DANCING WITH MYSELF, DRIFTING WITH MY CAMERA: THE EMOTIONAL VAGABONDS OF CHINA’S NEW DOCUMENTARY
I saw my first Chinese documentary, Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing – The Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing – Zuihou De Mengxiangzhe, 1990) at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1991. A young man was taking a hand-held video camera though the streets, back alleys and run-down apartments of Beijing, probing into the daily lives of marginalized artists. Part Jeanne Dielman (for its long takes, mundane actions and empty domestic spaces), part awkward cinema verite-cum-talking heads, with a touch of interventionism à la Marcel Ophuls (as Wu sometimes appears in the image and could be heard conversing or arguing with his subjects), the piece, unfolding over 150 mns, offered an access to a China never seen before, and was a genuine breakthrough in formal terms. I have recounted elsewhere the exhilaration I experienced at discovering this first documentary [1]. I was particularly fascinated by the moments in which apparently “nothing happened” and nothing was said. As I was analyzing it at the time as a throw-back to the tropes of Chinese classical painting (in which “the void” plays an essential part) [2], I was happily challenged by Ernest Larsen’s sensitive description of the
piece: Wu is not afraid to show us “nothing” – someone cleaning
a flat, for example, or making a painting... It is tempting to
see this figure of style as distinctively “Chinese” – but the
temptation is worth resisting. Furthermore, Wu’s long
takes and emphasis on duration serve as a kind of
counterpoint to the suddenness with which Tiananmen
was crushed... The prolonged moments of near silence
in Bumming in Beijing produce the aesthetic effect of
outlasting the remembered roar of government tanks.” [3]
On the other hand, at crucial moments, Wu adopts a perfomative mode that goes beyond the tropes of traditional verite and brings forward his body and his voice, as if to fill the void. Yet, unlike Marcel Ophuls, who inserts his disruptive questions and confrontational humor to track down his interviewee’s lies and omissions, Wu stages himself within the picture he (re)creates. The void that structures Bumming in Beijing sends back to the few months between the spring and autumn 1989 during which no image was taken and death was taking its toll. It is a void that threatened to engulf him as well as his subjects, so the relationship he set with them, far from being confrontational, was of shared sympathy. Of the five people whose lives he observes – a female writer (Zhang Ci), a male (Zhang Dali) and a female (Zhang Xia Ping) painter, a photographer (Gao Bo) and an experimental theater director (Mou Sen) – two define themselves as “vagabonds” (mangliu) [4] either emotionally (Zhang Xia Ping, who later has a nervous breakdown in front of the camera) or professionally (Gao Bo, who equates it to the state of being a free-lance photographer [5]). Like them, Wu is an independent artist, unattached to any “work unit”, and working underground – a fate shared by a number of filmmakers of the “Sixth Generation” after 1990 [6].
Born in 1956 in Yunnan, Wu worked as a farmer in the last years of the Cultural Revolution, studied literature, had a brief stint as an educator and a television journalist before turning independent in 1989. His breakthrough work, Bumming in Beijing, shot between 1989 and 1990, revealed the ambition of accurately portraying his generation – a goal shared by other important works of the early 1990s, such as the videos produced by the Structure, Wave, Youth, Cinema Experimental Group (SWYC) (Zhonghuo 'Jiegou, Lanchao, Qingnian, Dianying' Shiyan Xiaozu), Tiananmen Square (1991) and I Graduated! (Wo biye le, 1992).
At the time, Wu Wenguang had not yet been abroad (he only started to travel after his work was shown in international film festivals) – yet his work is delineated by the off-screen existence of a faraway, maybe fantasised, international scene. What prompted Wu to shoot Bumming in Beijing was the writer Zhang Ci's decision to marry an elderly American man who'd take her to the US. By the end of the piece, three other subjects had also married foreigners and moved abroad – Wu was to follow them a few years later with At Home in the World (Shihai Weijia, 1995), a documentary which combines tales of further displacement: Zhang Ci's second marriage in a California suburb; Gao Bo's difficult life, between freelance photography and portraits of tourists under the Eiffel Tower; Zhang Dali spray-painting the streets of Bologna at night as a way to vent a solitude that neither marriage, fatherhood nor success can assuage; and, more poignantly, Zhang Xia Ping's marriage into a well-meaning but religious Austrian family, where her free spirit is slowly crushed. Torn between motherhood and her desire to continue painting, Zhang seeks refuge, once again, in mental illness. Wu offsets their trajectories with that of Mou Sen, the experimental director who stayed at home, and who fights censorship and bureaucratic harassment. […]
Wu’s multifaceted approach opened new vistas. Bumming in Beijing is an “impure form” – or, maybe, to return to Andre Bazin’s famous expression, “a mixed cinema” (un cinema impur in French) [7]. To track an elusive, complex and often painful reality, he mixes various forms of talking heads (with and without the voice of the interviewer) with sequences shot in a style that spontaneously reproduces direct cinema. It’s only after traveling abroad that Wu discovered in the films of Frederick Wiseman and Ogawa Shinsuke – with their verite approach and use of long takes – echoes of his own work. In the following years, Wu became an active advocate of verite in China – organizing documentary screenings and conferences and publishing a desk-top magazine, Documentary Scene (Jilu Shouce, 1996-7), the short-lived independent monthly art magazine New Wave (Xin Chao, 2001) and editing two collections of critical texts, Document (Xianchang, 2000 and 2001).
