Luke Robinson (Auth.) - Independent Chinese Documentary - From The Studio To The Street (2013, Palgrave Macmillan UK) PDF

Independent Chinese Documentary
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Independent Chinese
Documentary
From the Studio to the Street
Luke Robinson
University of Nottingham, UK
© Luke Robinson 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-29829-3
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First published 2013 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Mapping Independent Chinese Documentary 12

The rise of a movement 12
The diversification of independent Chinese documentary 18
From analogue to digital 19
From the studio to the street 25
Xianchang, liveness, contingency 29
Postsocialism and independent Chinese documentary 33
2 Metaphor and Event 37

Introduction 37
Public, private, contingent 38
Form and event in No. 16 Barkhor South Street and The Square 45
Public documentary and the metaphorical mode:
the influence of Frederick Wiseman 51
The contingent event and the private documentary:
Springtime in Wushan 57
Floating 60
Structure and event in West of the Tracks 63
Towards a contingent documentary practice 67
Conclusion 72
3 Time, Space and Movement 74

Introduction 74
The time of independent Chinese documentary 75
The movement-image and the zhuantipian: River Elegy 81
The distended form and the jilupian: At Home in the World 84
Temporality and the demands of xianchang: the long take 88
Time without movement: In Public 92
Jia Zhangke, the long take and global art cinema 97
Conclusion 101
v
vi Contents
4 Ethics, the Body and Digital Video 103

Introduction 103
Xianchang and the corporeal image 104
The contingency of the contact zone 107
The lightness of the digital 109
Representing homosexuality: independent Chinese
documentary and the queer body 112
Queer activism and independent Chinese documentary 117
‘To whom do our bodies belong?’: Queer China,
‘Comrade’ China 120
New Beijing, New Marriage: queer performance
and queer agency 123
Conclusion 127
5 Sound and Voice 130

Introduction 130
Xianchang, liveness and sound practice 131
Standing witness and talking heads: Bumming in Beijing
and I Graduated! 134
The talking head today 138
Nostalgia: deconstructing the talking head 140
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir: performing the talking head 142
Digital video and the (re)production of liveness 145
Conclusion 150
Conclusion 153
Notes 160
Glossary of Key and Recurring Chinese Terms 172
Bibliography 173
Films and Television Programmes Referenced 184
Index 188
Acknowledgements
This book began life as a doctoral thesis at the School of Oriental and
African Studies, University of London. I would like to thank Kevin
Latham for supervising it, and the school, the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, the University of London, the Wingate Foundation
and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for financial provision during
my research. Chris Berry and Harriet Evans were exemplary examiners,
and they have provided support and encouragement above and beyond
the call of duty since my viva. At the University of Nottingham, thanks
are due to my colleagues in the Department of Culture, Film and Media,
and particularly to Roberta Pearson, for allowing me the sabbatical that
enabled the completion of the manuscript. Finally, in the course of
writing, I have had the pleasure of befriending the small but rapidly
expanding overseas research community with an interest in indepen-
dent Chinese documentary. Wang Qi, Qian Ying and Yu Tianqi have all
been eloquent interlocutors, each providing me with new avenues into
understanding this material. Many thanks for their contributions to,
and organization of, the panels at Visible Evidence XVI and Documen-
tary Now!, where embryonic versions of these chapters were aired (and
to Seio Nakajima and Joshua Neves, who also participated). Zhang Zhen,
Angela Zito, Li Jie and Ying also organized symposia at New York Univer-
sity (DV Made China: Digital Objects, Everyday Subjects) and Harvard
(Just Images: Workshop on Ethics and Chinese Documentaries) at which
some of this material was presented and refined; I am extremely grate-
ful for the opportunity to attend both of these (highly unusual) events.
Jenny Chio has been a comrade in arms on at least three continents
for over a decade now. I have constantly benefitted from her advice,
energy and far superior knowledge of China ‘in the field’. Rossella
Ferrari has always proved to be an excellent intellectual sounding board,
while Desmond Cheung leant me his translation skills. Last – though
never least – Royce Mahawatte has lived with this book from incep-
tion, through execution and on to production. Without his patience
and encouragement, it would never have been completed.
A version of Chapter 2 previously appeared as ‘From “public” to
“private”: Chinese documentary and the logic of xianchang’, in Chris
Berry, Lü Xinyu and Lisa Rofel (eds.), The new Chinese documentary
vii
viii Acknowledgements
movement: for the public record (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
2010). I would like to express my gratitude to Hong Kong University
Press, and to the editors, for the right to reproduce this material here.
The image on the front cover is a still of Huang Weikai, taken while
he was shooting Floating [Piao] in Guangzhou. Many thanks to Weikai
and to the photographer, Chen Hongxiang, for the right to use this
image; to LEAP Magazine for the print; and to Benny Shaffer, for acting
as intermediary.
Introduction
On 4 November 1997, a programme of Chinese video documentaries

opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, 14 pieces
in total, included music videos by Cui Jian, godfather of the Chinese
rock scene; shorts by several Chinese-American artists; and eight full-
length works by various directors from the People’s Republic of China
(PRC), billed as representative of the country’s ‘New Documentary
Movement’ (Larsen, 1998, p. 53). Among the latter was Wu Wenguang’s
Bumming in Beijing: Last of the Dreamers [Liulang Beijing: zuihou de mengx-
iangzhe] (1990). Emerging from work originally commissioned by China
Central Television (CCTV), the Chinese state broadcaster, but finished
privately and at the director’s own expense, Bumming in Beijing focuses
on the hopes, fears, aspirations and realities of five mangliu (‘drifting’)
artists living in Beijing during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Using a
distinctive (by Chinese standards) combination of live shooting, long
takes, tracking shots and talking heads interviews, Wu captures his pro-
tagonists at work and at play, talking to them about how and why
they have all converged on Beijing, their decisions to live the lives of
bohemian artists, and their plans for the future. By the conclusion of
the film, in the wake of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, four
of the five have emigrated, marrying foreign citizens and dispersing to
the United States and Europe. Only one, avant-garde playwright and
director Mou Sen, remains.
Reviewing the exhibition for the journal Art in America, Ernest Larsen
(1998) talked of Bumming in Beijing’s striking affective power. In partic-
ular, he singled out one specific sequence as exceptionally moving. This
is the (now infamous) moment at which the painter Zhang Xiaping suf-
fers a nervous collapse on camera. In what is essentially one extended
scene, broken down into two long takes and bookended with interview
1
L. Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary
2 Independent Chinese Documentary
commentary from friend and fellow documentary subject Mou Sen,

we watch as Zhang lapses into madness while preparing for a gallery
exhibition. She claims to be the voice of God; she questions the sub-
ject matter of her own self-portrait (‘Is it a man or a woman?’); then
we cut to a shot of her lying on the ground, gazing at the ceiling
while crying, laughing and calling out to God, ‘Who the fuck am I?’
In this particularly lengthy second take, Wu Wenguang’s camera moves
between close-up and medium long shot, apparently as unsure of how
to respond to Zhang’s predicament as the two members of the pub-
lic (or are they fellow artists?) who wander on and then off screen,
carefully picking their way through the incomplete display of the
artist’s work.
Larsen feels this scene to be especially harrowing for two reasons. First,
because Wu does not function as an objective recording eye; the sub-

ject is his friend and we feel his engagement with her. The camera is
empathetic here in a way that it seldom if ever is in American cinema
verité. (p. 55)
But second, and consequently, because
The woman’s lostness, her exile from her own mind, her inability to
stay whole, seems also like a refusal to accept the burden of sanity.
And here again, in the rupture of reason, we revisit the rupture of the
lives of a whole generation. (p. 55)
The intimacy of Wu’s camerawork may prevent Zhang’s objectification,

in the sense that she never becomes merely representative or emblem-
atic. And yet, in another way, inescapably, she does. For Larsen cannot
help but respond to Zhang’s breakdown as a metaphor for the experi-
ence of an entire generation: ‘young people who once believed that it
was possible to change their world’ (p. 53), now suddenly and brutally
divested of their dreams at the end of a tank barrel. Even in the long
takes and silences, he senses ‘a kind of counterpoint to the suddenness
with which Tiananmen was crushed’ (p. 55). Almost a decade later, the
shadow of the 1980s democracy movement looms large over both the
documentary and this particular viewer’s response to it.
Fast forward to Japan, and the 2003 Yamagata International Docu-
mentary Film Festival. For the first time, the festival’s grand prize has
been awarded to a film from the PRC: Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks
[Tiexi qu] (2002). A nine-hour epic set in the Chinese rust belt, West of the
Introduction 3
Tracks charts, in extraordinary detail, the impact of China’s economic

modernization on its old industrial heartland in the northeast. A small
camera in hand, Wang spent some two years wandering the streets, fac-
tories and housing complexes of Tiexi District in the city of Shenyang,
capturing on digital video what he saw. The resulting long takes and
handheld tracking shots metamorphosed into a triptych, the individual
elements of which were christened Rust [Gongchang], Remnants [Yanfen
Jie] and Rails [Tielu]. In Rust, the director traces the decline and closure of
three major factories in the district: the Shenyang Foundry, the Electric
Cable Factory and the Steel Rolling Mill. In the second part, Remnants,
Wang records the impact that these closures have on the neighbour-
hood where the factory workers and their families live, capturing the
destruction of their homes as the land is appropriated for commercial
development, and the residents scattered across the city. Finally, in Rails,
he turns his camera on a father and son, two itinerants who make a
living salvaging or stealing scrap metal and coal from the trains that
wind through Tiexi’s heart. Over the course of this section, the father is
arrested for stealing and is sent to a detention centre, while the son, in
desperation, tries to locate him. Eventually, the old man is released and
the two are reunited, returning to their little shack by the side of the
railway.
The historical significance of northeast China, the engine of the coun-
try’s socialist modernization project in the period after the revolution of
1949, endows West of the Tracks with an unavoidably symbolic dimen-
sion. As the director himself notes, the factory buildings – in particular,
the distinctive three chimneys of the foundry – were for decades vir-
tually iconic of the whole region (Y. Zhang, 2002). And yet, in an
article written after the film’s release, Lü Xinyu (2005c, p. 136) implies
that despite its length and the apparent grandiosity of its themes,
the emotional heart of the documentary can be located in a single
sequence almost at the very end. This moment occurs in Rails. The
father has just been arrested and the son is unclear as to where he has
gone.
Left alone at night in the little hovel where they live, the son finds a
package wrapped in plastic bags. When he opens it, we see a pile of
photos: one of the whole family, another of his mother when she was
young, leaning against a haystack and smiling warmly at the world.
Suddenly a clock on the wall strikes eleven times, and the camera
swings slowly away from the photos towards it. When it swings back,
tears are glittering on the orphan’s face.
This sudden moment of release in a film characterized by ‘strictly con-

trolled, rational, sober narration’ (p. 136) is, according to Lü, almost like
an open wound,
exposing the director’s own feelings about what he has shown.

‘I would very much like to affirm the value of life’, Wang Bing has
said, ‘but confronted with the reality of it, I feel so powerless that
I become more and more sceptical.’ (p. 136)
Through the unexpected emotional breakdown of this abandoned boy,

Wang thus manages to bring into focus the overarching theme of his
entire trilogy: mourning for a vanishing way of life, and for those who
will disappear with it.
In many ways, these two documentaries have little in common. They
were shot over a decade apart, in two separate cities. They employ
slightly different media: one analogue, the other digital, video. One
started life as a professional commission from the Chinese state media;
the other resulted from the frustrations of a recent film-school graduate
who, unable to afford to make a feature, rented a camera and started
filming a documentary instead (X. Lü, 2005c, p. 126; Y. Zhang, 2002).
And yet, despite these differences, the films share a number of similar-
ities. Both exploit aspects of a cinematic style – handheld camerawork,
long takes, tracking shots and synchronous sound – that has come to
be broadly understood as vérité.1 Both embrace subject matter that hov-
ers uneasily between the highly symbolic and the specifically personal:
lives lived in the shadow of political oppression and economic collapse.
And, equally importantly, both feature instants of sudden breakdown,
in which hidden tensions and emotions seem to erupt in a moment
of unexpected crisis; a crisis that, in both of the examples above, is
literally embodied in the behaviour of the subject on screen. Perhaps
it should be unsurprising, then, that two very different reviewers, one
American and one Chinese, should respond to these works in not dis-
similar ways. For what both Larsen and Lü have attempted in their
essays is to connect subject, style and these particular crisis moments,
such that the latter come to be understood as windows of emotional
truth that inform the rest of the documentary. In the spaces of Wu’s
cinematography and Zhang Xiaping’s collapse, Larsen senses both the
memory and the consequences of 1989; in the sudden tears of the aban-
doned boy, apparently so distinct from the measured images that have
preceded them, Lü detects Wang Bing’s melancholia for the values of a
vanishing socialist past. Each critic is thus posing, and then answering,
Introduction 5
two questions about these documentaries for the reader. What is the
relationship between such sequences and the manner in which these
films are shot? What is the significance of this relationship, understood
against the broader canvas of its social context?
My contention in this book is that both such moments of crisis, and
this vérité aesthetic, are the consequence of a particular film practice
that was developed and refined by Chinese documentary directors work-
ing predominantly outside the official state media system – individuals
whom I have termed ‘independent documentary directors’, but who are
also known as ‘new documentary directors’, or the ‘New Documentary
Movement’ – in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This practice was in
turn both a product of and a response to the process of postsocialist
transition in China during the 1990s. It was known as xianchang: liter-
ally, ‘the scene’ or site of a film, but also the act of filming on location.
The Leninist-derived pedagogical tradition which dominated Chinese
documentary filmmaking from the revolution of 1949 to the death of
Mao Zedong dictated that the genre be overwhelmingly studio based:
preplanned and shot to order, or simply compiled from pre-existing
archival footage. By the early 1990s, however, certain directors had com-
mitted wholesale to shooting beyond the confines of the studio. They
did so for a variety of reasons, but primarily to distinguish their work
from that of their predecessors, and to break with the by then discred-
ited official conventions. Xianchang thus became the defining element
of a newly emergent documentary praxis. Central to this project was a
certain spontaneous quality understood as inherent to such filmmaking,
for since what happened on the physical space of ‘the scene’ was beyond
the control of the filmmaker, xianchang as a practice was considered to
be intrinsically open-ended and indeterminate. This was in stark con-
trast to standard post-1949 documentary, in which control, both at the
point of production and at the point of delivery, was considered critical
to the educational and political functions of the genre.
Moments such as Zhang Xiaping’s breakdown in Bumming in Beijing,
and the tears of the abandoned child in West of the Tracks, are thus
the result of a dynamic that propelled Chinese documentary out of
the relative safety of the production studio and into the messy unpre-
dictability of so-called ‘real life’: a trajectory that I have termed, with
a little artistic licence, ‘from the studio to the street’. These scenes are
therefore products of location shooting that also function as signifiers
of this practice: extradiegetic events that operate within the documen-
tary diegesis to emphasize the reality of the subject matter in terms
of its contingency. Much loved by theoreticians of early film, it is this
concept that I argue signifies the apparently spontaneous, open-ended

