Today’s film:

Disorder (dir. Huang Weikai)

Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai (Disorder)

2009. China. Directed by Huang Weikai.

MoMA program description:

Assembling footage from a dozen amateur videographers, Huang Weikai presents a unique anti-city symphony of urban dysfunction that is alternately hilarious and horrifying. Pigs racing down a busy highway, government VIPs swimming in a polluted river, a hit-and-run victim being bribed to leave the scene, and an abandoned baby gawked at by passersby are all stranger-than-fiction visions that could never be aired on Chinese state television. These images represent both an alternative media culture of amateur videographers and viral video netizens, and the chaos seething through the cracks of a society in rapid transformation.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

Disorder was one of the most mesmerizing films I’ve seen in ages. Rendered in a grainy black and white, the film consists of a random sequence of brief, minute-or-so glimpses into the various spaces of Guangzhou’s public life. It’s bracing, occasionally confusing, and heavily ideas-driven—Weikai assembled the footage from over one-thousand hours of footage he collected from other, amateur filmmakers, and while stitching this footage together, he followed but one rule: No successive scenes could come from the same source tape. It’s a film that aspires toward democracy, that hopes to represent the multitude.

- Hua Hsu, The Atlantic, October 19 2010

These hobbyists would just shoot with DV cameras for the sake of shooting. They’d often forget what they had filmed, or simply feel that the footage they had compiled was of no value…After watching some of the footage, I was astonished by the things they documented, so at the time I came up with the idea for Disorder. Because I had watched hours and hours of their footage, I got the idea to use a collage method to expose another side of the city. There were so many different perspectives revealed in their footage that showed the absurd side of life in this city.

- Huang Weikai, interviewed in LEAP, 2010

Most of the material was shot in Guangzhou — Huang’s hometown and one that, like most Chinese metropolises, is expanding at a violent, rapid clip — but it is intended to stand for the whole of China. It cannot be said to really begin or end, it just bursts on the screen in medias res and gallops toward oblivion. The preliminary images portray a busted fire hydrant raining torrents on a busy intersection as drivers tentatively decipher their way through. It’s an apt synecdoche for most of what follows, as we see average Chinese citizens try to go about their days confronted by an abusive civil service, jury-rigged infrastructure, and extreme population density.

- Colin Beckett, UnionDocs

In interviews, Huang has speculated that the concept of “disorder” might vary according to ethnicity. Is there a form of chaos that is distinctly Chinese? Apparently yes, and his film both documents and embodies it. Grainy black-and-white footage, captured by amateur on-the-scene videographers, has been spliced together to create a nonstop portrait of a metropolis gone berserk—a city symphony from hell.

- Chris Chang, Film Comment

Q: What made you want to make it in black and white?
Huang: There are two reasons: one subjective, and the other objective. The objective reason is that I had collected different kinds of raw footage, and I also had several digital videocameras. Since different cameras have different visual qualities, shooting in black and white would help me eliminate the ostensible differences between colors. The subjective reason is that I used to be a brush painter, and I like portraying visuals in black and white.

- Huang Weikai, interviewed at DocChina in 2009, published on dGenerate

Tossed into a maelstrom of deracinated images from Huang’s native province, we’re left adrift and agog at brief scenes of traffic jams, floods, accidents, police violence, fools winding through lanes of heavy traffic, and so many, many farm animals gone astray. Programmer Sean Farnel has gone beyond considering Disorder a “city symphony,” merely saying it’s set in “Chris Marker-ville,” and Huang’s film is indeed an act of sustained bricolage, essaying contemporary China through a reported 1,000 hours of footage from amateur shooters, creating an eruptive, hallucinatory landscape, resisting narrative, that is both tactile and otherworldly. It may be the first great film of the 22nd century.

- Ray Pride, Moving Image Source

A patchwork of amateur footage offers a berserk, scattershot glimpse into the public and private spheres of this modern metropolis. A distant cousin of Godard’s Weekend, shot through with Keystone Kops, discontented citizens, and a renegade pig, Disorder is an original, terrifying portrait of a society on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

- Michael Chaiken, Film Comment

The film’s overarching concept is its detailing of a trickle-down systematic breakdown of law and order. We may see a lot of policemen in Disorder, but most of them are shown to be ineffectual at best, not even powerful enough to stop jaywalkers or even pigs from disrupting traffic. But the domestic unrest cuts deeper than such acts of indifferent nature and civil disobedience. One man who threatens to jump off a bridge complains about not being properly compensated at his job; another plot thread features the sight of government officials being forced to wade into a polluted river themselves. Worse, such dissatisfaction may well be reflected in the general populace. Perhaps that explains why all those random passersby seem to ignore that poor abandoned baby in the park; the one person who does gesture to help feels a need to ask if she should bring this to the attention of the police. Something seems rotten in China if this is something that needs to legitimately be asked.

- Kenji Fujishima, In Review Online

DISORDER is a seesaw between anxiety and gleeful wonderment. The sequences are bridged by asynchronous sound, bleeding from one event to the next, and the most common through-line is a never-ending parade of apathetic authority figures. “It will lead to paperwork, we have bigger problems” would be an apt alternate title for this modern masterpiece, if that didn’t sidestep the greater argument being made here. By shedding light on the magnificent number of situations people get into for which there is no logical resolution, Huang renders these occurrences mundane. The man seeking relief from a health inspector for the roach in his meal is just as crazy as the man threatening to jump of a bridge unless the police help him get relief (from what we never really know). Life as a system of orderly events is not just an illusion, but is the most illogical thought of all.

