. Only he could perform himself. While his body was real in documentary representation,

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

its dimensions had been enlarged and usurped as yet another icon in a political mechanism that was larger than even Mao himself. The first theatrical rendition of Mao might be Zhang Keyao’s performance in the play Xi’an Incident (Xi’an shibian) in 1976. See online at: http://arts.tom.com/1002/2004/9/30-38162.html (accessed August 2007); http://culture.qianlong.com/6931/2003/12/29/[email protected] (accessed August 2007). The first appearance in a Chinese fiction film of actors impersonating Mao Zedong appears in Part II of The Great River Rushes On (Dahe benliu, 1979); see Paul Clark, ‘Film-making in China: From the Cultural Revolution to 1981’, The China Quarterly 94 (1983), p. 313. The most famous ‘special-type actor’ (texing yanyuan, referring to actors who specialise in interpreting historical figures, such as Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and other Party figures) is Gu Yue. By the time of his death in July 2005, Gu Yue had played Mao in over eighty state-sponsored historical films and TV drama series. The obsession to reproduce Mao in life seems to be ongoing. See Chen Yan, a recent female re-enactor of Mao online at: http://news.163.com/ photoview/00AP0001/40280.html#p=9E79JQ1500AP0001 (accessed 21 February 2014). Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 18. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn and intro. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, [c1969] 1988), pp. 257–8. Heiner Müller, ‘The Luckless Angel’. Available online at: http://www.efn. org/~dredmond/MuellerPoems.PDF (accessed 19 February 2014). Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 24. Ibid. p. 48. Author’s email correspondence with Wang Chao, 24 May 2007.

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Selected Filmography and Bibliography

Selected Filmography and Bibliography

Selected Filmography Feature films

Chen, Kaige. Bawang bie ji (Farewell, My Concubine). 1993. Guan, Hu. Toufa luan le (Dirt). 1994. Jia, Zhangke. Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu). 1997. Jia, Zhangke. Zhantai (Platform). 2000. Jia, Zhangke. Ren xiaoyao (Unknown Pleasures). 2002. Jia, Zhangke. Shijie (The World). 2004. Jia, Zhangke. Sanxia haoren (Still Life). 2006. Jiang, Wen. Yangguang canlan de rizi (In the Heat of the Sun). 1994. Jiang, Wen. Guizi lai le (Devils on the Doorstep). 2000. Jiang, Wen. Taiyang zhaochang shengqi (The Sun Also Rises). 2007. Jiang, Wen. Rang zidan fei (Let the Bullets Fly). 2010. Li, Jun. Shanshan de hongxing (Sparkling Red Star). 1974. Li, Yu. Qunian xiatian (Elephant and Fish). 2001. Lou, Ye. Suzhou he (Suzhou River). 1998. Lou, Ye. Zi hudie (Purple Butterfly). 2003. Lou, Ye. Yiheyuan (Summer Palace). 2006. Lou, Ye. Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang (Spring Fever). 2009. Lou, Ye. Hua (Love and Bruises). 2011. Pema, Tseden. Jingjing de mani shi (aka Lhing vjags kyi ma ni rdo vbum, The Silent Holy Stones). 2006. Wang, Chao. Anyang yinger (Orphan of Anyang). 2001. Wang, Chao. Riri yeye (Day and Night). 2004. Wang, Xiaoshuai. Dongchun de rizi (The Days). 1994. Wu, Yigong, and Wu Yonggang. Bashan yeyu (Night Rain in Bashan). 1980. Xie, Jin. Hongse niangzi jun (The Red Detachment of Women). 1961. Zhang, Ming. Wushan yunyu (Rainclouds over Wushan). 1996. Zhang, Yimou. Huozhe (To Live). 1994. Zhang, Yuan. Mama (Mom). 1992. Zhang, Yuan. Beijing zazhong (Beijing Bastards). 1993. Zhang, Yuan. Kan shang qu hen mei (Little Red Flowers). 2006.

Documentaries Du, Haibin. Tielu yanxian (Along the Railway). 2000. Duan, Jinchuan. Ba kuo nan jie 16 hao (South Bakhor St. 16). 1995. Duan, Jinchuan. Linqi da shetou (The Secret of My Success). 2002.

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224  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Duan, Jinchuan. Guangchang (The Square) (co-dir. with Zhang Yuan). 2004. Duan, Jinchuan. Bao feng zhou yu (The Storm) (co-dir. with Jiang Yue). 2005. Huang, Wenhai. Menyou (Dream Walking). 2006. Kang, Jianning. Yin Yang (Yin Yang). 1997. Li, Hong. Huidao Fenghuangqiao (Out of Phoenix Bridge). 1997. Li, Yifan. Yanmo (Before the Flood) (co-dir. with Yan Yu). 2003. Liu, Xiaojin. Xunzhao yanjingshe (In Search of the Cobra). 1998. Mao, Chenyu. Ling Shan (Soul Mountain). 2003. Mao, Chenyu. Xi Mao Jia Wu Chang jiashen yinyang jie (Between Life and Death). 2004. Shi, Tou. Nü tongzhi youxingri (Dyke March). 2004. Shi, Tou. Nüren de wushi fenzhong (50 Minutes of Women). 2005. Tang, Danhong. Yeying bushi weiyi de gehou (Nightingale, Not the Only Voice). 2000. Wang, Bing. Tie Xi Qu (West of the Tracks). 2003. Wang, Fen. Bu kuaile de buzhi yige (More Than One Is Unhappy). 2000. Wang, Guangli. Wo biye le (I Graduated). 1992. Wu, Wenguang. Liulang Beijing: zuihou de mengxiangzhe (Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers). 1990. Wu, Wenguang. 1966, wo de hongweibing shidai (1966, My Time in the Red Guards). 1993. Wu, Wenguang. Jianghu (Jiang Hu: Life on the Road). 1999. Wu, Wenguang. He mingong yiqi tiaowu (Dance with Farm Workers). 2001. Yang, Tianyi (aka Yang Lina). Jiating luxiang (Home Video). 2001. Ying, Weiwei. Hezi (The Box). 2001. Yu, Jian. Bise chezhan (Jade Green Station). 2003. Zhang, Dali. Hanya (Crow in Winter). 2004. Zhang, Yuan. Fengkuang yingyu (Crazy English). 2000. Zhou, Hao. Long Ge (Using). 2008. Zhou, Hao. Gaosan (Senior Year). 2005. Zhou, Hao, and Ji Jianghong. Houjie (Houjie Township). 2003. Zhu, Chuanming. Qunzhong yanyuan (Extras). 2002. Zuo, Yixiao. Shisan (Losing). 2004.

Experimental films and videos Cao, Kai. Liu jiu nian zhi xia (Summer of 1969). 2002. Cui, Zi’en. Gongce zhengfang fanfang (The Pros and Cons of the WC). 2001. Cui, Zi’en. Choujue dengchang (Enter the Clowns). 2002. Cui, Zi’en. Jiuyue (The Old Testament). 2002. Cui, Zi’en. Aiyaya, qu buru (Feeding Boys, Ayaya). 2003. Cui, Zi’en. Wuyu (The Narrow Path). 2003. Cui, Zi’en. Yejing (Night Scene). 2003. Cui, Zi’en. Xingxing xiang xi xi (Star Appeal). 2004. Cui, Zi’en. Fuge (Refrain). 2005. Cui, Zi’en. Shaonian hua cao huang (Withered in a Blooming Season). 2005. Cui, Zi’en. Shi Tou he nage Nana (Shi Tou and That Nana). 2005. Zhou, Hongxiang. Hongqi piao (The Red Flag Flies – A Movie without Story). 2002.

Extended Filmography Feature films Li, Yang. Mang jing (Blind Shaft). 2003. Li, Yang. Mang shan (Blind Mountain). 2007. Wang, Chao. Jiangcheng xiari (Luxury Car). 2007. Wang, Quan’an. Yueshi (Lunar Eclipse). 1999.

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Selected Filmography and Bibliography  225 Wang, Xiaoshuai. Jidu hanleng (Frozen). 1996. Wang, Xiaoshuai. Biandan guniang (So Close to Paradise). 1998. Wang, Xiaoshuai. Shiqi sui de dan che (Beijing Bicycle). 2001. Wang, Xiaoshuai. Er di (Drifters). 2003. Wang, Xiaoshuai. Qing hong (Shanghai Dreams). 2005. Zhang, Ming. Miyu shiqi xiaoshi (Weekend Plot). 2001. Zhang, Yuan. Dong gong xi gong (East Palace West Palace). 1996. Zhang, Yuan. Erzi (Sons). 1996. Zhang, Yuan. Guonian huijia (Seventeen Years). 1999.

Documentaries Ban, Zhongyi. Gai Shanxi he ta de jiemei men (Gai Shanxi and Her Sisters). 2005. Cao, Fei. Fuqin (Father). 2005. Chen, Michelle Miao, and Li Xiao. Wo shu she (The Snake Boy). 2002. Chen, Yiyue. Jiehun (Wedding). 2003. Chen, Yiyue. Zhuba Lama (Zhuba Lama). Circa 2004. Cili Zhuoma. Xiao shengming (Little Life). 2003. Dai, Yi. Xiaowu (Small House). 2002. Du, Haibin. Renmian taohua (Beautiful Men). 2005. Guo, Xiaolu. Yuan he jin (Far and Near). 2003. Han, Tao. Baobao (Baobao). 2005. Hu, Jie. Xuzhao Lin Zhao de linghun (Searching for the Soul of Lin Zhao). 2004. Hu, Jie. Wo sui si qu (Though I Am Gone). 2006. Hu, Shu. Qing buyao guan wo (Let Me Alone). 2001. Hu, Xinyu. Nanren (The Man). 2003. Huang, Weikai. Piao (Floating). 2005. Huang, Wenhai. Xuanhua de chentu (Floating Dust). 2004. Ji, Dan. Laoren men (The Elders). 1998. Ji, Dan. Gongbu de xingfu shenghuo (Gongbu’s Happy Life). 2000. Jia, Zhangke. Gonggong changsuo (In Public). 2001. Jiang, Yue. Bi’an (The Other Bank). 1995. Jiang, Yue. Xingfu shenghuo (This Happy Life). 2002. Jiang, Zhi. Pianke (The Moments). 2003. Leng, Yefu. Zhizhu ren (Spiderman). 2005. Li, Jinghong. Jiemei (Sisters). 2005. Liao, Yibai, Lin Shaozhong, and Zhu Yili. Zhiye kuqi zhe (Professional Weeper). 2003. Lin, Xin. Chenlu (Chenlu). 2004. Ou, Ning, Cao Fei, and U-thèque. San Yuan Li (San Yuan Li). 2003. Peng, Hui. Pingheng (Balance). 2000. Shi, Runjiu. Jing daye he ta de lao zhugu men (Grandpa Jing and His Old Clients). 2003. Su, Qing, and Mi Na. Baita (White Tower). 2004. Sun, Zengtian. Shenlu a shenlu (Fading Reindeer Bell). 1997. Suo Nuo, Qi Lin, and Ah Zhu. Heitao (A Family of Pottery). 2002. Tian, Zhuangzhuang. De la mu (Delamu). 2004. Wei, Xing. Xuesheng cun (A Student Village). 2002. Xiao, Peng. Guirong xiyuan (Guirong Theatre). 2003. Yang, Guanghai. Jinpo Zu (Jinpo Nationality). 1962. Yang, Guanghai. Elunchun (The Oroqen). 1973. Yang, Tianyi (aka Yang Lina). Laotou (Old Men). 1999. Zha Xi Ni Ma. Bingchuan (Glacier). 2002. Zhang, Hua. Tiantang zhi lu (The Road to Paradise). 2005. Zhang, Ke. Qingchun muyuan (Garden of Innocence’s Demise). 2004. Zhang, Yiqing. Zhouzhou de shijie (The World of Zhouzhou). 1997.

