Date: September 30-October 8, 2006 Organizer: Caochangdi Workstation Curator: zhang Yaxuan |  |
Curator’s statements:
As the video part of "Crossing:2006" art program by Caochangdi Workstation, "Extending: Documentary Forum" is trying to show the freshest appearance of Chinese independent documentary. 12 films are involved in this forum, with nine long-feature ones, and three shorts, which are less than one hour. Half of the twelve were made by students, while 4 of the long-features, the Bimo Records, Dancing in the city, the Girl from the Children’s Village and Three Affairs of Three Cities are the graduation works made by the students of documentary major at Beijing Film Academy. The view expressed in those films is far beyond their surroundings, which may be linked to the social life experience they‘ve got before their studying. If how mature they expressed themselves makes us surprised or even touched, that’s because they also laid themselves in the process of observing others and around, through which they were pursuing their identity as documentary filmmaker.
The other half comes from some of free filmmakers in this society, along with their own background and experience of making documentary respectively, which was the first time for Yu Guangyi and Bai Budan. Though focusing on things around themselves from different aspects like the students do, generally, those films appear to be more rough and tough. Rough means the texture of the life shown in those works, tough means the filmmaker’s attitude towards that, therefore about those lives we can observe more profoundly and directly, it’s hard, even depressing, but that is just part of reality existing around us or we have no occasion to touch yet, that is how some people live their life in this era which sometimes we even don’t have enough courage to see.
Most of the works maintain the mainstream in genre of Chinese independent documentary nowadays, which is classical realism structured by the way of following (the subject), they point at the outside, the surroundings and the others, describing some kind of social being. For the filmmakers, the process of the description might make them know more about themselves. In this coordinate system, the Bimo Records by Yang Rui keeps the literature of anthropological documentary while describing Yi minority’s life poetically. For the auteur, the existence of those people must be marked by those rituals. While for mixing some fiction’s elements and working way, Our Loves by Jiang Zhi is opposed to be a strict-defined documentary.
Just as the subjects in these documentaries can't express themselves by themselves, it’s also difficult for the works to illuminate their own. They have to be put in a broader context to be understood, which reflects more distinctly the significance of them being produced and existing. This context is related to the time and the space, in which all the works can be taken as accumulation, its accumulated energy must be able to change something, the so-called “extending ” is exactly supposed to express the accumulation and the process of promoting its energy releasing .And on this level ,the forum not only links to the May Festival happened in Caochangdi in May?as a direct extension to the last screenings, but also corresponds with the continuous activities about to take place in this space. The forum would like to provide a clue with helping us see our traces of coming and going more clearly in these times.
Zhang Yaxuan
Sept. 21,2006