- Jason Halprin, Cine-file

The events represented in the film seem to reflect a form of urban possession, an abstract power of the city over its inhabitants, who attempt to confront and grapple with the absurd events that unfold in the lived experience of the everyday. In Disorder, we witness possession on multiple registers—the possession of individuals under the gaze of a DV camera, and the possession of both director and subject under the spell of the city. Through the reconfiguration and recontextualization of “found objects,” or found footage in the case of Huang Weikai’s project, he introduces jarring juxtapositions that subvert audience identification, often leaving the viewer bewildered, disoriented, powerless and confused. The film’s raw, grainy DV quality and its radical leaps from fragment to fragment are aesthetically mesmerizing. It distills a number of the qualities that Walter Benjamin locates in the practices of the surrealists, particularly the blurring of waking and dreaming states, and the interpenetration of image and language to yield a system of unstable meanings. As Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, “And no face is surrealistic to the same degree as the true face of a city.” AsDisorder exposes the underbelly of the city, making visible the absurd occurrences that are often subordinated to the realm of the invisible, his film offers a provocative portrait of an overwhelmingly absurd urban experience.

- Philip Tinari, LEAP

Today’s film:

24 City (dir. Jia Zhangke)

Er shi si cheng si (24 City)

2008. China. Directed by Jia Zhangke. With Jianbin Chen, Joan Chen, Liping Lu.

MoMA program description:

Throughout his distinguished career, Jia Zhangke has blurred the boundary between documentary and fiction like no other Chinese director. At a state-owned factory being demolished to make way for a luxury apartment complex, Jia explores the history of the site from the 1950s to the present through nine documentary-style interviews. Five are with actual residents of the site; four are fictional stories delivered by professional actors. Through this hybrid storytelling mode, Jia exposes the fictional constructs behind documentary factuality, and reflects on the performative aspects of history and memory.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

Why did you decide to include fictional characters among your interviewees?
‘There wasn’t such an arrangement at the beginning, because I only planned to make a documentary to record the worker’s oral history. Nevertheless, every interviewee gave me the urge to imagine the rest of his story. There were words unspoken, and sentences half finished. I thought I could only fully comprehend these real people’s feelings through imagination. I’m not a historian writing history; I’m a film director reconstructing experiences incurred in history.’

- Jia Zhangke, interviewed by Edmund Lee, Time Out

The stories that emerge paint a grim portrait of modern Chinese history—many speakers describe the shattering of families due to the state’s coercive power—as well as of the present day, with its soul-killing loneliness and materialism. Yet all the storytelling—whether culled or scripted—comes off as the sort of fictions that people tell themselves in order to define their own identity in the face of dehumanizing pressures.

- Richard Brody, The New Yorker, February 15 2010

The experience of watching this back and forth between the real and the imagined, and between people and places, is at once immersive and distancing. Because the names of Joan Chen and the Jia regular Zhao Tao appear in the opening credits, I understood the first time I watched the movie that they were delivering performances. But I was uncertain about most of the other people, even though Mr. Jia does include images of some workers on old identity cards. There’s something slightly disorienting about a work that doesn’t have the usual markers that assure you that now you’re watching a fiction, now you’re watching a documentary, which, as I realized on second viewing, can work beautifully for a movie about profound dislocation.

- Manohla Dargis, The New York Times, June 4 2009

24 City has proven to be Jia’s most commercially successful film. But despite his deliberate mise-en-scène and the hyper-clarity of the high-definition images, it’s not an easy movie to read. Is the filmmaker bemused or amused by a factory bureaucrat’s earnest remark that “our offices will become a five-star hotel”? And what is one to make of the casually revealed information that the movie itself was partially financed by 24 City’s developer? Have we been watching a kind of infomercial? Is there irony or pathos in the juxtaposition of retired workers enthusiastically singing “The International” as their factory collapses?

- J. Hoberman, The Village Voice, June 3 2009

CROSSTALK Beijing #2: Jia Zhangke and 24 City (part1/2) from Shao Foundation on Vimeo.

If the idea of representing a true national reality is a core objective of Chinese independent cinema, present circumstances of distribution beg the question, to whom is this representation directed to? The answer may determine to what extent 24 City is an act of compromise betraying the independent movement for commercial success versus an act of negotiation in delivering the independent movement to a wider audience.

- Kevin B. Lee, Cineaste, September 2009 (republished on Fandor)

We have collected a brief sample both American print reviews of the film, and Chinese responses from various sources, from press to online audience reviews. And, in a nod to Jia Zhangke’s playfulness, we are withholding the identities of the reviewers until the very end. Just as Jia had Americans guessing which performances were by actors and which by non-actors, can you guess which of these reviews were written by American film critics, and which were by Chinese?