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226  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Zhang, Yiqing. Ying he Bai (Ying and Bai). 1999. Zhang, Yiqing. Youeryuan (Kindergarten). 2004. Zhao, Gang. Dongri (The Sun in Winter). 2002. Zheng, Dasheng. DV China. 2002. Zhou, Yuejun. Ah Lu xiongdi (The Ah Lu Brothers). 2004.

Experimental films and videos Cheng, Andrew Yusu. Women haipa (Shanghai Panic). 2002. Cheng, Andrew Yusu. Mudidi Shanghai (Welcome to Destination Shanghai). 2003. Cui, Zi’en (as screenwriter and actor). Nan nan nü nü (Man Man Woman Woman) (dir. Liu Bingjian). 1999. Cui, Zi’en. Gongce hu hu ha hei (W. C. Hu Hu Ha Hee!). 2005. Wang, Guangli. Heng shu heng (Go for Broke). 2000. Wei, Xing. Wangji ta shi ta (Forget the Gender). 2002. Yang, Fudong. Mosheng tiantang (An Estranged Paradise). 2002. Zhang, Di. 301 de faze (The Rules of Room 301). 2005. Zhang, Zhonghua. Bawang niandai (Days of Being Little Kings). 2006.

Selected Bibliography English publications Astruc, Alexander. ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo’ (1948), in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), pp. 17–23. Baranovitch, Nimrod. China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978–1997 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Barmé, Geremie R. (ed.). Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, [c1977] 1978). Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn and introduced by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, [c1969] 1988). Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street and Other Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979). Berry, Chris (ed.). Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, [1985] 1991). Berry, Chris (ed.). Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (London: British Film Institute, 2004). Berry, Chris. Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004). Berry, Chris. ‘The Sacred, the Profane, and the Domestic in Cui Zi’en’s Cinema’. positions 12: 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 195–201. Berry, Chris. ‘Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism’, in Zhang Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 115–34. Berry, Chris (ed.). Chinese Films in Focus II (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Berry, Michael. A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Berry, Michael. Xiao Wu. Platform. Unknown Pleasures. Jia Zhangke’s ‘Home Trilogy’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Bly, Robert. A Little Book on the Human Shadow, edited by William Booth (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988).

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Selected Filmography and Bibliography  227 Boeult, John E. Russian Art of the Avant-Garde 1902–1934 (New York: Viking, 1976). Braester, Yomi. Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in TwentiethCentury China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Browne, Nick. ‘On Western Critiques of Chinese Film’, Asian Cinema 16: 2 (Fall/Winter 2005), pp. 23–35. Browne, Nick, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau (eds). New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Cardinal, Roger. ‘Pausing over Peripheral Detail’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 30/31 (1986), pp. 112–30. Carter, Curtis L. ‘On the Future of the Present: Art, Technology, and Popular Culture’. Available online at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1077&context=phil_fac (accessed 23 February 2014). Chanan, Michael. ‘The Documentary Chronotope’, Jump Cut 43 (2000), pp. 56–61. Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni, or, the Surface of the World (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Chen, Xiaomei. ‘The Making of a Revolutionary Stage: Chinese Model Theatre and its Western Influences’, in Claire Sponsler and Xiaomei Chen (eds), East of West: Cross-Cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 125–40. Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Clark, John (ed.). Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium (Hong Kong: New Art Media Ltd, 1999–2000). Clark, Paul. ‘Film-making in China: From the Cultural Revolution to 1981’, The China Quarterly 94 (1983), pp. 304–22. Clark, Paul. Chinese Cinema, Culture, and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Clark, Paul. Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Film (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2005). Corrigan, Timothy. The Essay Film: From Montaigne, after Marker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Cui, Shuqin. Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003). Dai, Jinhua. Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, edited by Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow (London and New York: Verso, 2002). Daniel, Clifton. Chronicle of the 20th Century (Mount Kisco: Chronicle Publications, 1987). Denton, Kirk A. ‘Model Drama as Myth: A Semiotic Analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy’, in Constantine Tung and Colin MacKerras (eds), Drama in the People’s Republic of China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 119–36. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf and introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994). Dirlik, Arif, and Maurice Meisner (eds). Marxism and the Chinese Experience (Armond: Shark, 1989). Dirlik, Arif, and Xudong Zhang (eds). Postmodernism and China (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000). Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk. Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Doran, Valerie C. (ed.). China’s New Art, Post-1989 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Center, in association with Hanart T Z Gallery and Hong Kong Arts Festival Society, 1993). Eaton, Mick. Anthropology/Cinema/Reality: The Films of Jean Rouch (London: British Film Institute, 1979). Erjavec, Aleš (ed.). Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2003).

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228  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Evans, Harriet, and Stephanie Donald (eds). Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). Ferrari, Rossella. ‘Disenchanted Presents, Haunted Pasts, and Dystopian Futures: Deferred Millennialism in the Cinema of Meng Jinghui’, Journal of Contemporary China 20: 71 (2011), pp. 699–721. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’. Available online at: http://foucault. info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html (accessed 18 February 2014). Gaines, Jane M., and Michael Renov (eds). Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Gee, Alison Dakota, and Anne Naham. ‘Wang Shuo: The Outsider’, Asiaweek, 8 August 1996. Available online at: http://www.asiaweek.com/asiaweek/96/0809/feat2.html (accessed 20 February 2014). Grant, Barry Keith, and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds). Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). Hareven, Tamara. Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). Hisashi, Nada. ‘Self-Documentary: Its Origins and Present State’, Documentary Box 26 (October 2005), pp. 15–23. Hockings, Paul (ed.). Principles of Visual Anthropology (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003). Jones, Andrew F. Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Ithaca: East Asia Programme, Cornell University, 1992). Lebow, Alisa (ed.). The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary (London and New York: Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2012). Lee, Ching Kwan, and Guobin Yang (eds). Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2007). Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space (Chichester: Blackwell, 1991). Leyda, Jay. Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). Li, Zhensheng. Red-Color News Soldier: A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey through the Cultural Revolution, edited by Robert Pledge and introduction by Jonathan D. Spence (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2003). Li, Zhisui. The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician, translated by Professor Dai Hongzhao with a foreword by Andrew J. Nathan (New York: Random House, 1994). Lin, Xiaoping. ‘New Chinese Cinema of the “Sixth Generation”: A Distant Cry of Forsaken Children’, Third Text 16: 3 (September 2002), pp. 261–84. Lin, Xiaoping. Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010). Lin, Xudong. ‘Documentary in Mainland China’, Documentary Box 26, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Available online at: http://www.yidff.jp/ docbox/26/box26-3-e.html (accessed 23 February 2014). Link, Perry. ‘Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?’, The New York Review of Books, 6 December 2012. Available online at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/ dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/?pagination=false (accessed 23 February 2014). Link, Perry, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (eds). Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic (Boulder: Westview, 1989).

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Selected Filmography and Bibliography  229 Link, Perry, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (eds). Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Liu, Binyan. A Higher Kind of Loyalty: A Memoir by China’s Foremost Journalist, translated by Zhu Hong (New York: Pantheon, 1990). Liu, Jin. Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013). Liu, Lydia H. ‘Beijing Sojourners in New York: Postsocialism and the Question of Ideology in Global Media Culture’, positions: east asia cultures critique 7: 3 (Winter 1999), pp. 763–98. Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng (ed.). Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997). Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: Unviersity of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). Lu, Tonglin. Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Lu, Xing. Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought, Culture, and Communication (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004). Lu, Xun. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, translated by William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990). Lucia, Cynthia. ‘When the Personal Becomes Political: An Interview with Ross McElwee’, Cineaste 20: 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 32–6. Lütgens, Annelie, Karen Smith, and Gijs Van Tuyl (eds), The Chinese: Photography and Video from China (Wolfsburg: The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2004). MacDougall, David. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). McGrath, Jason. Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). Micic, Peter. ‘A Summary of the Cultural Mapping Reports: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou’. Available online at: www.artsfoundation.nl/.../091105_Update_theater_ dansbeeldendekunst_sept2009.pdf (accessed 11 February 2014). Min, Anchee. Red Azalea (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). Müller, Heiner. ‘The Luckless Angel’. Available online at: http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ MuellerPoems.PDF (accessed 23 February 2014). Neale, Steve. ‘Triumph of the Will: Notes on Documentary and Spectacle’, Screen 20: 1 (1979), pp. 63–86. Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Nora, Pierre. ‘General Introduction: Between Memory and History’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 1–20. Owen, Stephen. Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Owen, Stephen. The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century (827–860) (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006). Pickowicz, Paul G. ‘Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism’, in Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau (eds), New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 57–87. Pickowicz, Paul G., and Yingjin Zhang (eds). From Underground to Independent (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006). Rascaroli, Laura. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2009). Renov, Michael (ed.). Theorizing Documentary (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

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230  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Reynaud, Bérénice. ‘Dancing with Myself, Drifting with My Camera: The Emotional Vagabonds of China’s New Documentary’. Available online at: http://sensesofcinema. com/2003/feature-articles/chinas_new_documentary/ (accessed 23 February 2014). Rhodes, John David, and Elena Gorfinkel (eds). Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Rosen, Philip. ‘Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts’, in Michael Renov (ed.), Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 58–89. Silbergeld, Jerome. China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (London: Reaktion, 1999). Silbergeld, Jerome. Hitchcock with a Chinese Face: Cinematic Doubles, Oedipal Triangles, and China’s Moral Voice (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004). Silbergeld, Jerome. Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Silbergeld, Jerome, and Gong Jisui. Contradictions: Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1993). Sobchack, Vivian (ed.). The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996). Steedman, Carolyn. Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1992). Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [c1988] 1995). Tang, Xiaobing. Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000). Teo, Stephen. ‘Cinema with an Accent – Interview with Jia’. Available online at: http:// sensesofcinema.com/2001/feature-articles/zhangke_interview/ (accessed 13 February 2014). Thomas, Brook. The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [c1977] 2005). Tung, Constantine, and Colin MacKerras (eds). Drama in the People’s Republic of China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987). Unidentified. ‘Magnificent Ode to the Worker, Peasant, and Soldier Heroes’, Chinese Literature 12 (1968), pp. 107–16. Unidentified. ‘Jia Zhangke: Pickpocket Director’, Beijing Scene Online 5: 23 (27 August – 2 September 1999). Available online at: http://www.beijingscene.com/V05I023/feature/ feature.htm (accessed 23 February 2014). Veg, Sebastian. ‘Propaganda and Pastiche: Visions of Mao in Founding of a Republic, Beginning of the Great Revival, and Let the Bullets Fly’, China Perspectives 2 (2012), pp. 41–53. Voci, Paola. ‘From the Center to the Periphery: Chinese Documentary’s Visual Conjectures’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 16: 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 65–113. Wang, Ban. Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Wang, Ping (ed.). New Generation: Poems from China Today (Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 1999). Wang, Qi. ‘The Ruin Is Already a New Outcome: An Interview with Cui Zi’en’, positions: east asia cultures critique 12: 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 181–94. Wang, Qi. ‘New Documentary Movement’, in Edward Davis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 428–9. Wang, Qi. ‘Navigating on the Ruins: Space, Power and History in Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentaries’, Asian Cinema 17: 1 (Spring/Summer 2006), pp. 246–55. Wang, Qi. ‘Closed and Open Screens: The 9th Beijing Independent Film Festival’, Film Criticism 37: 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 62–9.