and unpredictable spirit of xianchang. At the same time, it provides a
bridge to the latter’s most proximate English idiom: liveness. And yet,
through these processes of translation, we are already presented with
a conundrum. While the contingency of material reality suggests the
immediate or unmediated qualities of ‘the scene’ as location, liveness
itself can only ever be captured on screen through mediation. In this
sense, it, like xianchang, is not just a filmmaking practice, but also a
representational strategy derived from this practice. The independent
documentary directors were therefore presented with a challenge: how
could the visceral experience of shooting live, so central to their own
identity as filmmakers, best be translated into an aesthetic effect for the
viewer? The particular cinematic techniques that we now understand
to convey xianchang did not therefore evolve completely haphazardly;
they are part of a code that was slowly systematized over an extended
period by particular individuals, through specific technologies, and in
relation to broader industrial, social and political contexts.
At the heart of this book thus lies the question of how xianchang devel-
oped not just as a documentary filmmaking practice, but also as a poetics
of contingency. My primary focus is therefore not what these films were
showing – their subject matter – but how the representation of such
material was structured in relation to the contingent. Since many forms
of neorealist filmmaking exhibit a similar representational dynamic, this
line of enquiry is not particular to independent Chinese documentary.
But because the qualities of contingency were directly connected to the
process of postsocialist transition in the PRC, I would suggest that it
was – indeed, continues to be – a particularly compelling issue for many
of these directors. How to represent xianchang, in what form and to
what degree, was therefore a problem that carried an unusual degree
of political valence in 1990s China.
In an attempt to outline the reasons for this sensitivity, my first
chapter summarizes the ground to be covered. For those unfamiliar with
independent Chinese documentary, I sketch a brief history of the genre
from the late 1980s to the present day, paying particular attention to its
emergence and diversification. I then move on to consider the signif-
icance of xianchang for the vérité aesthetic so strongly associated with
independent documentary production: first, by tracing how the ear-
liest directors were introduced to the practice of location filmmaking
through television coproductions in the 1980s; and second, by con-
sidering how the practice was then theorized in relation both to ‘the
scene’ as physical site and to xianchang as representational practice.
Introduction 7
This analysis allows for an exploration of how xianchang as a poetics

was constructed – as an aesthetic of space and time (the ‘here and now’),
physical presence, the accidental, and the specific or particular – and for
discussion of how these relate both to the western theoretical construct
of liveness and to the category of contingency. Finally, the question of
postsocialism is raised. Here, through a reading of Liu Xin (2000) and
Alexei Yurchak’s (2006) work on the PRC and the USSR, I contextual-
ize the contingent in relation to the ongoing process of postsocialist
transition, and suggest why mediating contingency may therefore have
been both of particular interest to and potentially problematic for direc-
tors of independent Chinese documentary. This tension only underlines
the importance of considering the specific contexts in which individual
directors have sought to execute xianchang in particular ways, and the
different factors that have shaped the production of this poetics.
Chapter 2 takes up this challenge in relation to documentary genre,
and the question of its relationship to xianchang. I concentrate here on
public and private films, two forms of documentary identified as partic-
ularly significant in the post-1989 period. Critics have tended to define
these films in relation to their content: documentaries about issues of
communal importance versus those that focus exclusively on, or are pri-
marily of interest to, the individual. What I argue in this chapter is that
these distinctions are also ones of film form. As such, they are directly
connected to issues of contingency, understood here as the specific or
particular, the unexpected or unpredictable. Using the films of Duan
Jinchuan as an example, I argue that what enables a public documen-
tary to signify its content as of communal significance is a metaphorical
or metonymic diegetic structure that specifically sets out to contain the
semiotic contingency, or open-endedness, of its material. Adapted from
the work of American direct filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, this struc-
ture is the partner of an ethnographic mode of preshoot preparation
designed to limit the director’s exposure to the unexpected on the actual
site of filmmaking.
In contrast, in more recent films by Zhang Ming, Huang Weikai and
Wang Bing, metaphorical form is largely abandoned, and the unex-
pected event returns as a far more fundamental element of both diegesis
and filming technique. This shift is critical to the perception of these
films as private, or of singular significance: because the unpredictabil-
ity of such events renders them particular, they can only be understood
in and of themselves, rather than as part of broader causal patterns.
However, the centrality of the unexpected to Wang Bing’s West of the
Tracks, which in certain ways clearly functions as a public documentary,
complicates this picture, suggesting an acceptance of the contingent

that confuses easy generic distinctions. Perhaps as importantly, though,
this tension demonstrates how the private documentary can be under-
stood not simply as a consequence of large-scale depoliticization, as it
is sometimes styled by scholars, but also as a reflection on the gradual
reformulation of the political in post-reform China.
In Chapter 3 I move on to consider the question of xianchang as a
temporally contingent practice. Independent Chinese documentary has
often been associated with the articulation of a particular sense of time
‘in-the-now’ that contrasts strongly with the strictly teleological tempo-
rality of official documentary media. This contrast suggests a transition
from a modernist sense of time as progress, to one in which time is
contingent, unpredictable, and bounded by the present. Scholars have
explained this transition, via Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema, as a shift
from a cinema of the movement-image to one of the time-image, its
catalyst a loss of faith in narratives of progress following the collapse of
the democracy movement. And yet, the question of how such a sense of
time is produced cinematically has rarely been addressed directly. In this
chapter I argue that it is a consequence of xianchang as a filmmaking
practice, but particularly of the ways in which specific techniques have
been used to articulate time in relation to space and movement. The
results, however, depart somewhat from the model that Deleuze lays
out in his theoretical writings.
Using CCTV’s River Elegy [Heshang] (1988) as a point of departure,
I discuss how the series exemplifies the official sense of time as tele-
ology, reflecting both its ideological inspiration and the limitations
of its predominantly studio-based production technique. In contrast,
Wu Wenguang’s At Home in the World [Sihai weijia] (1995), released
seven years later, clearly demonstrates a non-teleological sense of
time ‘in-the-now’. However, this temporal sensibility is the result not
of time’s separation from movement through editing, as posited by
Deleuze, but of how Wu Wenguang theorizes and executes the long
take in his documentary. Of particular importance is how this technique
is articulated to movement, both of the camera and of Wu’s subjects.
Finally, Jia Zhangke’s In Public [Gonggong changsuo] (2001) provides an
example of time in the present that, in its near complete disaggrega-
tion of time, space and movement, matches Deleuze’s concept of the
time-image very closely. However, this sensibility is the consequence
of an extreme long-take aesthetic arising from Jia’s own understanding
of the practice; a distinct set of cinematic influences; and the director’s
integration into regional and transnational networks of film production.
Introduction 9
In Public thus suggests how a thoroughly aestheticized form of xianchang

may ironically be generated not through a loss of confidence in, or
reaction against, ideologies of modernity and the market, but as a con-
sequence of a director’s assimilation into that market, in the form of the
global art cinema industry.
Xianchang as embodied or corporeal experience is the subject of
Chapter 4. The centrality to the practice of the body has been empha-
sized by both scholars and directors. However, the ethical dilemmas that
arise from representing such bodies vary, depending on to whom they
belong. While corporeal images of the documentary subject are often a
bridge to intersubjective experience, they may also be objectifying and
exploitative. An especially sensitive problem where inequalities between
filmmaker and filmed are particularly pronounced, as in instances of
minority or subaltern representation, this in turn suggests how ‘the
scene’ is actually a space of contingent but contested power dynamics.
In China, these concerns were brought to a head by digital video, which
both facilitated directors’ access to minority communities and magni-
fied concerns about the acceptable limits of representation with regard
to already disenfranchised individuals.
It is precisely these tensions, as worked out through representations of
the queer body, that I explore over the course of this chapter. The first
digital documentaries on queer subject matter were largely filmed by
heterosexual directors. In consequence, they tended to concentrate on
stories about fanchuan: cross-dressing male cabaret performers, or drag
queens. While this interest in the embodied performance of homosexual
experience can be framed as a search for intersubjective understanding,
it resulted in images that were often problematically voyeuristic. These
issues were only exacerbated by the ‘lightness’ (Voci, 2010) of digital
video: the medium’s material and virtual mobility. In contrast, con-
temporary documentaries by directors who identify as queer approach
these problems from a different angle. Borne on a wave of socially
engaged media production facilitated by the spread of digital tech-
nology, these directors come to their subject matter from a position
within the community, rather than outside it. They therefore use their
status to critically interrogate images of the queer body, and exploit
the light qualities of digital media to publicly articulate a different
kind of sexuality. Thus, Cui Zi’en’s Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China [Zhi
tongzhi] (2008) reflects on historical representations of homosexual-
ity, reclaiming the corporeal image as a signifier of queer desire and
queer agency, while Fan Popo and David Cheng’s New Beijing, New Mar-
riage [Xin Qianmen Dajie] (2009) uses the physical act of documentary
filmmaking to effect this same agency in downtown Beijing. In doing so,

however, these films illustrate the contingent power dynamics at play in
shooting ‘on the scene’; the consequent problems that xianchang as rep-
resentational strategy may present for certain communities; and how
the rise of minority directors, facilitated by the popularization of new
technologies, has exposed the tensions surrounding both of these issues.
Chapter 5 considers the relationship between sound practice and
xianchang, with a particular focus on questions of presence and distance:
in other words, how sound constructs where liveness and the contingent
are located. Live sound, in particular sound off screen, played a critical
role in establishing the veracity of xianchang. In part, this was because of
its appearance as unplanned and uncontrollable. At the same time, how-
ever, such sound drew attention to the mediated nature of documentary
production by revealing the presence of the camera, and those operat-
ing it. This sense of liveness as generated through distance, or the act
of filming, presented problems for the first independent documentary
filmmakers, whose desire to testify to the events of 1989 necessitated the
articulation of liveness as presence – being ‘here’ – and the construction
of witnessing as lived historical experience. Consequently, certain direc-
tors combined particular sound techniques, primarily the talking head,
with an emphasis on moments of vocal collapse, as already detailed in
Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing. The voice of the documentary sub-
ject thus emerged as a site where xianchang as a quality both immediate
and contingent was located.
In contrast, contemporary directors have begun to use direct to cam-
era address in ways that highlight xianchang as an act of mediation.
In Shu Haolun’s Nostalgia [Xiangchou] (2006), the technique is revealed
as the outcome of conscious authorial intervention; in Wang Bing’s
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir [He Fengming] (2007), it is a response on
the part of the documentary subject to the act of filmmaking. This
increasingly catholic use of the talking head may be a consequence of
a sociopolitical context in which the compulsion to testify has waned.
However, I argue that it is also a reaction to the newly participatory
media ecology touched on in Chapter 4, in which access to a camera is
increasingly routine, and the boundaries between filmmaker and filmed
subject are more and more unstable. Liveness remains important to con-
temporary documentary directors. And yet, under these new conditions,
the quality is understood to result from the encounter of director and
subject ‘on the scene’ of filmmaking, rather than to exist independently
of such an encounter, in the timbre of the human voice. The location of
Introduction 11
the contingent in these documentaries thus differs from its position in