- “Play the 24 City East-West Match Game,” dGenerate Films

- A photo-essay update on the 24 City complex by Kevin B. Lee for Fandor

Let’s consider each of the roles played by these actors, as well as the overall historical development implied by the order in which they appear–a pattern that was carefully traced by James Naremore in Film Quarterly (Summer 2009, Vol. 62, No. 4) when he placed this film at the head of his annual ten-best list. Lu Luping, first seen carrying an IV drip bottle, plays Hao Dali, the oldest, who joined the factory the same year it opened, when she was 21. Her heartbreaking story about losing her three-year-old son on a rest-stop during her journey by boat from Shanghai to Chengdu– whether this is a “real” story derived from an actual interview, a fiction, or something in between—followed by her watching an old propaganda film on TV, painfully dramatizes the degree to which nationalist and military obligations could supersede family in 1958. This is in striking contrast to the final interview with Su Na (Jia regular Zhao Tao), born in 1982 in Chengdu, who voices a very different kind of nationalist sentiment when she defends her capitalist career as a “personal shopper” who has purchased a new car to enhance her “credibility”, and who tearfully says she wants to buy her factory-worker parents an apartment in the new 24 City development. (It’s important to recognize that while westerners tend to view communism as “collectivist” and capitalism as “individualist,” the Chinese state has tended to view each practice over half a century of social transformation as a particular form of civic duty.) And in between these polar extremes are the monologues delivered by Song Weldong (Chen Jianbin), born in 1966 in Chengdu–an assistant to the factory’s general manager, seated at a counter, who recalls street-gang fights and having been spared from one beating by the recent death of Zhou Enlai—and by the somewhat younger Xiao Hua (Joan Chen), a factory worker named after the eponymous heroine of one of Chen’s earliest films, who plays on audience recognition by discussing her close resemblance to Joan Chen. If the latter registers as a joke, it’s a joke with some serious intent, because Jia evidently wants the Chinese viewers’ emotions aroused by these monologues to echo those solicited by the same actors in fiction films, and he also wants the viewers to be aware of these echoes. And clearly the juxtapositions of nationalist consciousness with both street fights and business, as emphasized in these latter two monologues, are part of the ambiguities and ambivalences that Jia is intent on exploring, with pop culture and state policy both playing relevant roles.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, from his essay written for Cinema Guild DVD release of the film

In an interview with Jia Zhangke, Dudley Andrew asked the director to explain the meaning of the green tinge to the image in 24 City.  The hue, it turns out, was deliberately mixed into the colour palette of the film during postproduction. Why? Jia offered an intriguing answer. When he was a small child growing up in northern China in the late 1970s and 80s, he saw the green colour everyday and everywhere, often painted one metre high on walls of both private homes and public places—hospitals, offices, classrooms, and state-run factories. For Jia, green is apparently a very personal memory; yet instead of using the colour to express an individual sentiment, he “exhibits” it rather matter-of-factly by integrating it into the film texture

- Jiwei Xiao, Senses of Cinema, June 2011

Today’s film:

Yumen (dir. Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao, J.P. Sniadecki)

Yumen

2013. China/USA. Directed by Huang Xiang, Xu Ruotao, J. P. Sniadecki.

MoMA program description:

This highly experimental twist on the ethnographic documentary visits the town of Yumen, in China’s northwest Gansu province, a once-thriving, oil-rich community in the 1980s that has been left depleted and derelict. Strikingly shot on film, Yumen tells the story of this ghost town through a series of wandering characters and inventive vignettes in which even the spirit of Bruce Springsteen is summoned to comment on a world in ruins. A collaboration between Chinese and American filmmakers, Yumen pushes the boundaries of the documentary aesthetic in depicting China’s past and present.

YUMEN trailer

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

Fusing documentary and staged scenes in a manner reminiscent of Godard from the 1970s onward, Yumen brings dignity and beauty to a place that lies in near ruins, and was the finest piece of cinematic portraiture I witnessed at this year’s Berlinale.

- Travis Jeppesen, Artforum

Filmed in 16 mm, the director chooses to keep in the final edition all the evidence of the filming, with blurry shots and reel endings, even keeping the camera noise. This is a painful and nostalgic homage to a fading world and the medium which registered it.

- Eva Sangiorgi, FICUNAM

When a film like this articulates its setting—that of its title, a once oil-rich beacon of production in the northwest Gansu province that has since been nearly abandoned—one realizes how few films understand how to create a vivid sense of place. More than simply pointing the camera at a locale, the filmmakers conjure the very soul of Yumen, this all-but-defunct, oil (ghost) town. The monstrous, pulsating rhythm of drilling, the contrastive contours of the landscape, and the lonely group of buildings contained therein. The sound design brings forth a new layer of varying ironies and heartbreak—the very fabric of a broken space.

- Adam Cook, Mubi

Today’s film:

San Yuan Li (dirs. Ou Ning, Cao Fei)

San Yuan Li 

2003. China. Directed by Ou Ning, Cao Fei.

MoMA program description:

China’s rapid modernization literally engulfs the village of San Yuan Li within the surrounding skyscrapers of Guangzhou, a city of 12 million people. The villagers, who move to a different rhythm, thriving on subsistence farming and traditional crafts, resourcefully reinvent their traditional lifestyle by tending rice paddies in empty city lots and raising chickens in makeshift rooftop coops. Led by visual artists Ou Ning and Cao Fei, a dozen videographers, including Huang Weikai, who went on to direct Disorder, collaborated on this highly stylized village-in-a-city symphony, exploring the modern paradox of China’s economic growth and social marginalization.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

[Sanyuanli] differed markedly from what was then the established forms of independent Chinese documentary. Since its emergence at the end of the 1980s, documentary produced outside the official media systems has tended towards one of two forms: either a type of direct cinema heavily indebted to the work of Frederick Wiseman; or, increasingly, a performative and interventionist cinéma vérité mode that is more redolent of the films of Jean Rouch. Despite the stylised distance of its camerawork, Sanyuanli takes its cues from neither of these documentary practices. Instead, its black-and-white aesthetic, speeded-up footage, electronic music score and rapid montage editing suggest, as Ou has acknowledged, the influence of an older tradition: the European modernist “city symphony. Indeed, the film’s first major sequence – an “entry shot” into Guangzhou, filmed from a boat travelling up the Pearl River – clearly echoes the opening of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927), in which the camera enters the German capital by train.