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Selected Filmography and Bibliography  231 Wang, Qi. ‘Chicken Poets and Rough Poetry: Figuring the Poet and His Subject(s) in Independent Chinese Cinema’, in Marlisa Santos (ed.), Verse, Voice, and Vision: Cinema and Poetry (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013), pp. 67–77. Wang, Qi. ‘Embodied Visions: Chinese Queer Experimental Documentaries by Shi Tou and Cui Zi’en’, positions: asia critique 21: 3 (Summer 2013), pp. 659–81. Wang, Qi. ‘The Recalcitrance of Reality: Performances, Subjects, and Filmmakers in 24 City and Tape’, in Angela Zito and Zhang Zhen (eds), DV-Made China, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, forthcoming. Wang, Yiman. ‘The Amateur’s Lightning Rod: DV Documentary in Postsocialist China’, Film Quarterly 58: 4 (June 2005), pp. 16–26. Watson, Rubie S. (ed.). Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994). Wen, Chihua. The Red Mirror: Children of China’s Cultural Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995). White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Williams, Linda. ‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and The Thin Blue Line’, in Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds), Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), pp. 379–96. Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (New York: Grove Press, 1985). Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Film Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Wu, Hung. Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Wu, Hung, and Christopher Phillips (eds). Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Xu, Gary G. Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Zang, Xiaowei. Children of the Cultural Revolution: Family Life and Political Behavior in Mao’s China (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). Zhang, Longxi. Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). Zhang, Yingjin. ‘Review Essay: Screening China – Recent Studies of Chinese Cinema in English’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29: 3 (June–September 1997), pp. 3–13. Zhang, Yingjin (ed.). Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Zhang, Yingjin. Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies Publications, 2002). Zhang, Yingjin. ‘Styles, Subjects and Special Points of View: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 2: 2 (2004), pp. 119–35. Zhang, Yingjin. ‘Rebel without a Cause?’, in Zhang Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 49–80. Zhang, Yingjin. ‘Thinking Outside the Box: Mediation of Imaging and Information in Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary’, Screen 48: 2 (Summer 2007), pp. 179–92. Zhang, Yingjin. Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010). Zhang, Yingjin (ed.). A Companion to Chinese Cinema (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2012). Zhang, Xudong. Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

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232  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Zhang, Zhen (ed.). The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007). Zhu, Xiaodi. Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

Chinese publications Brock, Norman, and Placius Schelbert. Interview of Lou Ye on Suzhou River, Berlin, 12 February 2000. Available online at: http://www.msgproduction.com/artist/louye-c. htm (accessed 24 February 2014). Cao, Kai. Jilu yu shiyan: DV yingxiang qianshi (Document and Experiment: A Pre-History of the DV Image) (Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2005). Chen, Kaige. Shaonian Kaige (Adolescent Kaige) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2001). Cheng, Kai. ‘Hezhong renwen, hezhong lishi?’ (What Kind of Humanism, What Kind of History?), Dushu (October 2006), pp. 21–7. Cheng, Qingsong. ‘Sheng yu 1966’ (Born in 1966), Dianshi dianying wenxue (TV, Film, Literature) 5 (1995), pp. 154–9. Cheng, Qingsong, and Huang Ou (eds). Wo de sheyingji bu sahuang: xianfeng dianyingren dangan – shengyu 1961–1970 (My Camera Doesn’t Lie: Dossiers of Avant-garde Filmmakers – Born in 1961–1970) (Beijing: China Youyi Publishing House, 2002). China Ballet Troupe. The Red Detachment of Women – A Modern Revolutionary Ballet (Beijing: Waiwen chubanshe, 1972). Cui, Weiping. Women shidai de xushi (The Narrative of Our Times) (Guangzhou: Huacheng Press, 2008). Cui, Weiping. ‘Jingyan de niandai’ (The Age of Experience), in Cao Baoyin (ed.), Jingshen licheng – 36 wei dangdai xueren zishu (Passages of the Spirit: Self-Accounts of 36 Contemporary Intellectuals) (Beijing: dangdai zhongguo chubanshe, 2006). Available online at: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/473d066b0100081t (accessed 7 February 2014). Cui, Weiping. ‘Tiao lai tiao qu de Jiang Wen’ (Jiang Wen Who Jumps Around). Available online at: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_473d066b01000c0b.html (accessed 19 February 2014). Cui, Zi’en. Li Yü xiaoshuo lungao (Critical Essays on the Novels of Li Yü) (Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 1987). Cui, Zi’en. Qingchun de beiju (Tragedy of the Youth) (Beijing: China Peace Press, 1988). Cui, Zi’en. Dianying jilü (Travel in Film) (Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 1993). Cui, Zi’en. Yishujia de yuzhou (The Artist’s Universe) (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1993). Cui, Zi’en. Taose zuichun (Peach-coloured Lips) (Hong Kong: Worldson Books, 1997). Cui, Zi’en. Choujue dengchang (Enter the Clowns) (Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 1998). Cui, Zi’en. Meigui chuangta (Bed of Roses) (Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 1998). Cui, Zi’en. Sanjiaocheng de tonghua (Fairy Tales of the Triangle City) (Hong Kong: Worldson Books, 1998). Cui, Zi’en. Wo ai Shi Dabo (I Love Shi Dabo) (Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2000). Cui, Zi’en. Hongtao A chuixiang haojiao (Ace of Hearts Blows the Horn) (Zhuhai: Zhuhai Publishing House, 2003). Cui, Zi’en. Jiujiu de renjian yanhuo (Uncle’s Secular Life) (Zhuhai: Zhuhai Publishing House, 2003). Cui, Zi’en. Wei kehuan gushi (Pseudo-Science Fiction Stories) (Zhuhai: Zhuhai Publishing House, 2003). Cui, Zi’en. Yishujia wansui (Long Live the Artist) (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Publishing House, 2004).

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Selected Filmography and Bibliography  233 Cui, Zi’en. Beidou you qi xing: wo jiazu de jingshen zhuanji (Beidou There Are Seven Stars: A Spiritual Biography of My Family) (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2012). Cui, Zi’en. Diyi guanzhong (The First Audience) (Beijing: Xiandai Publishing House, 2003). Dai, Jinhua. Wu zhong fengjing: zhongguo dianying wenhua 1978–1998 (A Scene in the Fog: Chinese Cinema Culture 1978–98) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2000). Fang, Fang. Zhongguo jilupian fazhan shi (A History of Documentaries in China) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2003). Gu, Zheng (ed.). Shiji zhuanshen: zhongguo shehui bianqian de shijue jiyi (Turn of the Century: Visual Memories of Social Changes in China) (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2004). Guo, Xizhi. ‘Fandong shi weiyi de chulu’ (Counter-Reaction Is the Only Way Out), Dushu (October 2006), pp. 27–32. Han, Shangyi. ‘Yinmu san zan’ (Three Praises of the Silver Screen), People’s Daily, 21 Febuary 1981. Jia, Zhangke. ‘Wo duli biaoda wo suo kandao de shijie’ (I, As Myself, Express What I See). Available online at: http://ent.tom.com/1002/1011/20031111-59933.html (accessed 20 November 2003). Jia, Zhangke. Jia Xiang: 1996–2008 (Thoughts of Jia Zhangke: 1996–2008) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2009). Jiang, Wen et al. Dansheng (Birth) (Beijing: Huayi chubanshe, 1997). Jin, Zhaojun. ‘Yi zhong dute de wenhua xianxiang: “Qiu ge” manyi zhi yi’ (A Unique Cultural Phenomenon: Casual Discussion on ‘Prison Songs’ 1), People’s Daily, 3 March 1989. Jin, Zhaojun. ‘Lianjia de ganshang: “Qiu ge” manyi zhi er’ (Cheap Sentimentality: Casual Discussion on ‘Prison Songs’ 2), People’s Daily, 4 March 1989. Li, Jun. ‘Lou Ye: xing shi ziranshijie wufa geshe de yibufen’ (Lou Ye: Sex is an Inseparable Part of Nature), The Bund (Waitan huabao). Available online at: http://www.bundpic. com/2011/09/15813.shtml (accessed 23 February 2014). Li, Xigeng. ‘Yingsuhua zayi’ (Remarks on Poppy Flowers), Dianying yishu 4 (1979), p. 52. Li, Yinhe. Nüelian yawenhua (Subculture of Sadomasochism) (Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chuban gongsi, 2002). Li, Yinhe. Liangxing guanxi (Sex and Gender) (Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2005). Li, Yinhe. Ni ruci xuyao anwei: guanyu ai de duihua (You Need Comforting So Much: A Dialogue on Love) (Beijing: Contemporary World Press, 2005). Li, Yinhe, and Wang Xiaobo. Tamen de shijie: zhongguo nan tongxinglian qunluo toushi (Their World: A Study of the Gay Communities in China) (Taiyuan: Shanxi People’s Press, 1992). Liao, Yiwu (ed.). Chenlun de shengdian – zhongguo ershi shiji qishi niandai dixia shige yizhao (Sinking Holy Palace: Death Pictures of Underground Poetry in China’s 1970s) (Urumqi: Xinjiang qingshaonian chubanshe, 1999). Liu, Hongmei. ‘Shenmeyang de renwen guanhuai?’ (What Sort of Humanistic Concern?), Dushu (October 2006), 32–8. Liu, Xiaofeng. ‘Guanyu “siwu” yidai de shehuixue sikao zhaji’ (Sociological Thoughts and Notes on the 5 April Generation), Dushu 5 (1989), pp. 35–42. Lu, Xinyu. Jilu zhongguo: dangdai zhongguo xin jilu yundong (Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement in Contemporary China) (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2003). Lu, Xinyu. ‘Tiexiqu: Lishi yu jieji yishi’ (West of the Tracks: History and Class Consciousness), Dushu 1 (2004), pp. 3–15. Lu, Xinyu. ‘Jintian, “renwen” jilu yiyuhewei?’ (What Does ‘Humanistic’ Documentary Intend to Do?), Dushu (October 2006), pp. 12–17. Lu, Xinyu. ‘Jilupian: women weishenme yao chufa’ (Documentary: Why Did We Start). Available online at: http://www.gdtv.com.cn/southtv/articleaaX.htm (accessed 9 November 2009).