Meanwhile, Wu was struggling and experimenting to (re)define his own style. In 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1966, Wo de hongweibing shidai, 1993), he still resorts to talking heads to interview former Red Guards who reminisce and reflect about their involvement in the “movement” as teenagers. Although only a few years younger, Wu was aware of he gap that separated his experience from theirs. Moreover, these people – two businessmen, a philosopher, an engineer, as well as “Fifth Generation” director Tian Zhuangzhuang – are “settled” in life, with comfortable incomes and position (except for Tian Zhuangzhuang banned from filmmaking at the time, but still endowed with the “aura” of a world-famous director), while Wu was an independent video artist, surviving day-to-day on the fringe of illegality. Wu did not have access to his interviewees daily lives as he had in Bumming in Beijing, so, neatly divided into topical chapters, the piece first appears as having a traditional structure. Wu quickly disturbs it by alluding to his own involvement in the Beijing underground and intercutting footage of the all-girl rock band Cobra rehearsing a song titled “1966, Red Train” [8]. The piece then opposes two forms of struggle for modernity – the one embodied by the Red Guards who wanted to put the old world to death and become a part of revolutionary history, and the one represented by the members of Cobra, striving to find artistic recognition against sexism and marginalization in the gray post-Tiananmen era.
At Home in the World also contains a great number of interviews, in which the five “subjects” talk about themselves or their situations, but they are totally integrated to the verite footage. Wu shares their lives and living spaces, follows them in their various activities, often inserts himself, or his live-in girlfriend and collaborator Wen Hui, in the image, and continues ongoing conversations with them that becomes part of the texture of the moment. This sort of intimacy might become dangerous, or at least too close for comfort, and At Home in the World marks the apex, but also the end of the ambitious project that Wu had once nurtured – of following the lives of his five friends and recording them throughout the years. […]
Wu Wenguang is fond of saying that there is a sharp cut-off in his work: before and after DV. Upon acquiring a mini-camera, Wu became so excited at its possibilities that he became a keen advocate of this new tool in the articles he wrote and the magazines and books he published, and even executive produced China’s first underground DV narrative feature…
Wu Wenguang completed Jiang Hu: on the Road (Jiang Hu), an ambitious piece during which, equipped with his mini-DV camera, he and his reduced crew (3 to 4 people) lived several months with the members of a "Song and Dance Company" as they set up and then dismounted their huge tent throughout China.
Jiang Hu alludes to the mythology of the wuxi pian (martial arts film). Defining the narrative space of martial arts, the jiang hu is an alternative world of knights-errant, killers for hire and vagrants – in other words, a world of mangliu. So, even though Wu depicts a counter-society further away from him than the marginalized artists of Bumming in Beijing, a certain identification continues to take place. Moreover, like Wu himself, these people are performers. In 1994, Wu had co-founded The Living Dance Studio (wu dao sheng huo) with his partner, Wen Hui, one of the best-known modern dancer /choreographers in China. The couple (still unmarried after years of cohabitation, which is a subversive stance in China) often create performances together, Wu as a playwright, actor and video artist. The “performative” aspect of Wu’s video work is nurtured by to his ongoing collaboration with Wen Hui. In Jiang Hu he no longer appears in the image, but the camera dances.