those of the early 1990s.
To conclude briefly, I start with a scene from Jia Zhangke’s 24 City
[Ershisi cheng ji] (2008). This sequence is both a logical extension of and
a challenge to the narrative presented in this book. It suggests a paral-
lel history of independent Chinese documentary, one that is focused
less on the real, reality and realism, and more on the shadowy bor-
ders between documentary and fiction. Arguably, this too is rooted in
xianchang and, in particular, the performative impulse that, though side-
lined by the rise of direct cinema-influenced aesthetics in the mid-1990s,
can be traced back to the earliest manifestations of the practice. But
I have chosen here to focus instead on the contingency of liveness for
two reasons: first, because it provides a framework through which to
address the relationship between independent Chinese documentary
and the experience of postsocialist transition; and second, because it
opens up the possibility of analysis across time and space, enabling inde-
pendent documentary in China to be viewed against the backdrop of a
global history of the documentary image. This is not to deny that other
theoretical models also make this possible, but merely to stress what
may be gained from the approach that I have adopted over the course
of this book.
As this introduction should indicate, what follows is not a compre-
hensive history of independent documentary in the PRC. It is a partial
account of this cultural phenomenon, written from a specific perspec-
tive and focusing on distinct themes. The narrative it presents, like
xianchang itself, is thus particular; were I to focus on reception or dis-
tribution, for example, the casual reader would no doubt take from this
book an impression of independent Chinese documentary quite distinct
from the one presented here. But as I aim to demonstrate in the chapters
to come, there are logical reasons for taking xianchang as the subject of
scholarly analysis, above and beyond the simple intellectual enjoyment
that results from teasing out the multiple manifestations of the praxis.
I hope that, by the end of this study, the reader will agree with me on
this point.
1
Mapping Independent Chinese
Documentary
The rise of a movement
One day towards the end of 1991, the film director Zhang Yuan hosted
a meeting at his house in Xidan, Beijing. Those present came from a
variety of professional backgrounds – some had trained as artists, others
as filmmakers, yet others in television – but most had recent experi-
ence in the state media conglomerate, CCTV. The aim of the gathering
was simple: to discuss the concept and implications of independent
film production (W. Cui, 2003, p. 84). Although the group dispersed
without issuing a formal manifesto, and with an apparent agreement to
preserve only the loosest of affiliations (X. Lü, 2003a, p. 13), the doc-
umentary director Li Xiaoshan, who was present, recollects that two
conditions were agreed upon as fundamental to the maintenance of
its autonomy. The first was operational independence, incorporating
issues of self-sufficiency in production and financing; the second was
duli sixiang, or ‘independence of thought’, primarily signifying auton-
omy from state-approved ideology (X. Lü, 2003b, p. 204). Aside from
Zhang, participants included a number of individuals – Jiang Yue, Duan
Jinchuan, Wu Wenguang – who would gradually emerge as the driving
force behind independent documentary in China, as well as others, such
as Wen Pulin and Shi Jian, who would make a name for themselves in
other fields. Several of these figures went on to take part in an academic
symposium on documentary organized by Shi Jian at the Beijing Broad-
casting Institute some weeks later (Y. Zhang, 2010, p. 121). There, in
a closed session, various films were screened to heated debate, includ-
ing Bumming in Beijing and Tiananmen [Tiananmen] (1991), a series shot
for television by Shi Jian, Chen Jue and other members of the Structure
Wave Youth Cinema Experimental Group (SWYC) (X. Lin, 2005; W. Wu,
12
Mapping Independent Chinese Documentary 13
2002, p. 132). Early the following year, the Hong Kong International
Film Festival scheduled Tiananmen. Although it was taken off the pro-
gramme after pressure was applied from Beijing (Barmé, 1993, p. 282),
in the accompanying publicity materials the SWYC referred to the film
as a ‘new documentary’. Lin Xudong (2005) has suggested that this was
possibly the first time the concept had formally appeared in print.1
Despite the appellation ‘New Documentary Movement’ (xin jilu yun-
dong), popularized by Lü Xinyu’s book of the same name, it is debatable
whether these interconnected events represented the genesis of an orga-
nized artistic faction. First, as Zhang Yingjin (2010, p. 120) has pointed
out, despite these directors’ common interests, their lack of systematic
coordination in particular was not characteristic of a sustained artis-
tic movement. It is for this reason that I have opted instead to use
the term ‘independent Chinese documentary’ to describe works clas-
sified under this rubric (even though this phrase is problematic in other
ways, as I will touch on later). Second, these activities arguably repre-
sented less a point of origin than the clearest manifestation of forces
already in motion. All the works screened at the Broadcasting Insti-
tute seminar had roots in the state television system stretching back
prior to 1991. In 1988, in preparation for the fortieth anniversary cel-
ebrations of the PRC’s foundation, CCTV commissioned a series of
documentary productions to be broadcast to a foreign audience (W. Cui,
2003, p. 85). One of these, produced by the Bureau of Society and
Education, was Tiananmen. Another, produced by the Bureau of For-
eign Affairs, was The Chinese [Zhongguoren] (1988), several episodes of
which were written and directed by Wu Wenguang (X. Lin, 2005). How-
ever, following the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the implication
of the CCTV-commissioned series River Elegy [Heshang] (1988) in the
democracy movement, the state media conglomerate underwent inten-
sive restructuring. In consequence, programmes considered sensitive or
inappropriate were shelved, Tiananmen and The Chinese among them.
Although Shi Jian and his colleagues continued to work on the for-
mer until its completion in May 1991, CCTV refused it broadcast time,
banned the series domestically and denied it official international dis-
tribution (Voci, 2004, p. 80). Wu Wenguang, in contrast, adopted a
slightly different approach. Taking some of the material he had shot
for The Chinese, and some he had shot on the side while working on the
programme, he borrowed equipment from friends and colleagues and
continued to film his subjects after the summer of 1989 (Zhu and Mei,
2004, p. 65). Early in 1990, while in his hometown of Kunming, Yunnan
Province, he used further personal connections to access an editing
suite, refashioning his material over three days and nights of contin-
ual work (F. Fang, 2003, p. 378). The result was the first edit of Bumming
in Beijing. Rather than attempting to distribute the film through official
channels, Wu Wenguang handed out copies in private to friends and fel-
low media professionals, creating a considerable stir (p. 348). Thus was
‘independent’ documentary, in the sense of documentary produced and
circulated outside the state media system, born.
It is perhaps for these reasons that Bumming in Beijing has been
treated both as instigator of and prototype for independent Chinese
documentary.2 Even if one rejects the concept of a ‘movement’, other
films produced around this period shared distinct characteristics with
Wu’s work, simultaneously aligning them as a group while distinguish-
ing them from traditional Chinese documentaries. The directors mostly
came from the world of television, as opposed to the film studio sys-
tem and associated training institutions that raised the Fifth and Sixth
Generations of feature film directors. Like Wu Wenguang, however,
they eschewed working directly within the state system, preferring to
produce their documentaries outside it wherever possible (Berry, 2007,
p. 118). Their subject matter was distinct and innovative: rather than
concentrate on the major events or great historical figures of tradi-
tional documentary, they chose instead to turn their cameras on the
everyday lives of those around them (F. Fang, 2003, p. 348). Initially,
this meant their direct contemporaries: the educated artistic elite of
Bumming in Beijing, for example. Yet even this focus was pioneering, for
never before had such ‘marginal’ people been made the major charac-
ters of a documentary (X. Lü, 2003a, p. 5).3 Finally, they all displayed
aspects of the cinematographic style that Ernest Larsen had commented
upon in New York. The established Chinese documentary format of
the post-1949 era was an extreme version of the Griersonian expos-
itory mode, an illustrated lecture dominated by lyrical script, ‘voice
of god’ narration and re-enactment or staging. This formula served as
the paradigm for all mainstream Chinese documentary prior to 1989,
including the zhuantipian, or ‘special topic film’, a televisual innovation
of the 1980s of which River Elegy was an example (Berry, 2007, p. 117;
Y. Chu, 2007, pp. 29–30). In contrast, the new documentaries adopted a
rather different approach. While retaining elements of the zhuantipian –
for example, the formally arranged talking heads utilized by Wu in
Bumming in Beijing and 1966: My Time in the Red Guards [1966: Wo de
hongweibing shidai] (1993), his second documentary – they also began to
develop an aesthetic characterized by handheld camerawork, technical
lapses, and the use of distinct new cinematographic techniques, notably
long takes, synchronous sound and tracking shots (Berry, 2007, p. 122;
X. Lü, 2003a, p. 5). It was this style that drew consistent overseas com-
parison with cinéma vérité.4 Christened jishizhuyi (‘reportage realism’ or
‘documentary realism’) by its practitioners, documentaries utilizing it
were termed jilupian.
Despite the (somewhat shocked) familiarity with which foreign critics
greeted these films, several of the directors have argued that the new
documentaries emerged in a cultural vacuum. This position is exem-
plified by Wu Wenguang’s oft-quoted comment that, when he shot
Bumming in Beijing, he had no concept of what a documentary was
(X. Lü, 2003b, p. 6). In part, such claims reflect the tightly controlled
post-Tiananmen environment into which these films surfaced. They are
also perhaps indicative of the traumatizing nature of those events, and
the immediate need to process them. Even if one does not wish to
interpret Bumming in Beijing quite as literally as Larsen, the ‘crucial struc-
turing absence’ (Berry, 2007, p. 118) of 4 June is still apparent in the
earliest documentaries. This is perhaps most obvious in Wang Guangli,
Shi Jian and the SWYC’s I Graduated! [Wo biye le!] (1992), which was
shot primarily on the Beijing University campus, and features interviews
with students from across Beijing’s many educational institutions, all of
whom were involved in, or connected to, the demonstrations of 1989.
However, this sense of broader cultural isolation also speaks to the par-
ticular development of documentary in China. Historically, local expo-
sure to a variety of documentary modes following the 1949 revolution
was uneven. The 1950s were comparatively open, and saw visits from
directors outside the communist bloc: Chris Marker shot the footage for
Sunday in Peking [Dimanche à Pekin] (1956) on a two-week trip to China
in 1955 (Lupton, 2005, p. 50), while Jean Painlevé toured Shanghai
in 1957 (Johnson, 2011, p. 43). However, this situation was reversed
for much of the 1960s. In 1971 and 1972, respectively, Joris Ivens and
Michelangelo Antonioni became the first significant western documen-
tary makers invited to shoot in the PRC since the outbreak of the
Cultural Revolution, but neither of their projects – Antonioni’s Chung
Kuo [Cina] (1972) and Ivens’ How Yukong Moved the Mountains [Com-
ment Yukong deplaça les montagnes] (1976) – was an unqualified success.5
In consequence, CCTV coproductions in the 1980s with Japanese crews
from the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) and Tokyo Broadcast-
ing System (TBS), as well as the UK’s Antelope Productions, provided the
first sustained contact that many Chinese media professionals had had
with foreign documentary makers.6 Lü Xinyu (2003a, p. 14) has thus
suggested that the very early stages of the ‘movement’ emerged less as
a consequence of ongoing theorization than through gradual, practical

attempts to lay the foundations of a new form of documentary realism.
These conditions, however, changed rapidly over the course of the
early 1990s, as invitations were extended to these directors to show
their works abroad. In 1991, Bumming in Beijing premiered at the
Hong Kong International Film Festival, and from there was picked up
by festivals around the world (F. Fang, 2003, p. 379). That year alone,
the documentary was screened in Berlin, Fukuoka, Hawaii, London,
Vancouver, Montreal and Yamagata. More significantly, however, in
1993 the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival showcased
six Chinese documentaries, including work by Wu, the SWYC, Duan
Jinchuan and Wen Pulin, and Jiang Yue (X. Lin, 2005). At Yamagata
that year, the filmmakers were exposed to a wide range of docu-
mentary styles and techniques, two of which were to have a lasting
influence. The first was that of Ogawa Shinsuke, the Japanese docu-
mentary maker and founder of the festival, whose entire oeuvre was
shown in a commemorative retrospective. The second was that of the
American documentary maker Frederick Wiseman, whose films Model
(1980) and Zoo (1993) were screened at the festival in 1991 and 1993,
respectively. Ogawa’s work is characterized by an explicit social and
political commitment. He lived and worked alongside his subjects,
rather than coming to them as an ‘objective’ outsider, and his most
famous series of films concerns the resistance of local farming com-
munities to the appropriation of land for the construction of Tokyo’s
Narita airport (Berry, 2007, pp. 129–30). Wiseman, in contrast, is most
noted for his studies of American institutions and their day-to-day oper-
ations, shot in the strictly observational style of 1960s American direct
cinema. Lü Xinyu (2006, p. 15) has suggested that these two styles
were particularly influential because, together, they demonstrated how
the filmmakers could achieve a bottom-up analysis of Chinese soci-
ety. Certainly, exposure to these techniques caused the directors to
comprehensively reassess the nature and significance of documentary
production.
The consequence of this reassessment was the refinement of inde-
pendent documentary’s emergent film practice into one that bore the
distinct imprint of both Wiseman and Ogawa. Increasingly, directors
sought to eradicate any traces of the zhuantipian that had survived in
their films in favour of the very strict prescriptions of direct cinema:
exclusive use of natural sound; no interviews; and the minimization,
at least in the films of Duan Jinchuan and Jiang Yue, of the film-
maker’s presence on camera wherever possible.7 In addition, they began
to switch their focus from friends and colleagues – urban, educated,
middle class – to the quotidian experience of ordinary people lower