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234  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Meng, Fanhua. 1978: jiqing suiyue (1978: A Time of Passion), 2nd edn (Jinan: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002). Meng, Jinghui (ed.). Xianfeng xiju dangan (Avant-Garde Theater Dossier) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, [c2000] 2004). Li, Xiaojiang (ed.). Wenxue, yishu yu xingbie (Literature, Art and Gender) (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2002). Ouyang, Jianghe (ed.). Zhongguo duli dianying fangtanlu (On the Edge: Chinese Independent Cinema) (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2007). Ouyang, Jianghe, and Zhang Xiaogang. ‘Huiyi de muguang he cunzai de yiwei’ (Memory’s Eye and Existence’s Meaning), interview of Zhang Xiaogang, Dongfang Yishu – Dajia, 11 January 2007. Available online at: http://news.artron.net/show_news. php?newid=20524 (accessed 23 February 2014). Ping Jie (ed.). Ling yan xiang kan: haiwai xuezhe ping dangdai zhongguo jilupian (Reel China: A New Look at Contemporary Chinese Documentary) (Shanghai: Wenhui Publishing House, 2006). Shi, Hang. ‘Suanshi gei xianfeng xiju dangan zuo yixie zhushi’ (Count it as a Footnote to Avant-Garde Theatre Dossier). Available online at: http://blog.ifeng.com/article/653406. html (accessed 23 February 2014). Wang, Dongcheng. ‘Dui lishi zhenshi de waiqu yu wudu – yu Jiang Wen men shangque’ (Distorting and Misreading the Historical Truth – A Discussion with Jiang Wen and His Kind). Available online at: http://www.cnd.org/CR/ZK03/cr173.hz8.html#6 (accessed 23 February 2014). Wu, Mei. ‘Yige yishujia de shenjingzheng shi’ (The Neurotic History of an Artist). Available online at: http://www.xlmz.net/forum/viewthread.php?tid=2938 (accessed 24 February 2014). Xia, Ge. ‘Daoyan Jiang Wen shi zuo haishi you? Xie zai Rang zidan fei guanying zhihou’ (Is Director Jiang Wen on the Left or Right? – On Let the Bullets Fly). Available online at: http://www.douban.com/note/121658011/ (accessed 23 February 2014). Xia, Yan. ‘Xiwang you gengduo dute fengge de hao yingpian’ (Wish There Are More Great Films with Unique Styles), People’s Daily, 14 January 1981. Xu, Hui (ed.). Liushi niandai qizhi (Nineteen Sixties Personality) (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 2000). Yan, Jiaqi, and Gao Gao. Wenhua dageming shinian shi (Ten-year History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1986, 1988). Yang, Jian. Wenhua dageming zhong de dixia wenxue (Underground Literature in the Cultural Revolution) (Beijing: Zhaohua chubanshe, 1993). Yang, Jian. Zhongguo zhiqing wenxue shi (A Literary History of the Chinese Educated Youth) (Beijing: Zhongguo gongren chubanshe, 2002). Yao, Wenyuan. ‘Ping xinbian lishiju “Hai Rui baguan”’ (A Critique of the New Historical Play Hai Rui’s Dismissal from Office), Wenhui News, 10 November 1965 (reprinted in People’s Daily, 30 November 1965). Ye, Nan. ‘Bashan yeyu weishenme mei xie huairen’ (Why Night Rain in Bashan Doesn’t Write About Bad People), People’s Daily, 20 December 1980. Ye, Nan. Bashan Yeyu (Night Rain in Bashan), in Zhongguo dianying juben xuanji (An Anthology of Chinese Film Screenplays), vol. 12 (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1986), pp. 67–127. Ying, Hong. ‘Meng Jinghui gen ni shuo – Wo Ai XXX’ (Meng Jinghui Tells You – I Love XXX), Shanghai Drama 1 (1995), p. 20. Yu, Jian. 0 dangan: changshi qi bu u biantiao ji (File 0: Seven Long Poems and Collected Scrap Notes) (Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 2004). Zhang, Hongjie. Ling yi mian – lishi renwu de linglei zhuanji (Another Facet – Alternative Biographies of Historical Figures) (Tianjin: Baihua Wenyi Chubanshe, 2004). Zhang, Hongjie. Daming wangchao de qi zhang miankong (Seven Visages from the Great Ming Dynasty) (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2006).

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Selected Filmography and Bibliography  235 Zhang, Hongjie. ‘Xin yu jiu jiafeng zhong de qishi niandai ren’ (The Seventies Generation Caught in the Cracks between Old and New). Available online at: http://blog.sina.com. cn/u/488d2478010002zg (accessed 23 February 2014). Zhang, Ming. Zhaodao yizhong dianying fangfa (To Find a Movie Method) (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe, 2003). Zhang, Xianmin. Kanbujian de yingxiang (Invisible Films and Videos) (Shanghai: SDX Sanlian shudian, 2005). Zhang, Xiaogang. ‘Self Portrait’, interview. Available online at: http://www.ynarts.com/ shop/new_view.asp?id=190 (accessed 11 February 2014). Zhang, Yihe. Wangshi bingbu ruyan (The Past Is Not Smoky) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2004). Zhao, Jianwei. Cui Jian: zai Yiwusuoyou zhong nahan – Zhongguo yaogun beiwanglu (Cui Jian: Cry Out in ‘Having Nothing’ – A Memorandum on Chinese Rock) (Beijing: Beijing Normal University Press, 1992). Zhou, Libo. Bao feng zhou yu (The Storm) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1961). Zhou, Liming. ‘Jiang Wen: ba guanzhong dangzuo lian’ai duixiang’ (Jiang Wen: Treat the Audience Like Your Date), interview with Jiang Wen, Shouhuo 2 (2011). Available online at: http://i.mtime.com/617855/blog/5775577/ (accessed 23 February 2014). Zhu, Jingjiang, and Mei Bing (eds). Zhongguo duli jilupian dangan (Dossiers of Independent Chinese Documentaries) (Xi’an: Shaanxi Normal University Press, 2004). Zhu, Rikun, and Wan Xiaogang (eds). Duli jilu (Independent Record) (Beijing: Zhongguo minzu sheying yishu chubanshe, 2005). Zhu, Rikun, and Wan Xiaogang (eds). Yingxiang chongdong (Film Impulse) (Fuzhou: Haixia wenyi chubanshe, 2005).

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Index

Index

Note: illustrations are indicated by page numbers in italics 11 Flowers (Wo 11), 192 50 Minutes of Women (Nüren de wushi fenzhong), 20, 164–5 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (wo de hongweibing shidai), 87, 127 1966/1986/2006, 180 agitprop, 98, 99, 131 Along the Railway (Tielu yanxian), 128 Alov, Aleksandr and Naumov, Vladimir: Pavel Korchagin, 76 alterity, 9, 16, 36, 37, 137, 155 animation Feng, Mengbo, 181 Jia, Zhangke, 114 People’s Liberation Army, 182 Zhou, Xiaohu, 180–1 anniversary films, 55 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 104, 106–7 Anyuan, 53 Aron, E. see Romm, Mikhail and Aron, E. L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat, 149 art babies in, 52 political intolerance of, 46 Russian avant-garde, 200n14 see also painting; woodprints artists female see Yang, Keqin; Yu, Hong Forsaken Generation, 10 queer see Shi, Tou; Wang, Qingsong Astruc, Alexander: ‘The Birth of a New AvantGarde: La Caméra-Stylo’, 205n10 Aurora (Zhao Xia) (literary journal), 46 auteur cinema, 62 autobiographies, 63, 134–5, 214n2

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avant-garde art, 200n14 filmmakers see Cui, Zi’en plays see I Love XXX awareness of camera, 128–9 Feng Mangbo and, 182 and historical consciousness, 10, 11–12, 27, 34, 54, 136–7, 138–9, 193–4; Forsaken Generation, 9, 65; In the Heat of the Sun, 79, 86; Xiao Wu, 97, 104 specific and general, 95 in Summer Palace, 122 in West of the Tracks, 151 Azalea Mountain (Dujuan shan), 29 babies: in art, 52 Bai, Hua: Bitter Love (Portrait of a Fanatic) (Kulian), 32, 33, 36 ballets, 29, 37, 187 Baranovitch, Nimrod, 51 Barthes, Roland, 189 Battles on the Plains (Pingyuan zuozhan), 39 The Beatles: ‘Revolution’, 66–7 Before the Flood (Yanmo), 128, 152 Bégaudeau, François, 152 Beginning of the Great Revival (Jiandang weiye), 55 Beijing Chang’an Avenue (Eternal Peace Avenue), 142 Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, 193, 221n16 Olympic Games (1989), 4, 9 polylocality of, 209n25 Tiananmen Gate, 100, 216n22 Tiananmen Square, 68, 128, 129, 144, 165,

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238  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema 179, 193, 194, 216n22, 221n16; see also The Square; Tiananmen; Tiananmen Democratic Movement see also 50 Minutes of Women; Peking Opera Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong), 53–4, 87 Beijing Film Academy ‘85 Class’, 61 ‘Beijing Underground’, 205n6 Benjamin, Walter, 192 Berlin, A City Symphony, 149 Berry, Chris, 16, 33, 35, 48, 96, 103, 145, 173–4, 205n7, 211n15 Berry, Michael, 13 Bitter Love (Portrait of a Fanatic) (Kulian), 32, 33, 36, 201n39 The Black Cannon Incident (Heipao shijian), 55 Blood Simple, 9 Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng), 56 boats, 36, 115 Boeult, John E.: Russian Art of the Avant-Garde 1902–1934, 200n14 Born in 1966 (Shengyu 1966), 1–3 The Box (Hezi), 164 Braester, Yomi, 25, 75 Browne, Nick, 16, 34, 94 Bulatov, Erik, 200n9 Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing: zuihou de mengxiangzhe), 2, 61, 86, 96, 135 buses, 98, 102–3, 112 CCTV, 125 CD-ROMs, 181 CGI see computer-generated image (CGI) technology CPP see Chinese Communist Party cameras awareness of, 128–9 ‘camera-eye’, 44, 181, 185 caméra stylo, 62 video, 163 see also cinematography Cao, Kai, 220n1 Summer of 1969, 180 capitalism, 5, 6, 7, 125, 177, 178 Cardinal, Roger, 93 censorship, 124, 128 Central Park, 128 Chan, Jackie, 55 Chanan, Michael, 147–8 chance, 9, 57, 58, 59, 184 characterisation, 30, 32 Farewell, My Concubine, 58 Night Rain in Bashan, 38, 39, 47–8

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White-Haired Girl, 37 Xiao Wu, 97 Chatman, Seymour, 104, 106–7 Chen, Kaige, 33, 55, 197n28 autobiography, 68, 77–8 Farewell, My Concubine, 9, 17, 56, 58–60, 189 Yellow Earth, 8, 201n38 Chen, Yan, 222n16 Cheng, Kai, 125 Cheng, Qingsong, 1–2, 10, 11, 65 Chengdu see Nightingale, Not the Only Voice Chi, Zhiqiang, 51 Chicken Poets, 206n15 children abuse of, 162 books for, 11 Cultural Revolution, 215n18, 218n41 Dirt, 88 films for: Sparkling Red Star, 46–7 Night Rain in Bashan, 36–7, 44–6, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49–50 We Are All Sunflowers, 99–100 see also babies China Film Co-Production Corporation, 62 China Film Group Corporation, 55, 62 China Youth University for Political Sciences, 87 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 5, 30, 55, 76, 130, 218n31, 221n16 Chronicle of a Summer, 159 ‘Chuanbang jutuan’ (Accidental Exposure Troupe), 68 cinematography and censorship, 124 I Graduated, 139, 140, 141, 144, 146 Jia, Zhangke and, 93, 94, 95–7, 114; Platform, 95–6, 98, 99, 100–3, 102, 109; Xiao Wu, 96–7, 103–4 Lou, Ye and, 94, 114, 115–16, 117–19, 122–3 Night Scene, 171 personal filmmaking, 136 Shi Tou and That Nana, 166, 167 The Storm, 131 West of the Tracks, 147–8, 149–50, 152, 154 The City of Huizhou (Huizhou), 125 Civil War (1946–9), 57, 130 Clark, Paul: Reinventing China: A Generation and its Films, 197n28 class struggle, 30 Clifton, Daniel: Chronicle of the 20th Century, 64–5 Coen Brothers: Blood Simple, 9 colour, 30, 31, 32, 38–9, 47, 51–2, 53 I Graduated, 142, 145