- Luke Robinson, “Alternative Archives and Individual Subjectivities.” Senses of Cinema, July 2012

If Wu Wenguang launched the New Documentary Movement by documenting avant-garde artists’ lives in Bumming in Beijing, I take Sanyuanli as a continuation from the second phase of the movement. It repeatedly emphasizes the problematic relationship of art, reality and history. It was made by a collective of avant-garde artists rather than by a single filmmaker. Also, it uses some avant-garde techniques in its filmmaking styles. For example, the beginning of the film has music but no people and no voiceover. It starts by filming the water from a boat as it approaches the city, then gradually moves to the city and then to Sanyuanli, all visual images accompanied by avant-garde music.

- Lv Xinyu, “Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement.” In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Edited by Berry, Lv, Rofel. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

The cinematic quality of San Yuan Li reflects Ou Ning’s specific interests, yet his collaboration with others, particularly the young video artist Cao Fei, adds rich visual dimensions. In her own work, Cao Fei prefers saturated technicolor and takes a tongue-in-check approach, parodying the current aspirations and lifestyles of Guangzhou’s burgeoning white-collar class. The activities of both artists, is an integral part of the creative scene in Guangzhou today where film screenings and festivals regularly attract capacity audiences from all walks of life, without parallel anywhere else in China.

- Karen Smith, “The Chinese: Photography and video from China” (catalogue) , Wolfsburg Museum, Germany, 2004. Re-published on Ou Ning’s website Alternative Archive.

In 2003 an important historical event happened. After we made San Yuan Li, Nanfang Dushi Bao [Southern Metropolis Daily, a mainland newspaper famous for its investigative reporting]sponsored our retrospective of Jia Zhangke films in 2004. Then the death of the student Sun Zhigang was reported by the Southern Metropolis Daily [Sun was beaten to death while being arbitrarily detained by police in Guangzhou].

So the after that the Guangdong Government really hated the paper. They also hated the film, San Yuan Li. Actually they never saw the film, but San Yuan Li [an area in Guangzhou] had a reputation as one of the worst areas for drug abuse in China. They were afraid our film would publicise that.

Fifteen police broke into my office studio and took all my documents and DVDs. They were trying to prove U-theque was an illegal organisation – and that the Southern Metropolis Daily had supported an illegal organisation. They also wanted to take my computer but I insisted they could not take it.

- Ou Ning, interviewed by Dan Edwards, Screening China, March 7 2011

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (dir. Wang Bing)

Today’s film:

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks

2003. China. Directed by Wang Bing.

MoMA program description:

The most monumental achievement in the Chinese new documentary movement to date, Wang Bing’s three-part, nine-hour portrait of an industrial wasteland made the top 100 in the 2012 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll. Once the heart of state-run heavy industry, Tiexi district, in the northeastern city of Shenyang, is now a scene of decay, as economic reforms, bankruptcies, relocation, and demolition have left many factories empty and entire communities jobless. Filmed over two years, the film is a testament to Chinese documentarians’ commitment to a deceptively simple film technique, one that patiently peels away everyday surfaces to reveal rich layers of history and culture.

Read Director’s Statement by Wang Bing (from the 2003 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, where it won Grand Prize)

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

The film depicts a panoramic scene of the decline of China’s state-owned factories following the failures of its planned economy. Landscapes of desolate factories and portraits of people living in difficult predicament reflect a poetic sorrow.

- Jia Zhangke, ChinaFile

Going beyond the tropes of the Sixth Generation, West of the Tracks nevertheless defines the apex of a trend that developed in the post-Tiananmen ‘90s: independent art films produced in China which received praise abroad but were shown neither theatrically nor on television in their home country. However, due to the proliferation of illegal DVDs and the use of the internet, West of the Tracks has had an immense influence upon Chinese filmmakers. Wang Bing helped redefine the use of small, portable digital cameras in an epic context, especially through his reinvention of the tracking shot: simply walking about while carrying his camera. An intimate extension of the body of the filmmaker, the camera keeps him offscreen, but tantalizingly close to the frame.

- Berenice Reynaud, Cinema Scope

In making this film he never had enough money to buy his own camera, and he did his editing initially at night in local television facilities, to which a friend helped him gain unofficial access.[17] His own precarious status as an underground filmmaker may well account for his sympathy for the people of Tiexi District and, in turn, their trust in him not to abuse their images and stories…

- Li Jie, West of the Tracks — salvaging the rubble of utopia

The film makes a strong case for DV filmmaking. Bing’s cinematography is entirely handheld and he prefers to shoot from amidst the workers and from their eye level. Only Digital Video could have provided this material flexibility for Bing. He religiously performs the role of a historian, capturing passages that would otherwise be relegated to the level of footnotes. He neither exploits the grief of the people he’s filming to create his art nor does he try to analyze their situation and make an overarching statement. He merely lives among them, staying in the sidelines with humility and standing witness to the downward spiral they are thrust into. This way, Bing’s film makes a strong case for cinema itself, taking it closer to what it out to be and what it was devised for – to capture and save reality from destruction, negligence and falsification.