down the social scale, and the operation of Chinese state institutions on
the ground (Berry, 2007, pp. 120–1). From this transformation emerged
films such as Out of Phoenixbridge [Huidao Fenghuangqiao] (1997), in
which director Li Hong lived with her subjects for a period during shoot-
ing, not unlike Ogawa; Jiang Yue’s A River Stilled [Bei jingzhi de he] (1999),
on the relationship between two labourers working on the Three Gorges
dam project; and Duan Jinchuan’s No. 16 Barkhor South Street [Bakuo
Nanjie shiliu hao] (1997), a classic piece of direct cinema that focuses on
the operations of a juweihui, or ‘residents’ committee’, in Lhasa, Tibet.
These films form the apogee of what Lü Xinyu (2006, p. 14) has
termed the first phase of the ‘New Documentary Movement’, which she
suggests lasted from independent documentary’s emergence at the end
of the 1980s to the middle of the 1990s. Politically and socially engaged,
they are sometimes described as films on ‘public’ (gonggong) topics.8
Such topics concern questions of ‘state’ (guojia) and ‘nation’ (minzu): his-
torical issues, for example, or the day-to-day operation of the Chinese
state apparatus, as exemplified by the army, the police force, railway
stations and coal mines (Zhu and Mei, 2004, p. 7). Hence, while these
films are often about public spaces, they also concentrate on incidents or
institutions that require face-to-face contact between ‘real people’ and
state representatives at the most local of levels. It is precisely through
such interaction, in particular the organization of daily life by official-
dom, that Duan Jinchuan has argued that the ideological work of the
Chinese government system as a whole is thrown into sharp relief (W.
Wang, 2000, p. 133). This focus on the social and political forms of
everyday existence partly accounts for the designation of these films
as public.
The earliest manifestations of independent Chinese documentary are
thus usually seen as an attempt to break with accepted values, conven-
tions and modes of production in Chinese documentary filmmaking.
Stylistically, the directors endeavoured to emancipate themselves from
traditional methods of achieving documentary signification. In terms
of subject matter, they sought out new, even sensitive material, and
strove to address it from the perspective of the ordinary citizen, rather
than that of the government. Finally, they aimed for self-sufficiency
in production, turning their backs on CCTV and the official broad-
cast media. While not a direct challenge to the power of the state,
these films did constitute an implicit criticism of older forms of doc-
umentary and the vested interests that generated them. And yet, just
at the point when a coherent independent documentary style might
be said to have emerged, critics have located new and equally radical
shifts in representational form. These changes have been described as,

and ascribed to, the ‘diversification’ or ‘pluralization’ (duoyuanhua) of
independent documentary practice from the late 1990s onwards.
The diversification of independent Chinese documentary
Both critics and directors seem broadly to agree that independent doc-
umentary in the PRC underwent a transformation from around 1997.
Cui Weiping (2003, p. 89) has argued that, while this year was the high
point of what Lü would term the first phase of the ‘movement’, it was
also a turning point in its evolution; Lin Xudong (2005) has suggested
that a new breed of filmmaker and documentary started to emerge
from around 1997; while individual filmmakers, most obviously Wu
Wenguang (Zhu and Mei, 2004, p. 75), have also pinpointed this period
as one in which their own documentary film practice changed dramat-
ically. Moreover, there is also broad agreement as to how these changes
manifested. Two significant factors are usually invoked. First, younger
filmmakers began to move beyond the strictly observational approach
adopted by filmmakers such as Duan Jinchuan. They demonstrated a
willingness to experiment stylistically, transgressing the conventions
established by their predecessors. Extradiegetic music and variations on
the voiceover were employed; live and period film footage intercut; the
re-enactment revived. Such experimentation reaches its zenith in con-
temporary works such as Huang Weikai’s Disorder [Xianshi shi guoqu de
weilai] (2009) or Li Ning’s Tape [Jiaodai] (2009), which are as concerned
with pushing the formal limits of documentary as they are with ques-
tions of content. Thus we see the emergence of documentaries that,
with reference to the famous modes outlined by Bill Nichols (1991,
pp. 32–75; 2010, pp. 142–71), are as ‘performative’ and ‘reflexive’ as they
are ‘observational’.
The second significant factor is the diversification of subject mat-
ter. The focus on social institutions and minorities does not disappear;
indeed, since the early 2000s a new strain of socially committed film
has surfaced that is much more explicitly political than that of the
1990s. This is exemplified by the activist documentaries of Hu Jie and Ai
Xiaoming.9 However, such films have been complemented by a slew on
topics that depart from the public subjects of the early documentaries.
These new works analyse individual, often autobiographical, experi-
ences, sometimes even events that, from another perspective, might
be considered public. They scrutinize the familial – ethnographies of
marriage and of family dynamics are popular – and are often shot
indoors in domestic spaces, as opposed to outdoors in communal ones.

Finally, directors not infrequently include scenes of a highly private
or sensitive nature, such as sexual relations or physical self-harm.10
These documentaries have come to be known as ‘personal’ (geren) or
‘private’ (siren) documentaries, reflecting the fact that their directors
are understood to be interested less in socially or politically engaged
filmmaking than in addressing personal issues, or expressing an indi-
vidual point of view. This in turn has led some scholars (c.f. Y. Zhang,
2004, pp. 130–1) to warn of the dangers inherent in attempting to liber-
ate Chinese documentary from the complexity of its social and political
context, by withdrawing into the confines of the personal and rejecting
the possibility of wider social signification.
What has caused this transformation? One argument posits a gen-
erational shift. Lü Xinyu (2006, pp. 15–16) has emphasized that for
a new generation of directors raised in the era of commercialization,
social and political issues are simply not as important as individual
modes of expression. Even when such directors tackle a topic of social
significance, the manner in which it is addressed is, she argues, signif-
icantly different: the primary focus is on a performative establishment
of both subject and director as individual presences within the docu-
mentary. This, Lü argues, is inevitable in a depoliticized age, where the
lived experience of the individual has become a precondition for artis-
tic production, and the sole vehicle for the transmission of the social
experience of modernization. But critical to the emergence of such a
distinctive new position has been the popularization of digital video
technology since the late 1990s. It is partly through the ‘democrati-
zation’ (minzhuhua) (Zhang and Zhang, 2003, p. 6) of Chinese image
production effected by the new medium that this generation has found
its voice.
From analogue to digital
As Bérénice Reynaud (2003) has noted, the vérité aesthetic that charac-
terized early independent documentary was partly enabled by techno-
logical innovation. The growing availability across Asia of lightweight
consumer video cameras with inbuilt microphones allowed for the pos-
sibility of synchronous sound filming. Independent documentary in
China thus owed its existence to analogue video equipment, much as
direct cinema in the United States was enabled by shoulder-mounted,
16-millimetre cameras (Ellis and McLane, 2005, p. 210). And yet,
even this emancipation had its limitations. Wu Wenguang was already
working with betacam video when he shot 1966: My Time in the Red
Guards (F. Fang, 2003, p. 382). However, by the time he finished At Home
in the World, the director was feeling disaffected with his vocation:
[D]ocumentary filmmaking [ . . . ] was the kind of thing that entailed

a bunch of people carrying big cameras on their shoulders – very
conspicuous, even from a long way off [ . . . ] I felt like I had some
serious problems [ . . . ] I felt that all my documentaries were mired
in a fundamental dilemma [ . . . ] [T]he filming and editing techniques
I was using were the usual ones, techniques that required money [ . . . ]
But the resulting films usually had very little commercial appeal [ . . . ]
[E]ven the people who were interested in giving you money soon
stopped daring to play along with you, and your own wallet was
never thick enough to support you, so it [filmmaking] was impossible
to sustain for long.
(W. Wu, 2010, p. 50)
As Wu’s dilemma demonstrates, one of the reasons independent docu-

mentary in China initially emerged from professional television circles
was the material barriers to non-professional entry. Filmmaking tech-
nology, even of the analogue video variety, was too expensive for
private individuals to own, and too complex for the untrained to oper-
ate. To shoot a documentary, one therefore had to borrow equipment,
which usually meant having contacts in the state television system.
This explains why all the early films were produced by trained pro-
fessionals who had access both to cameras and to editing suites – or
with friends who did. It also suggests why, over the course of the 1990s,
early independent documentary actually became more, rather than less,
interpenetrated with the official media. Private investment was hard to
secure during this period. If, in the first years of the ‘movement’, direc-
tors funded their films through a combination of enthusiasm, savings,
generous friends and foreign festival prize money, they quickly came to
realize that this was a short-term strategy, as Wu Wenguang’s comments
above demonstrate. In order to facilitate their development, these direc-
tors needed a more regular income, and more work opportunities, than
their unstable position allowed for. One solution to this problem was to
turn once again to the very television system they had rejected only a
few years earlier. Duan Jinchuan’s films from the mid-1990s, for exam-
ple, were largely commissioned and partly funded by CCTV. Ironically,
this included No. 16 Barkhor South Street, the most obviously political of
all the public documentaries from this period.
That such a rapprochement was possible at all reflects the changes that
had taken place in the official media following Deng Xiaoping’s ‘south-
ern tour’ (nan xun) of 1992, and CCTV’s consequent shift towards a more
market-oriented programme production model. Deng’s trip initiated the
Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) re-engagement with market reform
across all industrial sectors, and the thawing of the post-Tiananmen
freeze. In 1993, CCTV implemented a new production format, known
as the producer responsibility system. This permitted programme pro-
ducers to manage their own budget. In consequence, they could recruit
their own crew, and outsource individual projects to independent direc-
tors at their discretion (Y. Chu, 2007, p. 95; Hong, Lü and Zou, 2009,
pp. 43–4). It was under these auspices that Duan completed his Tibetan
trilogy, which was part of a series commissioned by Wei Bin to cel-
ebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the establishment of the Tibetan
Autonomous Region (X. Lü, 2003b, pp. 72–3); and that Jiang Yue shot
a series of shorts for the Living Space [Shenghuo kongjian] segment of Ori-
ental Moment [Dongfang shikong], a CCTV documentary programme that
started airing in 1993 (X. Lin, 2005). However, the reimbrication of early
independent documentary with state media conglomerates also demon-
strates the limitations of independence in a Chinese context, and the
consequent dangers of understanding these works as the product of a
dissident subculture. The first directors may have aimed for operational
self-sufficiency, but the very fact that this proved so hard to sustain indi-
cates that they cannot be understood as standing either outside of, or
necessarily in direct opposition to, state power. Early independent docu-
mentary’s independence was relative, not absolute, and as such resulted
from complex negotiations with state institutions rather than outright
resistance to them. To quote Chris Berry (2006, p. 111), ‘Despite all the
rhetoric of standing alone (duli), it may be more than a play on words
to note that “independence” is also “in dependence”.’
But it is precisely this interdependence that some have argued has
been eased with the spread of small-scale production formats. The first
of these was Hi8, embraced as a working medium in the mid-1990s by
artists such as Zhao Liang. Emerging young documentary directors fol-
lowed in their footsteps: Zhu Chuanming and Du Haibin, for example,
adopted the format when shooting Beijing Cotton Fluffer [Beijing tan-
jiang] (1999) and Along the Railroad [Tielu yanxian] (2000), respectively.
However, the rise of digital video from the late 1990s has been seen as
critical. Unlike Hi8, DV came as both hardware and software; for the first
time, the latter made not just filming but also editing cheap and univer-
sally accessible (X. Wang, 2010, pp. 74–5). Potentially, this technology
therefore allowed anybody to shoot and post-produce on a shoestring

budget. Jia Zhangke (2009, p. 38) and Wu Wenguang (2010, p. 54) have
both argued that the digital camera’s ease of operability, its image qual-
ity, and the freedom and simplicity promised by computer editing, all
rendered documentary production more individual than professional or
industrial. In the process, not only was an older generation of filmmak-
ers relieved of the pressures to cooperate with the system in its many
forms – as Wu Wenguang (2010, p. 54) has written, ‘I have moved far-
ther and farther away from “professionalism,” television, film festival
competitions and awards [ . . . ] and closer to myself’ – but individuals
without professional connections were suddenly presented with a path
into documentary filmmaking. It is perhaps unsurprising that this ‘DV
Generation’ should be comprised not just of younger directors, but also
directors from slightly unconventional backgrounds – people like Wang
Bing, who worked for years to support his family in Xi’an following
his father’s death, before starting art school in Shenyang in his mid-20s
(Zhang and Zhang, 2003, p. 153) – and women, who were marginal to
the first cohort of independent documentary filmmakers.11 Those critics
who lauded the democratizing potential of the medium were thus also
celebrating the social diversification that it appeared to promise, and
the pluralization of positions and perspectives that they hoped would
follow.
Such digital utopianism has been criticized as unrealistic. Regardless of
their social background, most of the filmmakers usually invoked as rep-
resentatives of this culture have studied at Chinese institutions of higher
education, frequently majoring in the visual or performing arts. Oth-
ers consider amateurism a potential threat to documentary filmmaking,
making it less rather than more relevant.12 Furthermore, although digi-
tal technology may have challenged television’s institutional monopoly
on documentary production, it has not necessarily had the same effect
on distribution or exhibition. Despite the growth of film clubs, inde-
pendent film festivals, websites, and the release of select films on DVD,
this infrastructure remains somewhat fragmented and ad hoc. Neverthe-
less, digital video has had an undeniable impact on the independent
documentary scene in three noticeable ways. First, the rapid spread
of the medium in the past ten years has blurred boundaries between
traditionally discrete forms of image production in China (Z. Zhang,
2010, p. 104). Many new documentary filmmakers, though educated,
are not trained in broadcasting. Increasingly, they come from back-
grounds in photography, cinema or experimental art, disciplines that
also make creative use of digital video. These directors thus bring an
aesthetic sensibility to bear on their work that reflects their training,