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Index  239 In the Heat of the Sun, 73 Nightingale, Not the Only Voice, 158 The Sun Also Rises, 187 Tiananmen, 126 ‘Tiananmen Fish Tank’ (sculpture), 216n22 Weapons (paintings), 165 comedies: romantic, 55 communism 10, 192; see also Chinese Communist Party Communist Party see Chinese Communist Party computer-generated image (CGI) technology, 125 conscious/consciousness, 9, 10–13, 15, 17, 78, 192, 193, 194 Confucius/Confucianism, 34, 69 consumerism, 6, 193 corn motifs, 216n22 Crazy English (Fengkuang yingyu), 128 Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, 122 Cui, Jian, 87, 193, 203n57 and rock music, 51–2, 54 Cui, Weiping, 11, 186 Cui, Ying, 156, 157, 160–1 Cui, Zi’en, 4, 18, 163–4, 215n20 Beidou There Are Seven Stars: A Spiritual Biography of My Family, 217n24 ‘Endangered Species Rule!’, 172–3 Enter the Clowns, 169, 173–4 Feeding Boys, Ayaya, 169 The Narrow Path, 20, 169, 171, 174 Night Scene, 20, 169–71, 174–6, 216n22, 217n27 The Old Testament, 169 The Pros and Cons of the WC, 168–9 Pseudo-Science Fiction Stories, 171–3 Refrain, 169 Shi Tou and That Nana, 165–7, 166, 167 Star Appeal, 169, 171 Withered in a Blooming Season, 169 cultural diversity, 217n28 Cultural Revolution, 1 censorship, 124 central message of, 30 chaos, 58 closure of cultural institutions, 29 cultural limitations of, 197n28 end of, 4, 59, 82–3, 89 families and, 215n18 Forsaken Generation and, 2, 10, 50, 71 literary journal of, 46 literature, 29 model operas, 10, 29, 30, 37, 78, 174, 197n28, 202n44, 221n16

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model plays, 28, 29, 39 model theatre, 30, 58, 85 music, 73 narratives, 40 persecutions, 78 plays, 28, 29 posters, 108 propaganda, 53 and public blindfolding, 51 slogans, 67–8, 180 Tang, Danhong and, 158 Weidong (name), 88 culture: official representations, 28 Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng jin dai huangjin jia), 9 Dai, Wangshu, 69 dance, 68–9; see also ballets The Days (Dongchun de rizi), 54, 61, 87 death, 189; see also mourning; suicide debris, 18–19, 96 Purple Butterfly, 118 Spring in Wushan, 152 Still Life, 109 Xiao Wu, 109–10 democratic movement, 128, 195n5 Deng, Xiaoping, 4, 5, 25 Deng, Yimin see Yang, Yanjin and Deng, Yimin Denton, Kirk A., 30, 42 Derrida, Jacques, 146, 190–1, 192 Devils on the Doorstep, 85–6, 185, 207n33 Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, 134 diary film, 62 digital media, 3, 54, 177 digital technology, 62; see also computergenerated image (CGI) technology Ding, Yi, 202n44 direct cinema, 128, 130, 155 directors see filmmakers Dirlik, Arif, 5 Dirt (Toufa luan le), 18, 86–7, 88, 90, 190 characterisation, 87–8 child figure, 88 flashbacks, 87–8, 89 music, 89 narrative structure, 88 nostalgia, 89–90 space, 87 dissident film, 205n6 distrust, 12 documentaries audiences, 214n3 censorship, 124, 128

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240  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema digital technology, 126 dispersed focus structure, 128 domestic past, 163–4; see also Nightingale, Not the Only Voice footage, 89, 131 humanistic, 124–5 hybrid, 135 ‘I’ film, 134 ‘independent’ status, 205n7 institutionalisation, 211n15 observational, personal, 19, 126–7, 133–9; characteristics, 136–7; definition, 134; see also I Graduated; West of the Tracks post-verité, 135 and reflexivity, 130 relational status, 211n15 self-, 134, 156–7 television, 124–5, 126, 211n15 verité, 128, 133 Dou, Wei, 54, 87 drama see plays Dream Walking (Mengyou), 214n3 Du, Haibin: Along the Railway, 128 Du, Mu, 207n48 Duan, Jinchuan, 18, 19 The Secret of My Success, 128 South Bakhor St. 16, 128, 129 The Square, 128–9 and theatre, 130 Wiseman’s influence on, 128–9 Duan, Jinchuan and Jiang, Yue: The Storm, 128, 130–2 Duan, Jinchuan and Zhang, Yuan: The Square, 128–9 Dyke March (Nü tongzhi youxingri), 164, 216n21 E-mei Film Studio, 99 Early Merchants from Anhui (Huishang), 125 Early Merchants from Shanxi (Jinshang), 125 economy, 4–5, 25, 30 editing digital, 54 Jiang, Wen: In the Heat of the Sun, 73 jump cut, 19, 119, 120, 121, 123 Liu, Wenying, 40 Lou, Ye, 94 Meng, Jinghui: I Love XXX, 65 montage, 136 socialist film, 33 subjective, 20, 129, 151 Suzhou River, 114

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Tang, Danhong: Nightingale, 157, 158 video, 126, 145, 175, 176 We Are All Sunflowers, 100 Xiao Wu, 104 education films, scientific (kejiao pian), 210n1 Enter the Clowns (Choujue dengchang), 169, 173–4, 216n20 essay film, 62 essays, 134 ethnographic cinema, 129 expressionism, 19, 114, 136, 142 Extras (Qunzhong yanyuan), 128 Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, 134 Family Video (Jiating luxiang), 163 Fang, Lijun, 54 fantasy, 37, 114 Farewell, My Concubine (Bawang bie ji), 9, 17, 56, 58–60, 189 Feeding Boys, Ayaya (Aiyaya, qu buru), 169 female subjects, 31–2, 35 Feng, Mengbo, 18, 20 My Private Album, 181 Phantom Tales, 181–3 Fengjie see Before the Flood; Still Life figure/figures child, 44–6, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49–50, 88 clay, 180 fool, 78–85, 78 Jia’s use of, 110–12 Lou’s use of, 118 film criticism: Western, 94–5 Film Culture, 212n43 film noir, 19, 114, 117 film-souvenir, 151 filmmakers 5 April Generation (Siwu yidai), 196n22, 197n24 dual identity of, 27 educated youth generation, 8 female, 138–9, 163, 215nn 6, 19; see also Li, Hong; Li, Yu; Liu, Xiaojin; Tang, Danhong; Wang, Fen; Yang, Tianyi; Ying,Weiwei Fifth Generation, 8–9, 17, 32–3, 55–6, 189, 204n2 First Generation, 198n28 Forsaken Generation, 4, 9, 64, 77, 126, 127, 139; cinematic personas of, 49–50, 145; and Cultural Revolution, 50, 71; and Fifth Generation compared, 56; and gesture, 190, 191, 194; and historical consciousness, 9, 10–13, 15, 17, 78,

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Index  241 192, 193, 194; and painting, 52–3, 54; and personal filmmaking, 63–4; and rebellion, 54; relationship with Mao, 190, 191, 193; self-portraits of, 87–90; and social realism, 54; and space, 77, 133; and spectrality, 184, 185, 191, 193; and subject positions, 12, 21, 64; and suicide, 189; vision of, 185 Fourth Generation, 77, 197n28 as historians, 15 Liberation Generation, 196n22 outward gaze of, 135 and performance, 139, 140, 150–1, 156, 157–8, 159, 160–1, 176 and personal documentaries, 136–9 Playful Generation, 196n22 queer, 138–9; see also Cui, Zi’en; queer film; Shi, Tou role of, 133 Second Generation, 198n28 Sixth Generation, 53, 61, 122 and subjectivity, 146 Third Generation, 197n28 underground, 61 Urban Generation see Sixth Generation fire imagery, 42 Fish and Elephant, 217n28 Fish and Water (radio programme), 182, 183 fish motifs, 171, 173, 191, 216n22 flashbacks Dirt, 87–8, 89 Night Rain in Bashan, 48, 49 see also narrations: first-person flowers, 45–6, 47 Foucault, Michel, 36 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, 82, 83 The Founding of a Republic (Jianguo daye), 55 4 May Movement, 69, 196n22 France Cinéma du réel, 214n3 New Wave, 122 Fujian Film Studio, 61 Fukuyama, Francis, 190, 192 game installations, 181 Gao, Minglu, 6 gay community, 218n29 Ge, Fei, 26 gender Cui, Zi’en and, 168–9, 170, 172 inequality of, 164 Shi, Tou and, 165–6, 167–8

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see also female subjects; gay community; lesbian identities; queer film; women gest, 189–90 gesture, 179–80 Barthes on, 189 Cui, Zi’en and, 174 Forsaken Generation and, 190, 191, 194 In the Heat of the Sun, 83 Jiang, Wen and, 187 The Narrow Path, 174 in photography, 176, 177 Shi, Tou and, 164–5 Wang, Qingsong and, 178 Xiao Wu, 106 Zhou, Xiaohu and, 180–1 ghosts, 190–1 Girl from Hunan (Xiangnü Xiaoxiao), 201n38 globalisation, 193 Godard, Jean-Luc, 14, 122 Golden Rooster Award, 36 Gong, Li, 57 Gorfinkel, Elena, 94 Grant, Barry Keith, 129 The Great River Rushes On (Dahe benliu), 222n16 Greenblatt, Stephen, 15 Gu, Hongzhong: ‘Night Revel of Han Xizai’, 178 Gu, Yue, 222n16 Guan, Hu, 4, 18 Dirt, 18, 86–90, 89, 90, 190 Ha, Jin, 199n41 Hai Rui Ba Guan (Hai Rui’s Dismissal from Office), 28–9 Han, Sanping see Huang, Jianxin and Han, Sanping Han, Shaogong, 26 Han, Xizai, 178 Hareven, Tamara, 64 He, Jingzhi, 202n44 Heath, Stephen, 94–5 Hero (Yingxiong), 9 heroes, 30, 31, 74, 85–6 Heroic Sons and Daughters (Yingxiong ernü), 76 ‘heroic youth’, 8 Hershman, Lynn, 161 Herzog, Werner, 74 Heterotopias, 36 Night Rain in Bashan, 36–7, 43, 44, 47–8 Hibiscus Town (Furong zhen), 34–5, 206n33 historical consciousness, 9, 10–13, 15, 17, 78, 192, 193, 194

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242  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema history angels of, 49, 192–3 documentaries, 125 ‘end of’, 190 and identity, 175, 176, 183, 192 and memory, 54, 64–70, 89, 181–2 and narrative, 13–14, 49 national, 9 official, 26, 219n55 oral, 198n40 and painting, 52–3 personal filmmaking and, 62–3 photographic perspectives of, 177 and representation, 21, 61 ‘spatial practice’ of, 7 and truth, 132 West of the Tracks, 147, 148, 149, 151 Hitchcock, Alfred, 117 Vertigo, 75 ‘home movies’, 151 homosexuality, 164, 169–70; see also gay community; lesbian identities; queer film Hong, Hao, 176, 177 hooliganism, 51; see also violence Houjie Township (Houjie), 128, 133 Huang, Jianxin, 144 The Black Cannon Incident, 55 and Han, Sanping: Beginning of the Great Revival, 55; The Founding of a Republic, 55 Huang, Jingang: soundtrack to I Graduated, 142, 144, 145, 206n16 Huang, Wenhai: Dream Walking, 214n3 human body, 217n22 50 Minutes of Women, 164, 165 Cao, Kai: Summer of 1969, 180 Enter the Clowns, 173–4 Feng, Mengbo: ‘The Technology of Slide Shows’, 182 Mao, Zedong, 191 The Narrow Path, 174 Night Scene, 173 Nightingale, Not the Only Voice, 157–9, 160 photographic perspectives, 177–9, 213n70 posed, 179–80 Shi Tou and That Nana, 167 Zhou, Xiaohu and, 180 human figures see figure/figures human rights, 4, 34 Huo, Wei, 202n44 I Graduated (Wo biye le), 2, 19–20, 61, 87, 141, 143 cinematography, 139, 140, 141–2, 144, 145, 146