- Srikanth Srinivasan (aka Just Another Film Buff), Unspoken Cinema

[Part I:] Rust’s fascination with the choreography of Man and Machine gives way to moments of intense beauty that at times recalls the structural films of sculptor Richard Serra… [Remnants,] the second part of Wang’s trilogy offers a multi-generational portrait of a community faced with the sudden terrible certainty of its own demise… [Rails,] the closing chapter of Wang’s ambitious trilogy is arguably its most poetic and emotionally powerful, a portrait of the last supply trains that continue to deliver ever dwindling quantities of raw stuff to the crumbling factories.

- Harvard Film Archive

In his approach to the question of the unexpected pro-filmic event, Wang Bing demonstrates a sensibility subtly different from that of his predecessors. This distinctiveness is illustrated by one particular moment in “Rust” that has achieved significant critical attention. Wang is filming a maintenance worker in one of the factories recounting his life story, most particularly the disruption to his education that resulted from the Cultural Revolution. Suddenly, one of his co-workers enters the room and announces that the plant will shut down in two days: the news has just been broken to them by the factory manager. As Lv Xinyu points out, Wang has caught on film the precise moment at which the factory received its “death sentence.” Yet the director’s explication of this sequence is also of interest:

This moment is extremely important. Although when we see it now we are prepared for it, at the time of filming there was no way to know [it was coming.] You [the viewer] and he [the worker] experience the moment together; you will remember it very clearly.

Wang suggests that the significance of this scene – one which is arguably pivotal to the entirety of West of the Tracks, in that its consequences play out for the documentary – derives from its contingency. Its utter unexpectedness, both for those on screen and those watching, ensures its lasting power. Here, the unpredictability of the pro-filmic is no longer a problem or a challenge; instead, it is a quality to be harnessed by the documentary filmmaker.

- Luke Robinson, “From ‘Public’ to ‘Private’”. In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Edited by Berry, Lv, Rofel. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

The fate of individuals is struggling within the larger fate of the nation. The nation, buried under the allegories of vast rusty steel and material, has its prosperity and decline decided by powers beyond its control. The struggle of individuals contains the strength of life itself. Wang Bing believes that, if by such destiny one gets to understand oneself and reality, then one might be awakened even in the middle of this destiny – and awakening is the premise for redemption.

- Lv Xinyu, “West of the Tracks.” In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Edited by Berry, Lv, Rofel. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

Wang Bing’s nine-hour elegiac epic is a strange echo of the Lumière brothers’ much shorter Leaving the Factory (1895). Instead of workers happily coming off their shifts, the three parts of West of the Tracks trace the death of an iconic Mao era heavy industrial zone and show people leaving forever. Smoky, snow-covered, and dark, it made me think of the Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) as I sank into it and became immersed in its thoughtful nostalgia.

- Chris Berry, ChinaFile

This epic 9-hour deliberation on the decline of massive industrial manufacturing in northeast China compels the viewer to confront the ghostly ruins of giant machines and deserted factories. The soon-to-be-unemployed workers’ uncertain future evokes the nightmare rather than the glory of socialist legacy and human civilization. The slow-moving train that punctuates the film bears witness to a science fiction-like world where even the machine is abandoned in an industrial wasteland.

- Zhang Yingjin, ChinaFile

This is like a ghost story, a glimpse of the phantoms who haunt a world where inexorable economic forces have declared that human beings and the communities they build to give shape and meaning to their lives are no longer important. The existence of the film and Wang’s herculean effort in giving it such a rich and elegant form provide an irrefutable counter-argument: it is the human rather than economic values that give life its meaning.

- Kenneth George Godwin, Blog Critics and Rough Cut

For Wang, there is always the need to locate human figures in space and to allow the audience to locate itself in relation to that space. This double process requires time, and it might be said that the subject of Wang’s films is mainly this, how space becomes a screen of time, and how the paths of people through the space—across, toward, in, out, or simply dwelling within (as in 2007’s sublime Fengming, a Chinese Memoir)—write duration.

- Chris Fujiwara, Cinema Scope

Today’s film:

Railroad of Hope (dir. Ning Ying)

Xi wang zhi lu (Railroad of Hope)

2002. China. Directed by Ning Ying.

MoMA program description:

Years before the hit 2009 documentary Last Train Home depicted the plight of China’s migrant population, Ning Ying joined a trainload of agricultural workers on a grueling three-day journey to China’s northwest frontier in search of better jobs. In contrast to Last Train Home’s self-effacing style, Ning foregrounds her own presence through her exchanges with fellow passengers, as they respond to her disarmingly direct questions about their lives, hopes, and dreams with heartbreaking candor. A fascinating study of how the documentary camera serves as both objective observer of and subjective confidant for its subjects.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

A documentary in which, probably for the first time ever, we can listen to Chinese peasants from poor interior regions speaking openly and sincerely about their lives.

- 2002 Berlinale Forum program

Following hundreds of agricultural workers from Sichuang Province to Xinjiang, China’s northwest frontier, a journey of more than 3,000 km, Ning Ying spent three days and nights in the crowded train befriending and interviewing these hopeful peasants with their many dreams for the future, some shared and some diverging. Most of them, especially the young women, are on their first trip away from their native villages as well as their first time on a train.