explaining the formal diversification identifiable in more recent inde-
pendent documentary. For example, Wang Bing has stated his influences
as Fassbinder, Tarkovsky, Pasolini and Godard, making him, as Lü Xinyu
(2005c, p. 127) has suggested, a far more self-conscious heir of ‘world
cinema’ than the pioneers of early independent Chinese documentary.
Ou Ning and Cao Fei, who shot their film Sanyuanli [Sanyuanli] (2003) in
collaboration with the other members of the Guangzhou arts collective
U-thèque, prefer ‘non-fiction’ to ‘documentary’ as a description of their
work. This in part reflects the fact that its inspiration derived not from
the contemporary television documentary, but from the modernist ‘city
symphonies’ of Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann (N. Ou, 2003, p. 35).
Finally, Jia Zhangke (2009, p. 132), commenting on the emergence of
experimental filmmaking in the wake of digital video, has namechecked
artist Yang Fudong as one of the first to engage in this practice, clearly
demonstrating how the medium has accelerated the interpenetration of
the contemporary art and filmmaking scenes. Younger directors such
as Huang Weikai, who trained as a painter in Guangzhou, have helped
sustain this trajectory.
Second, small-scale formats have helped to blur the boundary
between documentary directors and their subjects. The early directors
would sometimes admit to concerns about ‘elements of voyeurism’ (lieqi
de chengfen) in their work on social subalterns, as Li Hong did when
shooting Out of Phoenixbridge’s migrant workers (X. Lü, 2003b, p. 205).
The new directors, with their blue-collar backgrounds, are more likely to
talk of identifying with the socioeconomically marginalized subjects of
their films, even as the unequal power dynamics inherent to director–
subject relations remain unresolved, both prior to and after shooting.
For example, Zhu Chuanming has spoken of how he feels his life and
those of his subjects display strong similarities, saying that he became
friends with the protagonist of Beijing Cotton Fluffer – a migrant worker
who made his living in Beijing fluffing cotton for coats and quilts –
precisely because they were both from the ‘underclass’ (diceng) (Zhu
and Mei, 2004, pp. 332–3, 336). Ultimately, however, it is increasingly
recognized that such identification comes to nothing: to quote Wu
Wenguang, ‘ “what you have documented cannot change [your sub-
jects’] lives, or help them in any way” ’ (cited in Y. Wang, 2010, p. 222).
While a director profits from this relationship, producing a documen-
tary, those being filmed do not, for it alters their lives very little. This has
led certain filmmakers to take the logical next step: turning the camera
over to their subjects. The result has been the emergence of participatory
documentary filmmaking projects such as Wu Wenguang’s China Vil-

lage Self-Governance Film Project [Zhongguo cunmin zizhi yingxiang chuanbo
jihua] (2005–) (commonly known as the Village Video Project), or Ou
Ning’s Meishi Street [Meishi Jie] (2006), which again depart quite radically
from the practices of the earliest directors.
Finally, the apparent ease with which the digital can blur the bound-
ary between public and private space has been perceived as something
new. While analogue video may have opened up new aesthetic possi-
bilities for documentary filmmakers, what Paola Voci (2010) has termed
digital’s ‘lightness’ – the portability of the DV camera, and the facil-
ity with which its images can be duplicated and circulated – has had
far-reaching consequences at every level of the filmmaking process. Wu
Wenguang has credited the camera’s increased flexibility with the emer-
gence of a more private aesthetic, focused on the domestic and the
everyday: ‘a kind of poetic quality produced amid the violence of a
dark and gloomy everyday existence’ (W. Wu, 2001b, p. 196). For other
critics, however, it is precisely this ability to transgress boundaries that
has resulted in the highly problematic moments of personal violence,
both literal and metaphorical, that are sometimes seen as characteriz-
ing private documentaries, both at the point of production and as a
consequence of their exhibition.13
As this narrative suggests, no single explanatory model can account
for the emergence and dissemination of independent documentary in
China. The phenomenon is too varied, and increasingly too diffuse, for
anything but a partial perspective to be possible. Yet even acknowledg-
ing such limitations, and thus the possibility of multiple narratives that
each present us with a different facet of the ‘movement’, the signifi-
cance of the aesthetic that so galvanized responses to Bumming in Beijing
remains unclear. Why vérité? What were its attractions? And what are
we to make of those moments of crisis identifiable not just in Wu’s
film, but also in Wang Bing’s? These questions are significant because,
despite the pluralization of independent Chinese documentary practice,
this style has proven surprisingly durable, more so than the debates sur-
rounding duoyuanhua might suggest.14 Furthermore, it has never been
exclusive to non-fiction filmmaking. Similar camerawork characterized
independent fiction film as far back as the beginning of the 1990s: the
early works of Jia Zhangke, long noted for their ‘documentary impulse’
(McGrath, 2007, p. 86), are a particularly good example. This suggests
that the aesthetic is part of a broader trend in Chinese screen cul-
ture post-Tiananmen, and not one unique to documentary filmmaking.
Finally, the precise cinematic practices that generate this new style
are sometimes lost in the complex interplay of social, political and

industrial forces that shape this story. Independent documentary’s dis-
tinctiveness was the consequence not simply of a particular mode of pro-
duction, a conspicuous political commitment or a new technology, but
also of changes in the way that documentaries were made. Although the
term jishizhuyi focuses attention on this aesthetic as a new kind of real-
ism, it does not clarify what was novel about these films at the level of
praxis: how did directors make their documentaries look different, and
why was this apparently so radical?15 At the heart of these questions lies
what Chris Berry (2007, p. 117) has described as the ‘defining feature’
of independent Chinese documentary: its ‘more spontaneous format’.
This issue speaks directly to the differences between contemporary inde-
pendent documentary practice in China, and the institutionalization of
documentary filmmaking following the revolution of 1949 – in particu-
lar, to the shift from studio-based production to shooting on location.
From the studio to the street
Between the revolution and ‘reform and opening’ (gaige kaifang), Chu
Yingchi (2007, p. 69) has suggested three main genres dominated
Chinese documentary production: newsreels, compilations and scripted
documentaries. Newsreels were similar to their western counterparts:
brief, and with a minimum use of images to convey basic information,
they were frequently screened before feature films (p. 84). Compilations
were produced almost entirely from spliced archive footage, their final
form heavily dependent upon editing (p. 81). Scripted documentaries
were shot or compiled from the archives, after a plan for the entire
film had been drawn up. Driven by voiceover, which leant towards
reportage, they made limited use of location sound, and much of
extradiegetic music (p. 84). Lin Xudong’s (2005) description of the clas-
sic Chinese documentary as a ‘carefully formulated scenario prepared
well in advance’, in which images were treated as ‘mere visual confirma-
tion of what the narrator was saying’, and sound – usually music – was
merely there ‘to add a bit of color to a given scenario, or to reinforce a
predetermined narrative ambience’, is clearly influenced by this genre.
What connected all these forms of documentary was an empha-
sis on studio production at the expense of location shooting. They
were, in essence, predominantly theoretical rather than practical modes,
scripted well in advance of filming, with images, whether contempo-
rary or archival, then sought out to illustrate these scripts. This was
partly financial: Wei Bin has noted that, even as late as the 1980s, film
ratios in China were such that natural sound and long takes, staples of
on-site shoots, were simply uneconomical (X. Lü, 2003b, p. 219). But
more importantly, the issue was ideological. After 1949, Lenin’s defini-
tion of documentary as the visual illustration of political ideology was
highly influential in China (Y. Chu, 2007, p. 55; F. Fang, 2003, p. 205).
This principle was enshrined at the heart of all non-fiction media pro-
duction, ensuring that there was less concern with the ontological or
epistemological function of the genre – in other words, its ability to
reflect material existence – than was the case in Europe and the Americas
(Y. Chu, 2007, p. 14). In the PRC, documentary’s reality was not that
of the world as perceived, but that of the historical dialectic operating
behind and through it. The function of the genre was thus to illustrate
and convey the immutable truths of historical materialism; it was in
essence a pedagogical and expository form that sought to control or
shape the viewer’s interpretation of events portrayed on screen (X. Lin,
2005). It was partly in order to achieve this that the first conference
on news and documentary filmmaking after the revolution, held from
December 1953 to January 1954, agreed that the scripting and plan-
ning of news reels and documentary films was an unavoidable necessity
(Y. Chu, 2007, pp. 59–60).
In Europe and the Americas, the post-World War Two period
saw a concerted challenge to the expository tradition launched by,
among others, Drew Associates, Michel Brault, Gilles Groulx, Frederick
Wiseman and Jean Rouch. In the PRC, however, it was only in the 1970s
that the Leninist ‘dogmatic formula’ (Y. Chu, 2007, p. 54) for documen-
tary filmmaking was confronted with significant stylistic alternatives.16
This followed contact with the first foreign camera crews allowed back
into China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. With these pro-
fessionals came new theories and approaches: not only the concept of
unscripted, location-based filming, but also the technical and cinemato-
graphic practices that underpinned it. Lin Xudong (2005) has suggested
that those in the know used to whisper about the methods Michelangelo
Antonioni and Joris Ivens had used when filming Chung Kuo and How
Yukong Moved the Mountains in the PRC. From the 1980s, however, this
exposure intensified with the rise of the television documentary. After
the revolution, non-fiction filmmaking had primarily been the province
of the Central News Documentary Film Studio. Following the elevation
of Beijing Television to national status in 1978, and its rechristening
as CCTV, television began to acquire an increasingly crucial role in
documentary and news production.17 With the decision to gradually
liberalize broadcast media in the early 1980s, foreign coproductions
became critical to these developments. Usually overseen by CCTV’s

Bureau of Foreign Affairs, coproductions were a vehicle through which
a newly outward-facing China could project its image to an overseas
audience. At the same time, however, they also introduced new ways
of shooting documentary to a wider, if still highly select, audience at
home. The first of these ventures was The Silk Road, produced with
Japan’s NHK, and it was during the production of this series that, as
Chu Yingchi (2007, p. 90) has put it, ‘the CCTV crew discovered that
their conventional way of making documentaries [ . . . ] [was] out of date.’
Technical practices were thus adapted. The Sino-Japanese coproduction
Once Upon the Yangtze River [Huashuo Changjiang] (1983), and its sequel
Once Upon the Grand Canal [Huashuo Yunhe] (1986), became the first tele-
vision documentaries to experiment with direct broadcast material, dual
transmission, and the use of presenters, first in the studio and then as
location-based interviewers (J. Guo, 2002, p. 17; S. He, 2005, p. 40).
Between 1985 and 1987, while he was shooting A Tale of the Wind [Une
histoire de vent] (1988) in China, Ivens engaged in extensive dialogue on
documentary with faculty members from the Beijing Broadcasting Insti-
tute. The Dutch director apparently placed particular emphasis on the
relationship of sound and image during these discussions (S. He, 2005,
p. 71). Indeed, one attendee, Liu Xiaoli, reports that he remonstrated
repeatedly about the lack of synchronous sound in Chinese documen-
tary of the period (F. Fang, 2003, p. 324). This obviously had some effect.
When, at the beginning of 1989, Liu, then Vice-Director of the CCTV
Bureau of Military Affairs, was delegated to oversee the CCTV-TBS copro-
duction The Great Wall, one of the first things that he and his team
agreed upon was that the entire documentary should be shot using syn-
chronous sound (F. Fang, 2003, pp. 317, 319). In consequence, when
The Great Wall was finally broadcast in late 1991, it became the first
documentary filmed entirely in this manner to be shown on Chinese
television. Wei Bin, who in the 1990s commissioned work from, among
others, Duan Jinchuan, has described the inspirational experience of
working on the programme. It was, he says, considered a technical mile-
stone because of its use of long takes and live sound (X. Lü, 2003b,
p. 216).18 The specific techniques associated with jishizhuyi are thus
more accurately described as a product of location shooting, their roots
within the world of Chinese documentary extending back considerably
prior to the 1990s.
To recognize this genealogy is not to deny the fact that ‘The majority
of [zhuantipian] [ . . . ] inherited some of the characteristics of Com-
munist documentary film’ (Y. Chu, 2007, p. 29). Indeed, a television
documentary like River Elegy is arguably closer in feel to a Chinese docu-

mentary of the Maoist period than it is to a contemporary independent
production. Nevertheless, in its more experimental manifestations, the
format was the vehicle through which early independent directors were
exposed to new ideas about documentary filmmaking. While this was
inevitable in a coproduction, in purely domestic contexts it was also
sometimes deliberately facilitated: for example, the CCTV crews work-
ing on The Chinese, including Wu Wenguang, were given special study
sessions on Antonioni, and on the Sino-British coproduction Heart of the
Dragon (X. Lin, 2005; Zhu and Mei, 2004, p. 63). In turn, the television
documentary became the earliest space in which these practices could
be put to the test. The standard work model for a zhuantipian was inher-
ited from the 1950s: the director selected a broad theme, decided on an
interpretative position and script, and then chose images to illustrate
this – a very abstract process. When shooting Tiananmen, however, Shi
Jian started with a broad plan; shot footage, which was then edited; and
only after this brought in writers to edit the general shape of the series
(X. Lü, 2003b, p. 150). The images shot on location thus determined the
structure and narrative of the programme, rather than vice versa. In this
sense, zhuantipian like The Chinese or Tiananmen emerged as a mixed
form, combining aspects of live shooting with the traditional scripted
studio style, in much the same way that Bumming in Beijing retained ele-
ments of the television documentary, while also expanding the format’s
boundaries.
When early independent documentary filmmakers such as Wu
Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan and Shi Jian describe themselves as being
profoundly influenced by overseas documentaries and the work of for-
eign filmmakers, it is therefore this unscripted, location-based style of
documentary filmmaking that they are generally referring too. Shi Jian
has made this very clear when discussing the impact of Chung Kuo and
Heart of the Dragon on his own perceptions of the genre: ‘After [watching
them] I felt our documentary methods were wrong. Through images we
interfered with life, but actually life itself can manifest quite naturally
[through images]’ (Li, Liu and Wang, 2006, p. 251). The key difference,
he goes on to suggest, was between staging (baipai) a scene and shoot-
ing it as it happened (zhuapai) (p. 251).19 What differentiated the works
of the early independent documentary filmmakers from their CCTV
predecessors was thus a total commitment, wherever possible, to this
latter form of filmmaking. Whereas a series like Tiananmen, however
experimental, still employed archival footage and voiceover, in I Gradu-
ated! Shi Jian, Wang Guangli and the SWYC used location-based sound
and images – with the exception of some extradiegetic music employed