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colour, 142, 145 as expressionism, 142 fiction and non-fiction boundaries, 145–6 interviewees, 139–40 and loss, 146 and memory, 140, 144 monologues, 142, 144 soundtrack, 144 and space, 140, 142, 144, 146, 193 I Love XXX (Wo ai XXX) (play), 17–18, 53, 64, 66, 142 inspiration for, 64 ‘jiti wu’ (group dance), 68–9 lighting, 67 memory, 68 monologues, 64, 66, 142 narrative structure, 66, 70 rhetoric, 69 space, 66, 70 identity collective, 193–4 dual, 27 and gender, 164, 165–6, 167–8 and history, 175, 176, 183, 192 photographic, 177 politics of, 139 and reality, 176 and subjectivity, 159–60, 161, 162 younger generations, 194 ideology idols/idolatry, 65–6, 180 In Public, 128 In the Heat of the Sun, 77 Night Rain in Bashan, 38, 39 Witnessing Growing Up, 31–2 In Search of the Cobra (Xuzhao yanjingshe), 215n6 In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi) awareness, 79, 86 characterisation, 83–4 colour, 73 critique of, 71–2 dreams, 72, 75–7 female characters, 75 fool figure, 78–85, 78 gesture, 83 and Hitchcock’s Vertigo compared, 75 as independent film, 62, 185 memory, 53, 71–2, 74–5, 81–2, 84 metaphor, 80 music, 73, 81 narration, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75 narrative structure, 17, 72–3, 75

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Index  243 opening shot, 11 post-production, 74 romantic heroism, 74 socialist media references, 76 space, 80, 117 voice-overs, 72, 74–5, 78, 81, 88 ‘independent’: use of term, 61–2 installations clay figures, 180 games, 181 mixed media, 219n50 Shi, Tou, 216n20 Internationale (tune), 73 Ivens, Joris, 212n43 Jay, Martin, 5 Ji, Jianghong see Zhou, Hao and Ji, Jianghong Jia, Pingwa, 26 Jia, Zhangke, 4, 62 use of camera, 93, 94, 95–7, 114 and fantasy, 114 In Public, 128 Platform, 18, 54, 95–6, 98–103, 107, 112, 149 Still Life, 18, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114 and surface, 93, 96, 103–4, 106, 107–14 and transport, 112–13 Unknown Pleasures, 18, 93, 109, 110–11, 112–13 The World, 93, 110–11, 112, 113, 114 Xiao Wu, 18, 54, 93, 96, 103–4, 105, 106, 107, 109–10 Jiang, Qing see Mao, Madame Jiang, Wen, 4 Devils on the Doorstep, 85–6, 185, 207n33 In the Heat of the Sun, 11, 17, 53, 62, 71–7, 78–87, 185, 198n40 Let the Bullets Fly, 185–6, 189, 207n33 relationship with Mao, 190 The Sun Also Rises, 185–7, 189, 207n33 Jiang, Yue see Duan, Jinchuan and Jiang, Yue Jin, Guolin: ‘I love Beijing Tiananmen’, 68 Johnson, Matthew David, 211n15 Ju Dou (Ju Dou), 8 Kang, Jianning: Yin Yang, 128 Kang, Zhengguo: ‘Realisticness and Verité’, 210n4 Kazuo, Hara: Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, 134 Keep Cool (You hua haohao shuo), 9 Korchagin, Pavel, 76 Korean War see In the Heat of the Sun

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Kuimen Gorge, 111 Kurosawa, Akira, 117 Lan, Fengying, 219n50 Land Reform, 130–1 language local accents/dialects, 170, 217n28 and madness, 77 Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah, 132 Lau, Andy, 55 Lee, Ang: Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, 122 Lee, Ching Kwan, 25 and Yang, Guobin (eds): Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution, 26 Lefebvre, Henri, 7 The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (Tianyunshan chuanqi), 32, 36 Lenin in 1918, 76, 80 lesbian film, 218n28 lesbian identities, 164–6, 168, 176, 214n2 Let the Bullets Fly (Rang zidan fei), 185, 186, 189, 207n33 Li, Aidong, 219n50 Li, Ang see Li, Jun and Li, Ang Li, Hong: Out of Phoenix Bridge, 96 Li, Huasheng: ‘Bashan yeyu’, 202n51 Li, Jun and Li, Ang: Sparkling Red Star, 46–7 Li, Kuchan, 46 Li, Ning, 179–80 1966/1986/2006, 180 and subjectivity, 138 Tape, 213n62 Li, Shangyin: ‘Night Rain: Sent North’, 48 Li, Xianting, 178 Li, Yifan and Yan, Yu: Before the Flood, 128, 152 Li, Yinhe, 170 and Wang, Xiaobo: Their World: A Study of the Gay Communities in China, 218n29 Li, Yu: Fish and Elephant, 217n28 Li, Zhensheng, 124 Liang, Xiaosheng, 8, 207n36 Lin, Biao, 124 Lin, Xiaoping, 5–6 Lin, Xudong, 126, 133 Link, Perry: ‘Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?’, 199n41 Little Red Flowers (Kan shang qu hen mei), 192, 198n40 ‘Little Train Please Take Us to Beijing Fast’ (Xiao huoche ya kuaikuai ba women daidao Beijing qu), 99 Liu, Huan, 47 Liu, Lydia H., 6

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244  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Liu, Wei: ‘The New Generation’, 52 Liu, Xiaobo, 4–5 Liu, Xiaodong, 54, 61, 87 Liu, Xiaofeng: ‘Sociological Thoughts and Notes on the April 5th Generation’ (Guanyu ‘siwu’ yidai de shehuixue sikao zhaji), 196n22, 197n24 Liu, Xiaojin, 215n6 Liu, Zheng, 176, 177 Long March, 125, 175, 181, 219n46 loss, 146 Lost, Lost, Lost, 146 lotus flowers, 46 Lou, Ye, 4, 18, 19, 54, 62, 189 cinematography, 94, 114, 115–16, 117–19, 122–3 Love and Bruises, 122–3 Purple Butterfly, 19, 116–23, 116, 118, 120, 121 Summer Palace, 122, 142, 145, 195n5 Suzhou River, 19, 114–16, 117, 208n7 Weekend Lover, 61, 93 Love and Bruises (Hua), 122–3 Lu, Hao: ‘Tiananmen Fish Tank’, 216n22 Lu, Sheldon, 5–6 Lu, Xinyu, 132–3 Lu, Xun: ‘Diary of a Madman’, 69 Lumière Brothers: L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat, 149 Ma, Ke, 202n44 Ma, Ning, 34 Spatiality and Subjectivity’, 202n43 MacDougall, David, 158 McElwee, Ross, 135 Sherman’s March, 134 McGrath, Jason, 6, 96, 101 madness, 77–8, 82 ‘main-melody’ films, 55 male subjects, 35 Mama, 61 Mao, Chenyu: Soul Mountain, 138 Mao, Madame, 29, 30, 46 Mao, Zedong biographies/histories of, 12 as Chairman, 1, 70, 72, 99, 100, 124 death of, 4, 91, 191 footage of, 68, 124 footage of, 68 Forsaken Generation and, 51, 190 impersonations of, 221n16 omnipresence of, 11, 129, 221n16 representations of, 52, 53, 100, 165, 219n55, 221n16

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spectrality of, 191 ‘Talks on Art and Literature’, 29, 219n46 thought of, 30, 31, 32 writings, 31 Maoism, 186, 192 Marker, Chris: Sans Soleil, 134 martial arts films, 9, 55 Marx, Karl: The Communist Manifesto, 190 Masgani, Pietro: Cavelleria Rusticana, 73, 74, 81 Mekas, Jonas, 212n43 Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, 134 Lost, Lost, Lost, 146 melodrama, 34, 56 memory Cui, Ying and, 156 Dirt (Toufa luan le), 88, 89 epistemological trope of, 25–6 families and, 163 film-souvenir, 151 and history, 54, 89 I Graduated, 140, 144 I Love XXX, 68 In the Heat of the Sun, 71–2, 74–5, 81–2, 84 intersubjectivity of, 215n19 Nightingale, Not the Only Voice, 158, 162 and performance, 140, 144, 190 revisionist, 2–3 Xiao Wu, 106 Meng, Fanhua, 197n24 Meng, Jinghui, 4 Chicken Poets, 206n15 ‘Chuanbang jutuan’, 68 I Love XXX, 17–18, 53, 64, 65, 69, 70, 142 metaphors Dirt, 89 Li’s use of, 48 The Narrow Path, 175 revolutionary, 46 Suzhou River, 116 The World, 114 migrant workers, 7, 114, 133 Min, Anchee, 47 Mine Warfare (Dilei zhan), 85, 178 Ming, Ming, 166 Minh-ha, Trinh T.: Naked Spaces: Living Is Round, 134 mixed media, 180–1, 219n50 Mo, Yan, 26 modernisation, 74 modernity, 6 money boys see Night Scene monologues Forsaken Generation, 53, 54

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Index  245 I Graduated, 142, 144 I Love XXX, 64, 66, 142 Night Scene, 170 Nightingale, 157 Montaigne, Michel de, 134 monuments, 179 More Than One Is Unhappy (Bu kuaile de buzhi yige), 163 Morris, Errol: The Thin Blue Line, 132 motorcycles, 112, 113, 164 mourning, 4, 164, 213n67 ‘Movie Journal’, 212n43 Müller, Heiner, 192 museums, 131, 144 music 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (wo de hongweibing shidai), 127 I Love XXX, 67, 68 In the Heat of the Sun, 73, 74 Liu, Huan, 47 popular, 51 rock, 51–2, 54, 203n62 symphonies, 29 theme songs/tunes, 45, 47, 112 We Are All Sunflowers, 99 see also operas My Camera Doesn’t Lie, 1 Nakamura, Toru, 116 Naked Spaces: Living Is Round, 134 narrations, 16 abandonment of, 126 first-person, 17, 32, 48, 71, 81, 86, 87, 94 I Love XXX, 70 In the Heat of the Sun, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 81 and memory, 26 Night Rain in Bashan, 45 self-referential, 53 subjective, 19, 33, 56 Suzhou River, 115 narratives of Cultural Revolution, 40 and history, 13–14, 49 role of, 13 of self, 64 The Narrow Path (Wuyu), 20, 169, 174, 175 Nationalists, 131, 212n32 A Native of Beijing in New York (Beijing ren zai niuyue), 207n33 Naumov, Vladimir see Alov, Aleksandr and Naumov, Vladimir Neale, Steve, 154

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New Chinese Cinemas, 34 ‘New Documentary Movement’ (xin jilu yundong), 126, 199n48, 217n28 New Historicism, 15 New Wave, 122 New York Lincoln Center, US Film Society: ‘The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema in Transformation’, 205n6 Screening Room: ‘Beijing Underground’, 205n6 see also Central Park Nichols, Bill, 63, 128, 129, 130, 161 Night Rain in Bashan (Bashan yeyu), 32, 35–43, 38, 41 ‘camera-eye’, 44 changeability of positions, 40, 42 characterisation, 38, 39, 47–8 child figure, 44–6, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49–50 dandelion reference, 45–6, 47 female characters, 36–7, 39, 40 flashbacks, 48, 49 as a heterotopia, 36–7, 43, 44, 48 ideology, 38 lighting, 42 mise-en-scène, 38–9, 40, 43 narration, 45 narrative structure, 47–8 night scenes, 43 poets/poetry, 37, 39, 40, 45, 48, 49 space/spatiality, 16, 38, 39, 43, 49 theme song, 45 Night Scene (Yejing), 20, 169–71, 171, 172, 174–6, 216n22, 217n27 Nightingale, Not the Only Voice (Yeying bushi weiyi de gehou), 20, 156–63 dialogue, 157 footage, 157–8, 161 memory, 158, 162 monologues, 157 performance art, 160 as ‘self-documentary’, 156–7 socio-historical dimensions, 160 subjectivity, 157 truth, 157 violence, 158 noise Night Scene (Yejing), 171 Phantom Tales, 182 visual, 147–8 nostalgia Dirt, 89–90 and Forsaken Generation, 54