The spectacles of Old Liu’s “Far and Wide Song and Dance Tent Show” are erotic and raunchy: they involve bikini-clad girls dancing at the sound of pop music, sexual jokes and explicit love songs. The performers are impoverished young farmers whose hope of making a better living is slowly but surely crushed by the troupe's growing insolvency: salaries are not paid for months, and whatever money is made is used to bribe officials and the police and get protection against local thugs. The small camera allowed for a “fly on the wall” intimate approach, in which people reveal themselves without interviews. A lot of the piece takes place under the tattered tent, a hybrid space at the boundary between the public and the private, littered with suitcases, clothes and remnants of meals, and which serves as both living quarters for the troupe and performance space at night. The travelers seem free like birds, while in fact, without salary, they are trapped in a strange no-exit where personal tensions erupt, couples frolic and quarrel, and a telling moment happens in front of a portrait of Maggie Cheung reproduced on a paper bag. This was the icon of their dream, of the show-business they once naively hoping to partake in, while they remain, "on the edge of the world – of the modern, happy, wealthy life they were yearning for." [9]
Wu’s next piece (still in progress, even though the first part was shown in the festival circuit in 2002), Dance with Farm Workers (He Mingong Tiaowu) deals with another kind of mangliu: displaced peasants that have come to work on construction sites in Beijing. The piece was conceived by Wu, directed by Wen Hui (with herself, Wu, some foreign students and thirty seasonal construction workers as performers) in a disused textile factory, and reworked by Wu as a 57 mns video. As it stands now, Dance with Farm Workers is a sort of counter-point to Jiang Hu – like the performers under the big traveling tent, the protagonists have left farmwork in the hope of bettering their conditions of existence, and find themselves pushed, once again, in the margins of society. The performance, for the first time in their lives, gives them center stage, and Wu films their interaction with the “professional” artists, such as the dancers or himself, and their gradual understanding, not only that they’re going to get paid for appearing in the piece, but also that they can use their bodies, toned and trained for hard work, to produce “art”. In the second (yet unfinished) part, Wu is following their lives.
Excerpted from DANCING WITH MYSELF, DRIFTING WITH MY CAMERA: THE EMOTIONAL VAGABONDS OF CHINA’S NEW DOCUMENTARY by Berenice Reynaud
Senses of Cinema (www.sensesofcinema.com ), Issue 28, September–October 2003
copyright @ 2003 Berenice Reynaud
Notes
Berenice Reynaud, “New Visions/New Chinas: Video-Art, Documentation, and the Chinese Modernity in Question”, in Michael Renov & Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press , 1996.
[2] See François Cheng, Vide et plein – Le langage pictural chinois,Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991.
[3] Ernest Larsen, “Video Verite from Beijing”, Art in America, September 1998, pp. 53 & 55.
[4] In Liulang Beijing, the first character, “liu” is identical to the second character in mangliu. “Liu” means currents, as in a river, while “lang” also means “currents” or “waves”, so the term connotes a certain romantic rootlessness, either by choice or circumstances that perhaps leads to transient relationships and adventures. Moreover, the Chinese term for “homeless man” is “liulang han”, which would in turn translate into “bum”. (Research: Victoria Meng).
[5] Gao Bo uses the phrase in English.
[6] The commonly accepted definition of the Sixth Generation includes filmmakers who graduated during or after the events of June 1989, and directed their first films illegally, outside the accepted production units: Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, He Jianjun, Jia Zhangke, Li Yu, Wang Chao, Emily Tang, Zhu Wen. However, not all Sixth Generation films are produced independently or “para-legally”: some directors started to work within the studio system – such as Zhang Ming, whose Rainclouds over Wushan (AKA In Expectation, Wushan Yunyu, 1995) was produced by the Beijing Film Studio, but later banned for not having complied to the Film Bureau regulations concerning export visas. Zhang Ming did not go underground, but stopped working until he could direct a second officially-sanctioned feature, Week-end plot (Miyu Shiqi Xiaoshi, 2001). Another luminary of the Sixth Generation, Lou Ye, did not produce films outside the studio system either; Suzhou River (Suzhou He, 2000), for example, was produced by the Shanghai Film Studio. And Zhang Yuan or Wang Xiaoshuai did not stop being “Sixth Generation directors” when they decided to make officially sanctioned productions, such as Zhang Yuan's Seventeen Years (Guo nian hui jia, 1999 – produced by the Xi'an Film Studio) and Wang Xiaoshuai's So Close to Paradise (Yuenan guniang, 1998 – produced by the Beijing Film Studio). Secondly, while it is true that all Sixth Generation directors did not graduate from the Beijing Film Academy (such as He Jianjun) – Jia Zhangke, however, did graduate from it, albeit in 1997, i.e. eight years after the first “batch” of directors – who were more directly marked by the June '89 events.
[7] Andre Bazin, “Pour un cinema impur”, in Qu'est-ce que le cinema – edition definitive (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958 & 1975), translated as “In Defense of Mixed Cinema”, in What is Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
[8] Cobra was a splinter from the group of Cui Jian, the underground rock star who had become a symbol of the spring 1989 movement and whose lifestyle loosely inspired Zhang Yuan's Beijing Bastards(Beijing Zazhong, 1993)
[9] Wu Wenguang, program notes, Panorama Section, Berlin Film Festival, 2000.