for poetic effect. Similarly, Bumming in Beijing may have retained the
talking heads of the zhuantipian, but this material was still purpose-shot
on location, not in a studio. It is this practice that underpinned the
appearance of spontaneity so distinctive to the work of the early inde-
pendent directors; its theoretical structure, however, was provided less
by jishizhuyi than by the concept of xianchang.
Xianchang, liveness, contingency
Xianchang is the quality that Chinese critic Dai Jinhua (1999, p. 219)
has argued fundamentally characterized Chinese cultural production in
the 1990s. The term has two meanings. One is material: the location, or
literally ‘the scene’, of the documentary shoot. This is the actual phys-
ical space in which an event must occur, and where a director must
be present, for the act of documentation to take place. Wu Wenguang
(2000, p. 274) has succinctly captured this latter prescription by describ-
ing xianchang as being ‘in the “here” and “now” ’ (‘xianzai shi’ he ‘zai
chang’), while artist and critic Qiu Zhijie (2003, p. 2) has simply stated
that ‘Xianchang means: at the time you must be there.’20 Both therefore
clarify that the practice has a temporal and spatial dimension that is
bound to embodied presence. Being ‘on the scene’ is critical, because
it guarantees the ontological truth of documentary representation: ‘it
[xianchang] is the basic quality [benshen] of things and people that a pro-
ducer [shezhiren] observes with his or her own eyes in real life’ (W. Wu,
2001b, p. 215). Yet xianchang describes not simply a physical space, but
also the space of the screen. In this sense, the term signifies precisely
the documentary poetics that caused so much comment in the early
1990s. Zhang Zhen (2007, p. 20) has described this aesthetic as ‘a par-
ticular social and epistemic space in which orality, performativity, and
an irreducible specificity of personal and social experience are acknowl-
edged, recorded, and given aesthetic expression.’ The techniques that
supported xianchang – the handheld camerawork, the long takes and
tracking shots, the natural sound and lighting – were thus meant to
capture the experience of shooting ‘on the scene’. However, they also
expressed a desire to describe a changing reality, and to reflect on the
evolving relationship between the director, his or her environment, and
the human subjects of the filmmaking process. Part of a general urge
in China to explore new forms of realist expression during this period,
xianchang was nevertheless a manifestation of this impulse that carried
with it a distinct ethical charge.
Three important points may be extrapolated from this description.

First, xianchang was the site of unscripted spontaneity in a quite lit-
eral sense. What the documentary director observed while being ‘on
the scene’ was a basic quality of ‘the scene’ itself: the inherently fleet-
ing, unstable nature of material reality. This demanded that one be
present, on the spot, to have any chance of documenting real life. Crit-
ically, then, xianchang as a production practice was characterized by a
propensity for unpredictability. Jia Zhangke’s comment on the shooting
of his film Xiao Wu [Xiao Wu] (1998) makes this quite explicit: ‘Expe-
rience told me that when you were shooting “on the scene”, many
unexpected things would occur, but also many possibilities’ (X. Lin,
1999, p. 10). Second, this quality was attractive to the early independent
documentary directors. If the scripted quality of the traditional Chinese
documentary ensured that the director had absolute control over the
film’s material, the most direct way in which the new documentaries
could define themselves against this practice was by embracing the
uncontrollable and unstaged qualities inherent to being ‘on the scene’.
This is captured precisely in Lin Xudong’s (2005) remark that ‘The ability
to [ . . . ] record events as they unfolded [my emphasis] came to be viewed
as a fundamental professional qualification for documentary cinematog-
raphers’ in post-1989 China. But third, and finally, xianchang cannot
simply be concerned with the immediate; it is necessarily implicated in
the mediated. For the experience of being on location to transmit suc-
cessfully to screen, it must somehow be translated into an aesthetic of
location. This helps to explain the reflexive undercurrent identifiable in
one strand of independent documentary, with its interest in document-
ing the act of performance and the process and effects of mediation itself
(J. Dai, 1999, p. 224; Leary, 2003). But it also intimates how the distinct
stylistic elements of xianchang – issues of time, space, sound, presence
and causality – derive their importance from their signifying relation-
ship with the unpredictability integral to shooting on location. Here,
then, we have an aesthetic of unscripted spontaneity: a form of docu-
mentary representation that, to paraphrase Zhang Zhen (2007, p. 19), is
open-ended, improvisational and constantly ‘in process’.
Articulated in this manner, xianchang can perhaps be most easily
understood in anglophone terms as liveness. An ontological category
as elusive as it has become naturalized, liveness has frequently been
theorized, in terms similar to those used by Wu Wenguang, as a state
requiring the simultaneous copresence of director, event and audience:
in other words, it is about the ability to capture or watch something
when it happens, where it happens.21 Like xianchang, this has resulted
in associations with performance and improvisation. But also like

xianchang, it suggests a critical link to the unexpected and the embod-
ied. Joshua Gamson (1998, p. 91) has underlined this when noting how,
on the set of a talk show, the ‘jackpot’ moment is when something
uncontrollable or unforeseen occurs: one guest lashing out at another,
for example, or a third breaking down in tears. These moments seem
to promise a connection with the ‘really real’ – the ‘spontaneous and
authentic’ – as opposed to the premeditated or the planned. However,
they also suggest how the site of filming, as a potentially unstable loca-
tion, is intimately connected to this sense of liveness, and the qualities
associated with it.
Like xianchang, liveness thus derives from being physically present in
a particular time and place. As a result, it has also been traditionally
seen as the antithesis of the scripted, the set up or the mediated. More
recent criticism, however, has argued that such a binary is untenable.
Both Philip Auslander (1999) and Nick Couldry (2003) have proposed
that liveness is not a state that exists outside of mediation, but is a
product of this very process: a media effect. Liveness as an experience is
often created through technology, even when it seeks to erase this fact:
consider, for example, the use of the hidden microphone or amplifier
during a live performance. It is therefore a discursive claim that relies on
recording technology, while simultaneously seeking to convey a lack of
mediated intervention. Couldry (2003, pp. 96–7) has argued that, with
mass media more particularly, part of this claim involves bringing us
closer to ‘shared social realities as they are happening’. However, a fur-
ther element is that of bringing us into contact with the unexpected
nature of such realities. The extent to which ‘the scene’ of the talk show
is primed to encourage such unanticipated outbreaks – as demonstrated
not just by Gamson, but also Laura Grindstaff (2002) – makes this very
clear. Yet the issue is also a formal one. In a discussion of the liveness
of early television broadcasting, Wendy Davis (2007, p. 48) has pointed
out that the quality is connected to ‘the televisual capacity to accom-
modate unexpected movements and actions, creating new forms and
image configurations.’ In other words, though liveness is an aesthetic
effect that manifests in distinct ways in different contexts, an ability to
mediate the indeterminacy of material reality is always critical to the
specific forms this effect takes.
As conceptual frameworks and as practices, what both xianchang and
liveness seek to convey is the contingency of material existence. Some-
times seen as a defining feature of modernity – most obviously in
Charles Baudelaire’s (2010, p. 17) famous invocation of the modern as
‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other
being the eternal and the immovable’ – contingency was also central
to early ontological analyses of film, even when not specifically articu-
lated as such. Janet Harbord (2007, pp. 90–1), for example, has argued
that it functions as the overarching theoretical paradigm for Siegfried
Kracauer’s famous Theory of film: the redemption of material reality. Despite
rarely appearing directly in the text, the term conveys the instability of
lived experience by interweaving a number of distinct qualities: indeter-
minacy, or the end of both causality and teleology; the fortuitous and
the accidental; the haptic or corporeal; and, as Miriam Bratu Hansen
(1997, p. xxx) has implied, the particular or unique. It was these quali-
ties of modern life that Kracauer believed film to be exceptionally adept
at mediating, in part because of its intrinsically indexical quality. Ques-
tions of medium specificity notwithstanding, that these attributes were
all ascribed to xianchang by the first independent Chinese documen-
tary directors suggests some fruitful conceptual intersections. Indeed,
this framework provides one explanation for why the moments of crisis
in Bumming in Beijing and West of the Tracks have attracted critical atten-
tion: they so brilliantly capture contingency’s many facets – its temporal
and spatial specificity, its corporeal tangibility, the accidental quality
with which it has been associated – thus powerfully bringing into focus
the manner in which these films were shot, and what makes them so
distinctive.
As this suggests, the question of how one mediates the lived expe-
rience of contingency is hardly unique to independent Chinese doc-
umentary. Xianchang is thus perhaps best understood as a culturally
specific, contemporary manifestation of an older phenomenon, the con-
sequence, in part, of the transmission of particular shooting practices
across cultural boundaries, and their theoretical recalibration under
specific local conditions. Indeed, from the perspective of anglophone
documentary studies, to even consider the question may seem redun-
dant: as Bill Nichols (1991, p. 13) said two decades ago, however
spontaneous a documentary may seem, control is always exercised
somewhere – the less it appears so on screen, the more so in prac-
tice. But like any act of cultural translation, this transmission has not
been an act of duplication: what appears obvious in one context may
become opaque in another. I would suggest that, in post-Tiananmen
China, the paradox of contingency and its mediation resonated beyond
the field of documentary filmmaking. It spoke directly to the problem
of postsocialist transition. As such, xianchang acquired a political dimen-
sion less obviously identifiable in its western counterparts, and it is this
dimension that I want to conclude here by discussing.
Postsocialism and independent Chinese documentary
What the term ‘postsocialist transition’ actually means is still a vexed

question. Critical assessment has tended to focus on the ‘postsocialist’
element either as a periodizing concept – of relevance to politics, or
political economy – or, with reference to cultural products, as an artistic
practice characterized by pastiche and nostalgia for the recent (social-
ist) past. Arif Dirlik (1989, p. 364), who is supposed to have coined
the phrase, used it to describe the historical conditions under which
socialism loses its intellectual coherence ‘as a metatheory of politics’,
primarily as a result either of being forced to articulate its vision to that
of capitalism, or because of vernacularization in particular national con-
texts. Zhang Yingjin (2007, pp. 50–1) and Sheldon Lu (2007a, pp. 208–9)
have suggested that, since then, the term has acquired further meanings:
it is a description of a political economy distinguished by one-party
politics and capitalist economics; a logic of affect frequently charac-
terized by nostalgia for the past, and a rejection of the present; and a
cultural logic, or aesthetic practice, that engages in pastiche, ambigu-
ity and play. Finally, Chris Berry (2007, p. 116) has argued for parallels
with Jean-François Lyotard’s understanding of postmodernism, propos-
ing postsocialism as a state in which ‘the forms and structures of the
modern (in this case socialism) persist long after the faith in the grand
narrative that authorizes it has been lost.’
From these perspectives, there are several ways in which one might
consider independent Chinese documentary to be postsocialist. It could
be the signifier of a particular industrial configuration in the polit-
ical economy of Chinese media production; a cultural product that
engages directly with questions of ambiguity and indeterminacy; or,
finally, an attempt to work through the legacy of socialism, and discover
new modes of representing the world. There is, however, an alterna-
tive approach to this question, one that connects postsocialism to the
production of meaning in everyday life. Alexei Yurchak (2006) and Liu
Xin (2000) have argued that the disappearance of authority figures in
the USSR and the PRC – Stalin in the former, local CCP representatives
displaced by Deng’s economic reforms in the latter – has produced an
environment in which ‘there [is] no longer any social group that [can]
authorize the meaning of ceremonial acts or symbols for local people’
(X. Liu, 2000, p. 146). In other words, in neither country is there now a
fixed relationship between signifier and signified, between cultural prac-
tice and meaning. Instead, an environment emerged in 1980s Russia
and 1990s China in which the ability to assign sociocultural mean-
ing, of whatever kind, was no longer the authority of an elite, but had
devolved more broadly to individuals and groups at large. In the former