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246  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Night Rain in Bashan, 48 West of the Tracks, 151 Not One Less (Yige dou buneng shao), 9 objectivity: observational, 129, 133, 145 Ode to the Dragon River (Longjiang song), 29 Of Great Events and Ordinary People, 134 Ogawa Productions, 127–8 Ogawa Shinsuke Prize, 127 The Old Testament (Jiuyue), 169, 216n20 Olympic Games, Beijing (1989), 4, 9 On the Dock (Haixia) (play), 29 On the Narrow Street (Xiaojie), 32, 33 operas Cavelleria Rusticana, 73, 74, 81 cinematic reproductions, 30 liangxiang (‘show face’), 31 revolutionary model, 10, 29, 30, 80, 197n28, 202n44, 221n16; White-Haired Girl, 37, 174 Peking Opera, 30 oral history, 131 Ostrovsky, Nikolai: How the Steel was Tempered, 76 otherness see alterity Out of Phoenix Bridge (Huidao Fenghuang qiao), 96 outsiders, 34 Owen, Stephen: Remembrance: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature, 207n48 painting Forsaken Generation, 54 Gu, Hongzhong, 178 and history, 52–3 ink, 202n51 Newborn Generation, 52–3 Pan, Dehai, 216n22 Shi, Tou, 165, 215n20 Yu, Hong, 31–2 Zhang, Hongtu, 219n55 Pan, Dehai: Corn series of paintings, 216n22 past and present, 1–2, 3, 96 representations of, 4, 125 see also history patriarchal system, 8 Pavel Korchagin, 76 peasants, 37, 38, 40, 42, 85–6, 131, 177, 179 Peking see Beijing Peking Opera, 30 Peking University see I Graduated

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Pema Tseden: The Silent Holy Stones, 193–4 Peng, Ning: Bitter Love (Portrait of a Fanatic, Kulian), 32, 33 Peng, Xiaolian, 197n28 People’s Daily, 28, 29 People’s Liberation Army, 182 People’s Republic of China: founding of, 55 performance/performers boundaries, 168–9, 170, 173, 174–5 dance, 48, 70–1 film, 91, 185; camera, 20, 98, 122, 160; documentaries, 128–9, 135, 136, 137, 145, 146, 164–5 filmmakers: personal, 139, 140, 150–1, 156, 157–8, 159, 160–1, 176 and memory, 140, 144, 190 mixed media, 180–1 musical, 45, 52, 89, 90, 91, 144 musical skits: Platform, 98–103, 108, 109, 112 and physicality, 176, 177, 178 plays, 29, 30, 31, 68, 72 poetry, 142, 145 performance art see Yin, Xiaofeng personal filmmaking, 3, 15, 18, 61, 62–4 cinematography, 136 contact zones, 28, 137 documentaries, 19 filmmakers’ role, 136–9 and self-figuration, 86 personal media, 194 Phantom Tales, 181–2 photography Bloodline: The Big Family, 167–8 and collective memory, 180 digital, 177–9 experimental, 176–7 and gesture, 176, 177 as the historical, 21 Liu, Wei, 52 secret, 124 Wang, Qingsong, 176–9 Zhou, Hai, 213n70 Pickowicz, Paul G., 5, 55 and Zhang, Yingjin (eds): From Underground to Independent, 205n6 ‘Platform’ (by Zhang Xing) (song), 112 Platform (Zhantai), 18, 54, 108, 113 cinematography, 95–6, 98, 99, 100–3, 102, 109 lighting, 101 mise-en-scène, 101–2 narrative, 108–9 space, 96, 98, 111, 103–5, 107, 112

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Index  247 symbolism, 103, 107–8, 112 time, 98, 102, 109 title tune, 112 train, 100–1, 103, 112, 149 plays film adaptations, 29, 37 ‘revolutionary model’, 28, 29, 39 see also I Love XXX; theatre poets/poetry Forsaken Generation, 50 in I Graduated, 142 in Night Rain in Bashan, 37, 39, 40, 45, 48, 49 underground, 8 Wang, Qi, 194 Portrait of a Fanatic see Bitter Love postmodernism, 115, 214n2 postsocialism distrust of, 59 and economy, 62 escape from, 114 generational subjects of, 7–13 and media, 20 personal scale of, 4 and transnationalism, 6 understanding of, 192 Praise for the Construction Army (Jun ken zhan ge), 46 proletariat, 30–1, 37, 40; see also peasants propaganda, 10–11 Cultural Revolution, 53 Feng’s use of, 182 in I Love XXX, 65, 68, 70 and personal filmmaking, 63 see also agitprop propaganda movies, 178 The Pros and Cons of the WC (Gongce zhengfang fanfang), 168–9 prostitution see Night Scene Pu, Shuping, 219n50 Purple Butterfly (Zi hudie), 19, 116–23, 116, 118, 120, 121, 122–3 Qu, Yunping, 219n50 queer film, 216nn 20, 21 radio, 11 Fish and Water, 182, 183 Internationale, 73 plays, 29 Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi bai hu tuan) (play), 29, 30, 80 RailRoad Guerrilla (Tiedao youjidui), 178

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Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglong gaogao gua), 8–9 realism deduction, 52–3 Feng, Mengbo: ‘The Technology of Slide Shows’, 182 metanarrative, 122 Sixth Generation, 54 social, 53 see also Socialist Realists The Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun) (ballet), 29 Red Guards, 2, 8, 9, 11, 60, 70, 124, 127, 168, 190; see also Night Rain in Bashan; 1966: My Time in the Red Guards The Red Lantern (Hongdeng ji) (opera), 29, 31 Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang), 8, 57, 201n38 REEL CHINA Documentary Biennial (2006), 214n3 reform era, 4 Refrain (Fuge), 169 Renov, Michael, 65, 134, 135, 136, 137, 146, 159, 161, 212n43 Rhodes, John David, 94 River Elegy (He shang), 125 romantic comedies, 55 romantic heroism, 74 Romm, Mikhail and Aron, E.: Lenin in 1918, 76 Rosen, Philip, 127 Rosenstone, Robert A., 13–14 Rouch, Jean, 129, 161 Chronicle of a Summer, 159 Ruiz, Raul: Of Great Events and Ordinary People, 134 Ruttmann, Walter: Berlin, A City Symphony, 149 Sacrificed Youth (Qingchun ji), 201n38 Sans Soleil, 134 Schlöndorff, Volker, 74 science fiction: Cui, Zi’en and, 168–9, 171–2, 216n20 sculpture, 179, 216n22 ‘searching for roots’ literature (xungen wenxue), 26 The Secret of My Success (Linqi da shetou), 128 sex and aggression, 51 awakening of see In the Heat of the Sun in The Sun Also Rises, 186 see also gender Sha Jia Bang Symphony, 29 Sha Jia Village (Sha Jia Bang) (play), 29, 30–1 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 190, 191

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248  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Shanghai, 4, 28, 114, 115, 118 Shanghai Dance School, 202n44 Sherman’s March, 134 Shi, Hang, 65, 70 Shi, Jian, 87 Tiananmen, 126 Shi, Tou, 18, 163–8, 166, 215n20, 216n22 films: 50 Minutes Women, 20, 164–5; Dyke March, 164, 216n21 oil paintings: ‘Buddha Butterfly’ (Fo die), 165; ‘Female Friends’ (Nüyou), 165; Weapons (Wuqi), 165 video: Shi Tou and That Nana, 165–7 Shinsuke, Ogawa, 127–8 Shiyan, Chao: ‘The Erotic Politics Inside and Outside The Box – A Discussion on Dyke March’, 216n21 Shoah, 132 ‘show face’, 31 Silbergeld, Jerome Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen, 207n39 on colour politics, 202n51 on Suzhou River, 208n7 The Silent Holy Stones (Lhing vjags kyi ma ni rdo vbum), 193–4 Sino-Japanese War, 85, 116 slide shows, 182 Sobchack, Vivian, 10, 151 socialism, 5, 25 ideology of, 94 legacy of, 187, 192 memories of, 17, 26, 67 official representations of, 28 and postsocialism, 7–8 and traditional culture, 34 socialist cinema, 218n31 Socialist Realists, 200n14 Song, Yongping, 176 songs prison, 51 Soviet, 76 theme, 45, 47, 112 see also operas Soul Mountain (Ling Shan), 138 South Bakhor St. 16 (Ba kuo nan jie shiliu hao), 128, 129 Soviet Union art, 200n14 songs, 76 space/spatiality, 35 Antonioni and, 106

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Cavelleria Rusticana, 73 concentrated, 165 Cui, Zi’en and, 168, 169, 170–1, 172, 173, 175 and dance, 68–70 Dirt, 87 discursive, 130 epistemological, 126 fake, 112–13 Feng, Mengbo and, 181 Forsaken Generation and, 77, 133 gender, 166 and history, 27 Houjie Township, 133 human interaction, 93–5 I Graduated, 140, 142, 144, 146, 193 I Love XXX, 66, 70 In the Heat of the Sun, 80, 117 isolated, 8 Mao, Zedong and, 11 in model opera, 188 in model theatre, 30–1, 85 and modernity, 6 Night Rain in Bashan, 16, 38, 39, 43, 44, 49 open, 130 Platform, 96, 98, 111, 103–5, 107, 112 postsocialist, 7, 113, 128, 130, 174, 175 private, 157, 163, 164 public, 165 Purple Butterfly, 117–18, 119 ‘representational spaces’, 7, 32–3 ‘Spatiality and Subjectivity’ (Ning, Ma), 202n43 Still Life, 111 The Storm, 132 superficial, 19, 110 symbolic, 128–9 temporary, 125 and time, 104, 137 To Live, 61 Wang, Qingsong and, 179 West of the Tracks, 146–8, 149, 150–4 Xiao Wu, 108 Sparkling Red Star (Shanshan de hongxing), 46–7 special effects: Jia, Zhangke and, 114 special-topic film, 125 spectacle: and gaze, 154 spectrality, 190–1, 193 Forsaken Generation and, 184, 185, 191 Spring in Wushan (Wushan zhi chun), 152 The Square (Guangchang), 128–9 stagnation, 35 Star Appeal (Xingxing xiang xi xi), 169, 171

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Index  249 Still Life (Sanxia haoren), 18, 111, 113 debris, 109 rootlessness, 110–11 special effects, 114 superficial elements, 18–19 The Storm (Baofeng zhouyu), 128, 131–2 The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiu Ju da guansi), 9, 57 students and democratic movement, 195n5 as documentary subjects see I Graduated as a poetical subject, 194 studios, 61, 99, 219n50 Su, Tong, 26, 50 subject positions Forsaken Generation, 12, 21, 64 Jia, Zhangke and, 96, 114 Lou, Ye and, 115 and Maoist ideology, 28, 31, 32 multivalent, 97–103 in socialist cinema, 33, 34 postsocialist, 35, 94, 95 subjective cinema, 62 subjectivity, 33–5, 48 and autobiography, 63 challenges to, 59 in editing, 20, 129, 151 essayists and, 134 historical, 61, 64 and identity, 161 and melodrama, 34 and navigation, 154 Night Rain in Bashan, 157 performative, 140, 146, 155–6; Nightingale, Not the Only Voice, 156–63 in personal documentaries, 137–9, 146 and ‘post-verité’, 135 social, 63–4 Wang, Qingsong and, 179 West of the Tracks, 149, 152, 154 Sui, Jianguo, 219n50 suicide Born in 1966, 3 Farewell, My Concubine, 59, 60 Forsaken Generation and, 56 In the Heat of the Sun, 79, 81 Let the Bullets Fly, 189 Summer Palace, 145 The Sun Also Rises, 187, 188–9 Summer of 1969 (Liu jiu nian zhi xia), 180 Summer Palace (Yiheyuan), 122, 142, 145 The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang zhaochang shengqi), 185–7, 189, 207n33 Sunflower (Xiangrikui), 192