- Zhang Zhen, Harvard Univeristy Nieman Reports

Filmmaker Ning Ying is a rare breed among independent Chinese filmmakers, not only because she is a woman, but also because she attended the Beijing Film Academy alongside 5th generation filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who decidedly do not share the same aesthetics, concerns, and economic paradigms as their younger counterparts.

- La Frances Hui, ChinaFile

Ning, an eloquent interpreter of her movies, explains that she takes issues with many documentary filmmakers who simply place the camera waiting for things to happen. The camera, claims Ning, cannot capture anything that has not already taken place inside the director’s mind. Unmotivated filmmaking shows, in her view, “an empty head behind the camera.” Railroad of Hope, on the other hand, makes use of directorial intervention to produce a highly personal statement. Rather than a xianchang-like investigation of a particular site, the film comes close to a fictional account.

- Yomi Braester, “Excuse Me, Your Camera Is In My Face.” In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Edited by Berry, Lv, Rofel. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

Ning Ying… in her cinematography has always preferred the progressive mixture between fiction and documentary, telling stories in which the restless and ever changing soul of her country is expressed… In this sense Ning Ying is somehow (maybe even unconsciously) a reference point for the new generation of Chinese film directors who aim at achieving an “emotional and documentaristic” cinema.

- Il Manifesto

In one emotional interview, a woman tells of being tricked into moving to Xinjiang to marry her brother’s older friend in exchange for the promise of work.  In almost every case, the workers speak of their hopes for a better life for their children, and it’s clear that, in doing so, they have renounced their own dreams . As voyeurs to these conversations, we are forced to understand the tragic implications of so many thousands of people living deferred lives.

- Leah Modigliani, Stretcher

2 Why did you choose to shoot on dv?

- because it’s small

3 What was special about shooting in dv (e.g.compared to 35mm, was it your first time with dv or are you used to it)?

- dv allows for more freedom
- it was the first time with dv

4 Which camera and which editing software did you use?

- Sony PD-150 and Apple Final Cut-Pro

5 What was your shoot-edit ratio?

- 30:1

- From a questionnaire answered by Ning Ying for netLoungeDV 2002

Today’s film:

Old Dog (dir. Pema Tseden)

2011. China. Directed by Pema Tseden. With Yanbum Gyal, Droluma Kyab, Lochey.

MoMA program description:

A young Tibetan decides to sell his family’s nomad mastiff, an exotic dog that fetches a fortune from wealthy Chinese. His aging father opposes him, leading to a series of tragicomic events that threaten to tear the family apart. Pema Tseden is the leading filmmaker of a newly emerging Tibetan cinema, and the first director in China to film his movies entirely in the Tibetan language. His third feature,Old Dog employs an observational documentary approach that soberly depicts the erosion of Tibetan culture under the pressures of contemporary society.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

And so the Tibetan new-wave cometh. Though merely a tiny ripple for now (consisting of about two filmmakers), the homelanders are showing a different side of their environment, one overlooked by features such as “Seven Years in Tibet” or the blockbusters currently burning the region’s box office. Pema Tseden’s “Old Dog” doesn’t include any of the flourishing beauty that the aforementioned Brad Pitt vehicle does, instead opting to showcase a dismal, despairing area where the cities look like post-apocalyptic wastelands and the countrysides don’t seem to contain a speck of life. While his outlook on things is unrelentingly critical, he’s not being negative for the sake of it — there’s some true passion behind this work, and Tseden is a director with plenty to say on all topics, ranging from the younger generation’s lack of connection to their heritage to the troubling relationship between Tibet and China

- Christopher Bell, Indiewire

“Old Dog” as a whole is characterised by the same dogged determination shown by its elderly protagonist, being a film whose naturalistic style masks a powerful use of metaphor. A beautiful, highly effective and moving statement about a culture in danger of disappearing, it treats its subject matter with thoughtful even handedness, never offering any easy answers or even much hope for the future. Tseden is certainly a talent to watch out for, and the film is a fine example of the richness which Tibetan cinema has to offer.

- James Mudge, Beyond Hollywood

Lurking in the background – and driving the story – is the shadowy presence of immense Chinese wealth made real and present by the petty thieves who cater to Chinese interests by stealing dogs. This issue is still current with 2010 seeing a Qingdao buyer splash out £1.5 million for a droopy-eyed fur-covered Mastiff who looked positively uncomfortable in his bedraggled red coat. In 2009 another Chinese millionaire made headlines when she welcomed Yangtze No. 2, a Tibetan Mastiff apparently worth £350,000 to her home in Xi’an with a convoy of 30 back Mercedes and the ubiquitous red banners used in Chinese celebrations.

- Stephanie Chang, The Culture Trip

Our expectation of at least a shred of sentimentality is elegantly rebuffed in favor of a tale in which the dog in question has no name, is rarely petted, has ragged unkempt fur and is always chained. Animals have a function in old Tibet; they are in a realm of their own, one of the lower realms with far more suffering than the human realm. There is no mention of karma in this film, because nothing is spelled out that doesn’t have to be. Questions hang unanswered, brushstroked details pass barely noticed, but this slow gentle film delivers a sharp and bitter a portrait of the new Tibet that lingers long after it’s disappeared from its brief festival circuit.

- Rita Valencia, Times Quotidian

“I tried to show people the traditional way of life and the social change taking place. For instance, in this film, there’s a story inside a story — that young couple couldn’t have a child. Through that kind of situation I’m trying to tell people what is current in Tibet. Things are changing,” Tseden noted. “The main point of the film is not just to tell a story, but also to demonstrate or document small details that make up Tibet.”