USSR, the result was a situation in which the performative aspects of a
speech act or a cultural form gradually gained precedence over its con-
stative or sociological dimension (Yurchak, 2006, p. 24). The meaning of
such an act or form thus became almost impossible to predict a priori, or
out of context. Liu (2000, p. 184) has made a similar point, suggesting
that what cultural forms ‘mean’ in contemporary China is often rather
different from what they ‘do’ in a specific situation, with the latter tak-
ing precedence over the former. Thus, the relationship between form
and content, representation and the represented, between what some-
thing looks like and what it signifies, has become increasingly unstable.
It is precisely this instability that is key to understanding the nature of
postsocialist (or, in Yurchak’s preferred phrase, late socialist) transition.
For Yurchak and Liu, postsocialism thus appears to be a state of
advanced uncertainty, in which all sociocultural forms are semiotically
unstable, and where the power to determine their significance is open
to outright contestation. This has two significant implications for inde-
pendent Chinese documentary. First, it suggests that the critical position
that the contingent occupies within xianchang may indicate more than
a desire to deconstruct the pieties of officially sanctioned documen-
tary filmmaking. It also reflects a world where instability is increasingly
understood to be the social norm, which any serious attempt at doc-
umentation must then acknowledge. The emergence of xianchang as
independent Chinese documentary filmmakers’ preferred mode of post-
socialist representation might therefore be a consequence not solely of
Maoist-era documentary’s rejection of the practice and its qualities, nor
of the ipso facto contingent status of reality. Instead, it could also be a
product of the particular historical conditions that first generated this
kind of filmmaking, conditions in which contingency had been nor-
malized as integral to everyday existence. It is partly for this reason that
I would argue that the contingent is central to most forms of postsocial-
ist realism in China, and why liveness as a quality appealed to Chinese
documentary filmmakers at a point when their western contemporaries
seemed either to have dismissed it or to have taken it for granted.
The second implication, however, is that while the trend in post-
Mao media towards what Chu Yingchi (2007, p. 27) has labelled
‘polyphony’ – ‘the gradual replacement of the dogmatic style [ . . . ]
by disseminated viewing positions and speech attitudes’ – is clearly
just one facet of a general atrophication of authorizing discourses in
1990s China, this broader state of social indeterminacy is critical to
understanding the political potential of xianchang. As previously noted,
documentary in the newly founded PRC functioned as a form of politi-

cal education. Crucial to this pedagogical intent, however, was the need
to control the interpretation and reception of film. This was the funda-
mental reason for the development of the scripting system: it allowed
every project to be reviewed by the CCP prior to shooting, thus ensur-
ing that the political message of any given documentary was vetted
and approved before production commenced (Y. Chu, 2007, p. 65). This
desire for control was also reflected in the wider film culture promoted
by the state in the wake of the revolution, which prioritized the edu-
cation of the masses in responses appropriate to the medium.22 By the
1980s, the imposition of cinematic closure was thus associated with a
propagandistic model of information transfer in which audiences were
supposed to passively absorb material viewed, rather than attempt to
critically engage with it.
For the early independent documentary directors, contingency was
therefore significant in relation not simply to a film’s production but
also to its reception. By introducing a greater degree of semiotic con-
tingency into their material, these filmmakers could try to open up a
broader range of interpretative possibilities for their audience, an act
that in itself was politically loaded. This is reflected in comments by
Duan Jinchuan to the effect that his adoption of vérité cinema tech-
niques was a way of forcing an audience to think about his films, rather
than provide them with neat conclusions from which they could draw
easy judgments (Zhu and Mei, 2004, p. 131); and in Wu Wenguang’s
statement that a documentary should merely present the viewer with
what the director has seen and heard, not help or hinder comprehen-
sion of its material (X. Lü, 2003b, p. 21). Of course, under conditions
in which absolute freedom from government intervention was never
a possibility, such ambiguity could at times serve a distinctly prag-
matic purpose.23 But it also demonstrates that the question of how
open-ended one’s material could or should be was of genuine polit-
ical importance to these directors, far more so than to their western
contemporaries. Perhaps the intensity with which Wu Wenguang ulti-
mately sought to theorize xianchang reflects the fact that, unlike liveness
in Europe or North America, the potential political charge of the practice
was instinctively understood in China.
The rest of this book reflects on the implications of this discussion.
It is a consideration of how independent documentary filmmakers in
China attempt to mediate the liveness of location shooting, to sus-
tain on screen the sense of contingency that lies at the heart of their
encounter with the historical world. Different directors achieve this
in different ways, using a variety of techniques to invoke the diverse

qualities associated with xianchang in their films. But equally impor-
tantly, different conditions of production mould this process at different
points in time. Just as liveness is produced through particular technolo-
gies, in specific industrial configurations, for a certain kind of (usually
imagined) audience, so the local elaboration of the practice in China
has been subject to similar forces. Some of these – the highly politi-
cized conditions of production in the immediate aftermath of 1989, for
example – I have already hinted at; others I have not. But it is important
to remember that these forces have not always manifested systemati-
cally or identically. The field of independent Chinese documentary has
never been static. In consequence, shooting ‘on the scene’ has always
been as much a process of material reconstruction – a practice shaped
in different ways by its immediate environment – as a simple act of cul-
tural translation. Xianchang has thus necessarily developed in response
to some very real historical pressures, even as these forces were in turn
themselves evolving.
My aim over the course of this book, then, is to try to integrate a study
of xianchang into the broader story of independent Chinese documen-
tary’s emergence and diversification. Inevitably, this attempt is far from
comprehensive; I do not have the space here to consider how all the
threads that constitute that narrative interact with xianchang. Instead,
I have tried to touch on some of the more significant factors. Are there
ways in which we can understand genres of Chinese documentary in
terms of their relationship to xianchang and the contingent? If so, what
are they? What impact has the supposed diversification of independent
documentary in the wake of digital video had on xianchang? Has this
new technology resulted in new ways of mediating the contingent? How
has the globalization of Chinese cinema, and with it Chinese documen-
tary, affected the theory and practice of xianchang? These are a few of the
many questions that could be asked of independent documentary, and
I will try to address some of them in this study. But as a point of depar-
ture, I want to turn first to the question of contingency as the specific
and as the accidental, and to consider how this can help us understand
two forms of independent documentary that I have already touched
upon: the public and the private.
2
Metaphor and Event
Introduction
What is the relationship between distinct types of documentary and

the contingent? Though possibly a peculiar question, it is one that this
chapter addresses directly. The public and the private, two significant
manifestations of independent Chinese documentary, are forms often
defined in relation either to their subject matter or to the spaces in
which they take place. Here, I propose that they are also connected to
different ways of signifying meaning. The public documentary makes
general claims for its material; the private documentary, in contrast,
rejects such claims in favour of the particular and specific. Because
the latter qualities are expressions of the contingent understood to be
integral elements of xianchang, particularly in relation to a location’s
propensity for the unexpected or accidental, it is thus possible to under-
stand public and private documentaries as embodying different ways of
being ‘on the scene’.
From this premise, I argue that the public documentary, at least as
exemplified in the work of Duan Jinchuan, is a form that attempts to
routinize the contingency of location shooting, rendering the practice
more predictable. This is critical if these films are to be understood
as making general propositions about their subject matter; it is thus
reflected not simply in how Duan shoots his documentaries, but also
in how he edits his diegetic material for the screen. In contrast, direc-
tors of private documentaries often make the unexpected a more central
element both of their creative practice and of their films, contribut-
ing to the sense of their subject matter as specific and ungeneralizable.
And yet, it does not follow, as has sometimes been argued, that such
documentaries are necessarily apolitical. Instead, it is possible for a film
37
such as West of the Tracks to bring together elements of the unexpected

and the private in a manner that is suggestively political. Not only
does this demonstrate how the division between private and public
documentaries is far from absolute, it also provides a framework for
understanding how the private documentary may in fact rearticulate
political experience within the context of a China in transition.
Public, private, contingent
When Hu Xinyu’s documentary The Man was screened at the 2005

Yunfest, it attracted considerable controversy. Taking as its subject the
lives of three male friends, one of whom was the director, and all of
whom taught at an art college in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, the film
tracks their evolving relationships with each other – and, equally impor-
tantly, with the women in their lives – across the course of several
months. Largely confined to the claustrophobic space of the tiny flat
shared by the friends, the explicitly misogynistic views expressed by the
film’s subjects were evidently shocking to some. Others saw in these
attitudes precisely what distinguished The Man as a documentary: its
accurate depiction of how men actually talk about women in the safety
of a masculine social space. Lü Xinyu (2005a, p. 168) has captured this
conflict when stating that
The exposure, depth and coldness towards morality in this type of

film are shocking. The unease and even the fear that it dredges up
arise from an invasion of the heart of reality; this is something that
we instinctively hope to protect. Reality is no longer terra firma; it
has become ice that is continuously cracking.
The film is unpleasant because it is true, but this is not a truth that many
viewers may wish to confront.
The Man is an excellent example of what is sometimes described
in Chinese as the siren (‘private’) or geren (‘individual’ or ‘personal’)
documentary.1 As outlined in Chapter 1, this is identified as an increas-
ingly significant genre in the post-1997 period, and one that is supposed
to take as its locus of expression the individual. Directors who work with
the form are therefore seen to be less interested in socially or politically
engaged filmmaking than in addressing personal issues, or expressing
a personal perspective. Hu Xinyu (2005, p. 4) has made this position
explicit when discussing The Man:
Because I lack the ability to get by socially, I basically don’t care about
society. I can only circle round my own tiny world and the people in
Metaphor and Event 39
it. I also think that looking after myself and filming myself is better
than being concerned with society and politics; it’s better for me to
sort myself and my own immediate issues out.
Documentary, in this formulation, is a film form uninterested

in addressing the greater social or political good. Instead, it is a
mode of introspection concerned solely with expressing the fate of the
individual.
For the western reader, a film such as The Man hardly seems new.
Indeed, the personal film as a genre has deep roots in western film
history.2 In China, however, these films appear radical for two reasons.
First, they quite explicitly turn their backs on many of the concerns
of the early independent documentary filmmakers. As previously dis-
cussed, films shot prior to 1997 are generally described as being ‘public’
(gonggong or hongda) documentaries. These works are seen as a form of
politically and socially engaged documentary that touches on topics
that resonate collectively, rather than individually, with people across
China. Their concerns thus appear rather different from a film like The
Man. Second, this shift from public to personal or private is coloured by
the particular history of such terminology in the PRC, and the ideolog-
ical weight it bears. In the immediate aftermath of the 1949 revolution,
the CCP was closely involved in the creation of a public political culture
that incorporated aspects of social life designated as private in western
society. The most obvious of these was the sphere of interpersonal rela-
tions. Under the impact of marketization, this culture has undergone a
radical transformation, and, more recently, scholarly investigation has
focused on the government’s involvement in the creation – or at least
tacit acceptance – of a private realm in which the individual is consti-
tuted in specifically consumer terms. This is a phenomenon mirrored
in the world of artistic production by the rise of commercial popular
culture and the literary market.3 Since certain Chinese scholars have, in
part, explicitly linked the rise of private film to the emergence of a gen-
eration of directors born after gaige kaifang and the 1980s Culture Fever
(c.f. X. Lü, 2006, pp. 15–16), it is tempting to view the siren jilupian as
visible evidence of a radical cultural shift. Perhaps the genre is proof
that a postsocialist Chinese interiority is coming to fruition, a sense of
identity akin to western notions of individual subjectivity? And is this
interiority a product of official policy, or has it in fact developed beyond
the reach of government, thus constituting an independent space from
which resistance to the CCP can be nurtured?
Speculating about these questions in such terms tends to reproduce
an inherently problematic model of independent Chinese cinema as
necessarily dissident. Nevertheless, acknowledging that the public and

the private are historically constructed rather than absolute raises other,
perhaps more interesting, questions. What exactly do we mean when we
talk about ‘constructing’ these categories? How do we understand this
process to operate? And, more specifically, how does it work in these
documentaries? As my brief description above suggests, the emphasis to
date has usually been on the subject matter of these films, on what they
represent. But if we accept that the public and the private are essentially
historically situated and discursively generated concepts, then we must
also accept that these documentaries cannot simply reflect, but must
also produce, them. How these documentaries order their subject matter
thus becomes a critical question. If the public documentary is in part a
genre that claims a collective rather than individual significance for its
subject matter, how is this signified formally? And, in contrast, in what
ways does the private documentary signify that its material should no
longer be viewed in this light?
These points are pertinent because, while this shift from public to
private documentary can be mapped through changing subject mat-
ter, it has also entailed significant modifications in documentary form,
practice and discourse. In its most ascetic manifestation, the public
documentary was characterized by a strict adherence to a pure vérité
aesthetic. This entailed the elimination of the mixed mode sometimes
suggested as characterizing early independent documentary production
(c.f. Reynaud, 2003; Y. Zhang, 2004, p. 124) in favour of a more clas-
sically observational or objective aesthetic. In contrast, the rise of the
private documentary has been accompanied by a greater willingness to
experiment, and a reintroduction of precisely those elements that were
eliminated in the public documentary. This in turn has resulted in the
rise of performative and reflexive modes of documentary filmmaking,
as detailed in the previous chapter. Equally important, however, is an
accompanying insistence on the particularity of these documentaries,
and of what they signify. The collective ambitions of the public doc-
umentary as a form are reinforced by the explicitly metaphorical or
allegorical language used to describe it. Wu Wenguang illustrates this
clearly in discussion of Jianghu: Life on the Road [Jianghu] (1999), about a
big top and its travelling company of players. Jianghu, he insists, should
not be understood as a film that is merely about the experience of ‘other
people’, namely those without urban residency permits, who effectively
constitute the subjects of the documentary. Rather, it should be under-
stood as a film about everyone in China, urban or rural; now everyone’s
life is ‘on the road’, in a constant state of flux in which the old rules no
longer apply, and the new ones have yet to be created (X. Lü, 2003b,
pp. 14–15; W. Wang, 2000, p. 108). Through these people, who form a
new and distinct social strata that lies somewhere between that of the
migrant worker and the farmer, one can analyse broader social change.
Contrast this with Hu Xinyu’s discussion of the final shot in The Man:
a long take of a mouse, dying on the floor of the friends’ flat, where it
has been shot by one of the film’s protagonists. Unlike Wu Wenguang,
Hu refuses to attribute any symbolic significance to this ending. He
states explicitly that ‘It’s not a metaphor. Poetry rejects metaphor; so
too does documentary’ (C. Cui, 2007). Whereas Wu embraces the possi-
bility that people across China might identify with being ‘on the road’,
Hu deliberately shuts down any attempt to discuss The Man in a similar
light.
As this comparison suggests, on some level the emergence of private
documentary indicates not simply an interest in new subjects or new
forms, but also an elevation of the particular and partial over the uni-
versal and collective. Given the historical significance of these latter
values – and, indeed, of the allegorical and archetypal – to socialist cul-
tural practice, their rejection suggests that the private documentary is a
particularly radical form of postsocialist cultural production.4 By exten-
sion, the residual influence of socialist forms appears more clearly
identifiable in the public documentary. And yet, particularity is also a
manifestation of contingency, and a significant element of xianchang:
recall Zhang Zhen’s (2007, p. 20) assertion that an insistence on the ‘irre-
ducible specificity of [ . . . ] social experience’ is central to the aesthetic.
Hu Xinyu’s claim that the death of a mouse is simply the death of a
mouse, no more no less, could therefore be understood not just as symp-
tomatic of a particular world view, but also as a consequence of a specific
way of shooting documentary, and the aesthetic associated with it.
In one sense, this merely returns us to the point that xianchang is
both a poetics and a praxis. But in doing so, it raises an interesting
possibility: that this particular difference between public and private
documentary may be the result not simply of the different world views
they exemplify, or of the differing degrees to which the influence of
socialist practices has been cleansed from independent Chinese docu-
mentary, but also of distinct ways of managing being ‘on the scene’.
Jianghu and The Man both cleave to the fundamentals of xianchang:
they are shot on location, use only natural sound and lighting, and fea-
ture the vérité camerawork and editing typical of the practice. And yet,
the fact that the directors disagree quite radically over the significance
of what their documentaries represent – one endorsing Zhang Zhen’s
irreducible specificity, one resisting it – should encourage us to look