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Sunward Yard organisation (‘Xiang Yang Yuan’), 218n41 surface Jia, Zhangke and, 18–19, 93, 96, 103–4, 106, 107–14 Lou, Ye and, 114 walls, 31, 32, 39, 96; Platform, 103, 104, 105, 108 Zhang, Xiaogang and, 52–3 Suzhou River (Suzhou he), 19, 114–16, 117, 208n7 symbolism Farewell, My Concubine, 59, 60 painting, 31–2 Platform, 103, 107–8, 112 The Square, 128 The Sun Also Rises, 187 Tiananmen Square, 129 Xiao Wu, 104, 106, 107, 109–10 symphonies, 29, 149 Tagg, John, 21 Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu wei hu shan), 29, 30, 76, 181 Tang, Danhong, 18, 138, 214n2 Nightingale, Not the Only Voice, 20, 156–63 Tang, Xiaobing, 25–6, 53 Tang, Yaping: ‘Black Night’, 50–63 Tape (Jiaodai), 213n62 television, 13 and cultural identity, 194 documentaries, 124–5, 126, 211n15 talk-shows, 198n40 theatre, revolutionary model, 30, 58, 85; see also plays theme songs/tunes, 45, 47, 112 The Thin Blue Line, 132 Three Gorges Dam project, 152 The Three Men United Studio, 219n50 Tian, Zhuangzhuang, 87, 197n28 Blue Kite, 56 Tiananmen, 126 Tiananmen democratic movement, 4 Tiananmen Square see Beijing: Tiananmen Square time, 18, 96 Platform, 98, 102, 109 West of the Tracks, 147, 151, 152 see also past Titicut Follies, 129 To Live (Huozhe), 9, 17, 56–8, 189 tourism Hong, Hao: Beijing Tour Guide series, 177 ‘red’, 131

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250  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Tiananmen Square, 129 The World, 111 ‘The Train Heading for Shaoshan’ (Huoche xiangzhe shaoshan pao), 98–9, 99 trains Platform, 112 West of the Tracks, 147–9 transnationalism, 6 transportation, 112–13; see also boats; buses; motorcycles; trains trauma literature, 26 Troubled Laughter (Kunao ren de xiao), 32 truth, 132 Nightingale, Not the Only Voice, 157 West of the Tracks, 133–4 Tuan, Yi-fu, 149, 151 Tunnel Warfare (Didao zhan), 85 underprivileged, 194 underrepresented, 63, 96, 126–7, 135, 155 United States, 10; see also New York Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao), 18, 93, 109, 112–13 ‘unofficial’: meaning of, 62, 205n8 Using (Long Ge), 212n40 victims, 3, 16, 26–7, 34, 145, 158, 160, 162, 174, 178, 179–80, 191 victimisers, 3, 160, 162 violence families and parents, 162–3, 215n18 Hamlet, 191 Maoist, 191 mass, 131 Night Scene, 176 Nightingale, Not the Only Voice, 156, 158 Phantom Tales, 181, 182 state, 145 voice-overs Dirt, 88 documentaries, 125 In the Heat of the Sun, 72, 74–5, 78, 81, 88 Lou, Ye, and 94, 114–15; Suzhou River, 115, 125 We Are All Sunflowers, 99 walls collapsing, 50, 58 and memory: Platform, 106–8, 109, 112; Xiao Wu, 110 Shi Tou and That Nana, 167 as surfaces, 31, 32, 39, 96; Platform, 103, 104, 105, 108

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Wang, Ban, 26 Wang, Bing, 18, 202n44 and subjectivity, 138, 139 West of the Tracks, 19–20, 133–4, 139, 146–54 Wang, Chao, 193 Wang, Fen More Than One Is Unhappy, 163 and subjectivity, 138 Wang, Guangli, 4, 10, 11, 18, 65 I Graduated, 2, 19–20, 61, 87, 139–46 and subjectivity, 138, 139, 154 see also Wu, Wenguang and Wang, Guangli Wang, Ping, 50 Wang, Qingsong, 20, 176, 177–8 ‘The History of Monuments’, 179 ‘Long Life’, 52 ‘Night Revels of Old Li’, 178–9 ‘Past, Present, and Future’, 179 Wang, Shuo, 51, 72 ‘Behind the Headlines with Wen Tao’ (talk show), 198n40 Ferocious Animals, 71, 198n40 It Looked Beautiful, 198n40 Wang, Xiaobo see Li, Yinhe and Wang, Xiaobo Wang, Xiaoshuai The Days, 61, 87 11 Flowers, 192 see also Zhang, Yuan and Wang, Xiaoshuai Wang, Yiman, 137 war films, 85 Watson, Rubie S., 25, 212n33 We Are All Sunflowers (Women doushi xiangyanghua), 99 We Are the . . . of Communism (Women shi gongcanzhuyi shengluehao), 214n1 Weekend Lover (Zhoumo qingren), 61, 93 Wen, Chihua: The Red Mirror: Children of China’s Cultural Revolution, 199n40 Wenhui News, 28 West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu), 148, 149, 150, 153 awareness in, 151 cinematography, 147–8, 149–50, 152, 154 filmmakers’s presence, 139, 150–1 history, 147, 148, 149, 151 space/spatiality, 146–8, 149, 150–4 structure, 19–20, 146–7 subjectivity, 149, 152, 154 time, 147, 151, 152 truth, 133–4 White, Hayden, 13 White-Haired Girl (Bai mao nü) (ballet), 29, 37, 174 Williams, Linda, 132

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Index  251 Winterson, Jeanette Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 214n2 Sexing the Cherry, 214n2 Wiseman, Frederick, 19 Central Park, 128 influence on Duan, Jinchuan, 129–30 Titicut Follies, 129 Zoo, 127 Withered in a Blooming Season (Shaonian huacao huang), 169 women photographs of, 177 use of language, 218n28 see also female subjects; lesbian film; lesbian identities Women/Here, 219n50 Woo, John, 55 woodprints, 46 The World (Shijie), 93, 110–11, 112, 113, 114 Wu, Fan: ‘Dandelion’ woodprint, 46 Wu, Han: Hai Rui’s Dismissal from Office (Hai Rui Ba Guan) 28–9 Wu, Wenguang and documentary, 133, 135–6 1966, My Time in the Red Guards, 87, 127 and personal filmmaking, 18, 62 and subjectivity, 138 Wu, Wenguang and Wang, Guangli: Bumming in Beijing, 2, 61, 86, 125–6, 135 Wu, Yigong and Wu, Yonggang: Night Rain in Bashan, 16, 32, 35–6, 46 Wu, Zhaodi: Heroic Sons and Daughters, 76 Wu, Ziniu, 197n28 Wushan, 152 Wushan Goddess, 48 Xi, Chuan, 102 Xi’an Incident (Xi’an shibian) (play), 222n16 Xia, Yu, 207n33 Xiang, Yu, 59 Xiang Yang Yuan see Sunward Yard organisation Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu), 105 characterisation, 97 cinematography, 93, 96–7, 103–4 debris, 109–10 history, 54 memory, 106, 110 surface, 18 symbolism, 104, 106, 107 Xie, Fei: Girl from Hunan, 201n38 Xie, Jin, 16 female characters, 34 Hibiscus Town, 34–5

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The Legend of Tianyun Mountain, 32, 36 melodrama, 56 Xie, Tieli, 131 Xing, Danwen: Born with the Cultural Revolution, 52 Xu, Gary G., 85 Xu, Hui, 11 Xudong, Zhang, 6, 7–8 Xue, Di, 50 Xue, Jianqiang, 138 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF), 127 Yan, Yu see Li, Yifan and Yan, Yu Yan’an Lu Xun Literature and Art Academy, 202n44 Yang, Guobin, 25; see also Lee, Ching Kwan and Yang, Guobin Yang, Jian: A Literary History of the Chinese Educated Youth, 8, 197n23 Yang, Keqin, 215n6 Yang, Lina (aka Yang, Tianyi) Family Video, 163 and subjectivity, 138 Yang, Xiaobin, 31 Yang, Yanjin: On the Narrow Street, 32 and Deng, Yimin: Troubled Laughter, 32 Yangtze Delta (Jiangnan), 125 Yangtze River, 38, 48, 191 Yangtze River (Huashuo changjiang), 125 Yao, Wenyuan: ‘A Critique of the New Historical Play Hai Rui Ba Guan (Hai Rui’s Dismissal from Office)’, 28–9, 67 Ye, Nan, 46 Yellow Earth (Huang tudi), 8, 201n38 Yin, Xiaofeng, 156, 160 yin and yang, 30 Yin Yang (Yin Yang), 128 Yin, Zhaoyang, 53 Ying, Weiwei: The Box, 164, 216n21 Young Pioneers, 31, 68 Yu, Bo, 173, 174 Yu, Fan, 219n50 Yu, Hong, 54, 61, 87 Witnessing Growing Up, 31–2 Yu, Hua, 50 Yu, Jian, 138 Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (2003), 156 Zang, Tianshuo, 87 Zhan, Wang, 219n50 Zhang, Chengzhi, 8 Zhang, Dali, 138

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252  Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema Zhang, Hongjie, 12 Zhang, Hongtu: ‘Chart of Acupuncture Points and Meridians: The Physiology of a Revolutionary’, 219n55 Zhang, Keyao, 222n16 Zhang, Lu, 202n44 Zhang, Ming Rainclouds over Wushan, 152 Spring in Wushan, 152 Zhang, Nuanxin: Sacrificed Youth, 201n38 Zhang, Wei, 26 Zhang, Xiaogang, 54 Amnesia and Memory, 52–3 Bloodline: The Big Family, 52, 167–8 Zhang, Yang: Sunflower, 192 Zhang, Yihe: The Past Is Not Smoky, 195n5 Zhang, Yimou, 33, 55, 197n28 and cinematic realism, 9 Hero, 9 Ju Dou, 8–9, 57 Raise the Red Lantern, 8–9, 57 Red Sorghum, 8, 57, 201n38 The Story of Qiu Ju, 57 To Live, 9, 17, 56–8 Zhang, Yingjin, 54, 91, 114, 133 Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943, 204n2 Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, 196n19, 209n25 ‘Rebel without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking’, 196n20, 203n62

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‘Thinking Outside the Box: Mediation of Imaging and Information in Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentary’, 216n21 Zhang, Yingjin and Pickowicz, Paul G. (eds): From Underground to Independent, 205n6 Zhang, Yuan, 18 Crazy English, 128 Little Red Flowers, 192, 198n40 Mama, 61 The Square, 128 see also Duan, Jinchuan and Zhang, Yuan Zhang, Yuan and Wang, Xiaoshuai: Beijing Bastards, 53–4, 87 Zhang, Ziyi, 55, 116, 120, 121, 122, 123 Zhao, Jianwei, 51–2 Zhaxi, Dawa, 26 Zhou, Hai: Turn of the Century: Visual Memories of Social Changes in China, 213n70 Zhou, Hao: Using, 212n40 and Ji Jianghong: Houjie Township, 128, 133; Senior Year, 128 Zhou, Hongxiang, 179–80 The Red Flag Flies – A Movie without Story, 180 Zhou, Libo, 212n31 Zhou, Xiaohu, 180–1, 219n46 Zhu, Chuanming: Extras (Qunzhong yanyuan), 128 Zhu, Ziqing, 69 Zhuang, Hui, 176 Zoo, 127 Zuo, Yixiao, 138

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