- Pema Tseden, interviewed by Christopher Bell, Indiewire

People often confuse Tseden’s films for documentaries, asking how a family is doing now, or even expressing the desire to donate. Recounting this, Tseden laughed and stated, “The main difference between documentary versus narrative films is in attitude.” He does not consider his own art to be documentary, believing that “the minute you bring a camera to a person’s real life, they cannot maintain their reality. But what you’ve captured is also truth or reality.”

- Tingting Wei, Asian American Writers’ Workshop

From the opening sequence of Gonpos’ sojourn into town, we encounter an aggressive, busy soundscape. The clink and roar of construction; the shrill call of pop music blaring from stores; the hum of a scooter’s motor; the bleating of goats; wind and insects; even the screechy blather of a Mandarin-language TV station in the family’s otherwise tranquil mountain home. Tseden is frugal with the movement of his camera and subjects and tends to hold a shot long after the frame is vacated by humans and animals, but the cacophony of sounds often overwhelms an abandoned landscape. In the film’s climactic moment, a prolonged event of mercy and brutality, the audience can look away if they choose, but the choked noises of this violent act are impossible to ignore.

- Maya E. Rudolph, dGenerate

Even as they call for Tibetan independence, many Westerners romanticize the region, viewing it through a framework of Orientalist exotica. On the other hand, the Chinese government continues to rule it with a heavy hand. This places Tibetan director Pema Tseden in a difficult position but he’s carved out a slot in East Asian cinema with panache. In an interview with the Trace Foundation, a New York based non-profit organisation promoting Tibetan culture, he states: “My friends and I had all seen many movies on Tibetan culture. However, most of these movies don’t portray the way of life and value systems properly.” Tseden attended the Beijing Film Academy, from which he graduated in 2004 after making several shorts, and has pursued a parallel career as an author. The first director ever to emerge from Tibet, he’s devoted himself to making accurate films about the country, shot with local crews, using Tibetan dialogue and casting nonprofessional actors.

- Steven Erickson, Sight & Sound, June 2013

Given Pema Tseden’s extremely complicated position as a Tibetan in China, and the necessity of having his films pass stringent Chinese censorship, his ability to speak eloquently of individual despair and the emergency of cultural obliteration is masterful; his ability to do this in films of such eloquent, quiet beauty is nothing short of astonishing.

- Shelly Kraicer, Cinema Scope

Today’s film:

Beijing de feng hen da (There’s a Strong Wind in Beijing)

1999. China. Directed by Ju Anqi.

MoMA program description:

A gonzo camera crew roams the streets of China’s capital, asking random passersby, “Is the wind strong in Beijing?” This ambiguous question provokes a startling variety of responses that expose social and cultural anxieties within contemporary China. The film implicitly poses a larger question about the role of intrusiveness and spontaneity in both documentary filmmaking and everyday social interactions.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

The film’s premise is simple: the crew goes around Beijing randomly asking the question, “Do you think the wind in Beijing is strong?” The ensuing interaction is best understood at the performative rather than semantic level – not in relation to the inane question about weather, but rather as prompting a social interaction. One may observe how – and not only with what words – various people respond to the unexpected question. People on the street react with varying degrees of media savvy – at times baffled by the non-sequitur, on other occasions trying to come up with a narrative to accommodate the question, for example, “It used to be strong before. The protective forest around Beijing works.” The haphazard encounters yield a surprising amount of information about Beijing’s streets and present a slice of life. The principle of spontaneous shooting, identified with the xianchang aesthetics, shows its advantages toward the end of the movie, when the filmmakers run into the penniless and desperate parents of a child with leukemia. The director reacts quickly and follows the parents to see their child, and a moving human story materializes out of the chance meeting.

- Yomi Braester, “Excuse Me, Your Camera Is In My Face.” In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Edited by Berry, Lv, Rofel. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

The crew of three wander unannounced into through beauty parlours, toilets, schools, restaurants, public squares and all manner of locations. They eavesdrop on public phone conversations, knock on doors and generally have loads of fun capturing some inspired moments which run the gamut of hilarious to intensely moving. The film’s final sequence and only real semblance of cohesive story is a powerful and enormously moving moment. And through it all they paint a picture so detailed and honest that you cannot help but marvel at their clarity of vision.

- Menggang

Out of Phoenix Bridge (dir. Li Hong)

Today’s film:

Hui dao feng huang qiao (Out of Phoenix Bridge)

1997. China. Directed by Li Hong.

MoMA program description:

For this groundbreaking work, which revealed the conditions of migrant laborers in China, Li Hong spent two years following the lives of four young women from the countryside who share a single-room Beijing hovel while searching for work. Li’s empathetic approach achieves both intimacy and a sense of solidarity with her subjects, while depicting the transformation of women’s roles within China’s massive migrant worker population.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings: 

 Unlike other films about migrants, Phoenix moves quickly from a focus on the hardship of migrant living to the women’s personal histories. First, they talk about their lack of schooling in their native villages. Afeng and Jailing say their parents did not allow them to go to school because they were girls. Afeng describes one incident when she tried to go to school only to have her parents physically stop her. First, her father grabbed her as she left home. When she attempted to circumvent the parents by taking a detour around a river, her mother blocked her. Sadly such a description of women (mothers) helping to reinforce discrimination against girls is repeated further along in the film.

- Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, “Migrant workers, women, and China’s modernization on screen.” Jump Cut, No. 54, fall 2012

By moving in with her subjects, Li Hong paints an intimate and detailed picture of the lives of these migrant women laborers. She makes excellent use of portable video equipment to record in the cramped quarters of the workers’ shack. Because of the nature of the location, Li favors close-ups, and the camera often lingers on the women’s faces, occasionally too close for the image to be in focus, allowing the talking heads to directly address the live-in filmmaker and by extension, the audience.

- Gina Marchetti, From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997. Temple University Press, 2006.

Out of Phoenix Bridge does not directly condemn the government but rather addresses a deeper issue of representational power. Thus Li indirectly counters Beijingers’ attitudes by showing these migrant women’s articulate critique of their own situation. Living with and filming these women in their one-room apartment for a year, Li uses cinema verite to show how these women speak back to Beijingers, the media, their landlady, the patriarchal forces in their villages, and even the local Beijing police.

- Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel, “Alternative Archive.” In The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record. Edited by Berry, Lv, Rofel. Hong Kong University Press, 2010.

Today’s film:

i.Mirror by China Tracy (dir. Cao Fei)

i.Mirror by China Tracy (aka: Cao Fei) Second Life Documentary Film 

2007. China. Directed by Cao Fei.

MoMA program description:

Artist and documentarian Cao Fei recorded her “experiences” within the online social platform Second Life. The result is a wistful, surreal vision of an alternative reality sprung from the pop culture fantasies and hyper-consumerism of contemporary urban China, while also trying to transcend its real-life limitations. It can be seen as an answer to the challenge posed by River Elegy: how to envision a new Chinese destiny founded on principles of individuality, creativity, discovery, and freedom. The film also reflects the contemporary condition of the virtual supplanting our experience of the real.

Excerpts from select reviews and writings:

The video is described by the artist as a “virtual documentary,” where we follow the adventures of China Tracy dating a young Chinese hipster, traveling to the beach, or visiting a museum in a disclocated environment. China Tracy’s virtual experiences often express melancholy, as seen in the message that scrolls down the screen: “To go virtual is the only way to forget the real darkness.”

- New Museum, Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education. Taylor & Francis. June 23 2011.

Gradually it is revealed that China’s handsome young swain is actually a 60-something American, though in Second Life–where, as China notes, one can be young forever–this doesn’t seem to be a big problem… Second Life video’s landscape have a dystopic air, and despite the avatars’ ability to enact fantasies of unlimited movement while inhabiting impossibly glamorous personas, their world is tinged with melancholy, as when China Tracy’s paramour abandons his hipster avatar for an old-man persona that is presumably closer to his first life identity.

 - Eleanor Heartney, “Like Life.” Art in America, May 2008

People ask me whether that love story was real or fake. Of course there were aspects of both involved because when you film in SL you have to interact with other people but you also try to preserve a sense of impartiality. It became very hard to disentangle emotions and objectivity.

- Cao Fei, interviewed by Andrew Maerkle in The Japan Times, October 30, 2009

Another interview with Cao Fei gives more details of the male “lead” of i.Mirror, who in real life is a political activist and former political prisoner in the United States. 

“When we travel through Second Life, or when we watch i.Mirror, we inevitably project our first life into it. In fact, we bring many of the dilemmas and quandaries that we face in real life to the fore in Second Life, hoping to resolve them. Or we hope and attempt to use Second Life to decode and interpret real life.”

-Cao Fei, Art21

“SL is a lab, a world lab, but it consists in a huge global economic systems.  It bring us business and democracy, at the same time with feelings and culture. We can’t avoid capitalism’s wave; at the same time, we can’t avoid Communist aspirations in our heart. This world is not only dualistic, we’re inconsistent. Communism is our Utopia, Second Life is our E-topia… SL is our mirror, it tells us the truth.”

- Cao Fei interviewed by Wagner James Au, New World Notes

Cao Fei, in her beautiful, meditative, and sometimes sardonic, explorations of Second Life, reveals that in the hyperreality of Second Life there is an attempt to restore the real—connections with people that escape them in Real Life, for some reason or another. Second Life is a “scaled-down refraction” that facilitates the coming together of people from all over the world in one common, publicly accessible space. For Baudrillard, “But we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this same breakdown. And it is by an artificial revitalization of all this that we try to escape it” (Baudrillard). Cao, in her documentary, exposes the artificial attempt of Second Life to mourn the loss of the real. Yet, she offers us some hope, “To go virtual is the only way to forget about the real darkness.” Through her documentary i.Mirror, Cao wants the viewer to see in her experience of Second Life a resemblance of the real that still holds meaning.

- Jennie Fleming

A veteran of two Venice Biennales, one Carnegie International and countless international fairs and expositions, Ms. Cao is one of mainland China’s hottest art exports, known for videos and conceptual projects that uncover curious subcultures, all while shining a light on contemporary Chinese life. With the 2004 video“Cosplayers,” she honed in on China’s early “cosplay” scene, following kids costumed like Japanese anime characters as they staged fantastical battles, then returned to humdrum home lives. For “Whose Utopia” (2006-7) she persuaded workers in a Guangdong Province light-bulb factory to enact their fantasies and filmed them as rock musicians, break dancers and ballerinas on the factory floor.

- Carol Kino, The New York Times, June 2 2011