again at the execution of xianchang in public and private documentaries.
Perhaps the question of how these documentaries signify their material
as unique or as universal is partly related to different approaches to the
key elements of liveness.
This chapter argues that this is indeed the case. It does so by con-
sidering how two of xianchang’s contingent qualities, the particular and
the accidental, are articulated through the signifier of the spontaneous
or unexpected event. I draw this latter term from Jia Zhangke’s com-
ment, quoted in Chapter 1, concerning the many ‘unexpected things’
that a director would encounter on location; things whose appearance
emphasized the lack of control exerted by the independent documen-
tary filmmakers over an inherently contingent, unpredictable profilmic
reality, clearly differentiating their work from the officially sanctioned,
scripted and studio-based zhuantipian of the 1980s. Here, the event
is contingent in a very physical sense, its unexpectedness placing it
beyond the possibility of manipulation. The differences between the
public and the private documentary, however, hint at another level of
contingency: the semiotic or diegetic. Hu Xinyu and Wu Wenguang
are indirectly debating the question of interpretative control in their
documentaries. The death of Hu’s mouse is quite literally meaningless.
In its specificity, it is significant only in that it happened, not for what it
might further signify. As such, it is absolutely contingent; inimitable,
it is beyond or prior to signification.5 In contrast, Wu Wenguang is
suggesting precisely the opposite of Jianghu. In emphasizing the synec-
dochic relationship between the film and the state of China as a nation,
he effectively implies that the documentary’s events are neither unique
nor inexplicable, but rather representative of a much bigger picture. This
assertion thus becomes a way not simply of signalling Jianghu’s rele-
vance to the world at large, but also of imposing limits on the absolute
open-endedness of meaning implied by total contingency.
The key question here is how to mediate liveness. On the one hand,
as a shooting practice xianchang was theorized as fundamentally open-
ended and unplanned. On the other hand, the very act of representing
this experience on film required some systematization if it was to be at
all meaningful. The spontaneous event brings this conflict into focus.
At a profilmic level, it was seen as the embodiment or site of contin-
gency, here understood as the aleatory. Its significance derived not from
some predetermined external point of reference, but from its nature as
pure accident. This was why it was a critical indicator of the liveness
of these documentaries. In contrast, capturing these moments within
the film itself presented a conundrum. Was it possible to incorporate

something so asystematic into the documentary diegesis? Could it be
done without doing damage to the inherently contingent nature of
the unexpected? Or would such events require formalization, primarily
through editing conventions, in an attempt to preserve the greater sig-
nificance of the documentary’s message? At stake is the transformation
of the encounter between the director and material reality (the profilmic
event) into the diegetic event (the mediation of that experience) and the
extent to which the latter must be invested with a degree of signification
not inherent to the former.6
These questions speak to those I raised at the end of the previous
chapter concerning semiotic interpretability and postsocialist transi-
tion, and the issues I want to pick up here are directly related to
these concerns. However, I wish to address them in relation not to the
public documentary in general but to the work of one director specif-
ically: Duan Jinchuan. This is a reflection not simply of the fact that
Duan’s work from the mid-1990s constitutes an example of public doc-
umentary in its purest form but also of his working practices. Duan
Jinchuan is famous for an almost ethnographic investment in exten-
sive preshoot research, interviews and careful forward planning; indeed,
Wu Wenguang (2001b, p. 236), referring to his own adoption of such
techniques in his earliest films, has described the process as ‘fieldwork’.
Such practices could be aligned with xianchang’s ethical impulse, in par-
ticular the desire to understand one’s subjects, and to consciously reflect
on one’s relationship with them. However, Duan has provided another
perspective on such filmmaking. While acknowledging the inevitabil-
ity of change ‘on the scene’ – ‘there will be some discrepancy between
what you thought of in advance and the actual process of shooting’ –
the director notes the following:
As far as documentary filmmakers are concerned, you must also have

the vision to be able to see how things will develop; you must plan
in advance. Why do I like to shoot films? Because the discrepancy
between my understanding of the issues and what I shoot after-
wards isn’t that great. When conducting research and interviews prior
to shooting, I can actually see in advance how certain things are
going to pan out; but because during shooting people change, your
actual content may change. This happens all the time, it’s inevitable.
[So you must have a plan.] Otherwise you won’t be able to shoot your
film.
(W. Wang, 2000, p. 132)
In other words, however unpredictable profilmic reality, the impact of

such unpredictability can be minimized through proper preparation. For
Duan, the ethnographic aspect of location shooting does not simply
reflect a desire to reassess the relationship between the director and his
or her subject. It can also be seen as a practical measure to ensure maxi-
mum control over profilmic material within the limits established by the
xianchang aesthetic, thus reducing the element of contingency inherent
in location work until it is acceptable to the director.
The rest of this chapter argues that, in the public documentaries of
Duan Jinchuan, the metaphorical functions as a formal corollary to
this ethnographic element of preshoot preparation. While clearly pro-
viding greater freedom of interpretation than the classic zhuantipian,
Duan’s documentaries do so within a carefully defined semiotic space
that suggests specific limits to the possibilities of such exegesis. This is a
consequence of the causal model of the event that the director adopts,
a model that, in its purest manifestation, was adapted from the film
practice of the American director Frederick Wiseman. In this model,
often described as metaphorical or mosaic, events are never unexpected
or inexplicable. Instead, they are edited to suggest their relationship to
larger structures of causation. The cinematic form adopted by Duan in
these films can therefore be understood as a response to the contin-
gency of xianchang, and as a reflection of the director’s ambivalence
towards this quality. Such ambivalence was in turn partly related to the
conditions under which these documentaries were produced.
In more contemporary works by Zhang Ming, Huang Weikai and
Wang Bing, however, metaphorical form has largely been abandoned,
and the unexpected event returns as a far more fundamental element
of the diegesis. This signals a far less ambivalent relationship on the
part of these directors to the contingent, at both the profilmic and
the semiotic levels. Indeed, I would suggest that it demonstrates an
embracing of the unexpected that reflects not just changing shooting
practices, but also a different understanding of the nature of documen-
tary as a film form, and the role of the director as practitioner. While
this is clearly connected to the rise of the private documentary, the cen-
trality of such events to Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks – a work that
in certain ways functions as a public documentary – complicates this
picture. Not only does it suggest an acceptance of the contingent that
confuses easy generic distinctions, but also, and perhaps as importantly,
it raises the issue of politics. On the one hand, this generic ambiguity
highlights the sensitivities around marking one’s documentary as pub-
lic in the contemporary PRC. On the other hand, it demonstrates how
the private documentary can be understood not simply as a rejection
of the political, but as a reflection on its gradual rearticulation in post-

reform China. But before addressing these issues, I wish to return to the
question of metaphorical form and the diegetic event in two of Duan
Jinchuan’s most significant works: No. 16 Barkhor South Street and The
Square [Guangchang] (1992).
Form and event in No. 16 Barkhor South Street

and The Square
No. 16 Barkhor South Street and The Square were both produced in the
period immediately post-1992, when a combination of the financial
pressures of independent production, and the gradual thawing of the
post-Tiananmen freeze initiated by Deng Xiaoping, pushed several doc-
umentary directors into reconsidering their opposition to working with
state media (W. Cui, 2003, p. 87). The result was a flowering of ‘inde-
pendent’ documentaries made under the aegis of CCTV. Some of these
films were directly commissioned, but others were made clandestinely,
while their directors served as crew on more mainstream television
productions. The Square is a good example of the latter. Produced by
Duan Jinchuan in collaboration with Zhang Yuan, the directors orig-
inally gained access to Tiananmen Square, where the film was shot,
when working with a CCTV camera crew in a freelance capacity. Once
the crew had finished shooting, however, Zhang and Duan stayed on,
continuing to shoot material of their own, while allowing the security
services to assume that they were still in fact working for CCTV (Zhu
and Mei, 2004, p. 108). In contrast, No. 16 Barkhor South Street was part
of a series commissioned by state television to celebrate the thirtieth
anniversary of the establishment of the Tibetan Autonomous Region
(X. Lü, 2003b, pp. 72–3). Although most of the money invested came
from an independent group called the Tibetan Culture Communication
Company (Berry, 2006, p. 115), the documentary was in effect a CCTV
production.
No. 16 Barkhor South Street takes as its subject the day-to-day running
of a single institution: a juweihui, or ‘residents’ committee’, in a neigh-
bourhood of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Most of the activity takes
place around and about a single building, the office out of which the
committee, the lowest level of local government in China, operates.
Its subject matter is thus archetypally public. And yet, of all the pub-
lic documentaries from the 1990s, No. 16 Barkhor South Street is the one
that most clearly advertises the limits imposed on its profilmic subject
matter, simply because the issue of social control is indicated as cen-
tral to the film from the outset. While what we see is in no way staged
by the director, much of it is closely monitored by the members of the

committee. Nothing, then, is spontaneous if it can be helped; unex-
pected events are to be avoided at all costs, for they might disturb social
stability and threaten national unity. From the beginning, when a meet-
ing is called to discuss the maintenance of proper social order during
celebrations to mark the end of the Tibetan New Year period, through to
the finale, when the committee is obliged to help organize the anniver-
sary celebrations – an event so spontaneous that the participants are
even instructed what to wear – it is clear that the micromanagement of
daily processes is a key element of this film.
As a result, there is very little in the way of genuinely unexpected
profilmic activity in No. 16 Barkhor South Street. The events portrayed –
familial and neighbourhood disputes, political education, incidents of
theft and delinquency – are far from exceptional to the context in which
they occur. Interactions between members of the committee and mem-
bers of the general public are clearly shaped by the official positions
occupied by the former, such that sequences are usually structured in
ways that reflect the expectations and responsibilities of the juweihui.
One of the most obvious of these is the presentation of a problem at the
beginning of a scene that must be resolved by its conclusion. Arguably,
it is precisely this form of social role playing, and the muted ethnic ten-
sion that it hides, that here constitutes Duan Jinchuan’s object of study.
The result, though, is that while nothing of what we see is staged, very
little occurs that exceeds the roles defined for all participants by the
institutional space that is the focus of the documentary.
The question arises, however, as to how these individual sequences
are bound together. The profilmic events caught by Duan’s camera do
not necessarily follow in a logical, linear manner. One thing does not
lead inexorably to another; we tend instead to jump around, some-
times returning to problems, occasionally leaving them unresolved.
There is, in other words, no obvious temporal progression connecting
these events. True, it is evident that there is a considerable disjunc-
ture between the diegetic and actual time of the film. Over the course
of a two-hour documentary, we clearly move from winter, signalled
at the beginning by the few establishing shots of snow covering the
ground, to late summer or autumn, as demonstrated both by changes
in light and weather and by the committee secretary’s statement that
the anniversary celebrations, which conclude the film, are to take place
on 1 September. Yet this time is generally non-specific. It is unclear pre-
cisely when most of the events portrayed take place, and ultimately it
is unimportant; their relationship with one another is structured only
very loosely by the time periods in which they occur. Instead, these
sequences share at least one of two characteristics: they all take place
within the immediate environs of the juweihui, and they are all impli-
cated in some way in the maintenance of social order. Thus, though each
sequence in the film is more or less distinct, each also represents a differ-
ent facet of the work of the juweihui as a whole. Together, they therefore
present a more complete and coherent picture of what the institution
is, and how it operates.
This is marked most clearly in the transitions between sequences that
take place inside and outside the juweihui office. In practice, the environs
of the committee would appear to include much of Barkhor Street itself,
and the documentary features sections that occur both within the actual
physical space of the committee building and elsewhere. However, tran-
sitions between such spaces are carefully edited to ensure that a degree
of continuity is maintained between what happens inside and outside.
One short but telling example, which takes place almost 45 minutes into
the film, involves the shift from a meeting in the committee room to a
scene set in the local paichusuo (‘police station’). The former sequence
is a relatively extended one that deals with an old man who, feeling
ill-treated by his daughter, wishes to move out of her house. It is the
responsibility of the juweihui to consider the issue, and resolve it in
an appropriate manner. This sequence concludes with three shots: two
close-ups of committee members, one woman and one man, with dis-
cussion of the case continuing on the soundtrack; and then a medium
shot of three members, positioned diagonally to the camera, looking off
screen, clearly in the direction of the other members sitting across the
room. A telephone suddenly rings, and we see all three officials turn
their heads, presumably in the direction of the sound. Another offi-
cial goes to answer; a fragment of his body is visible from behind as
he enters the shot while crossing the room. The camera then cuts out-
side. We hear street noise; a vertical sign hangs on the wall in front of
us, indicating that this is the entrance to the police station; pedestrians
pass back and forth in front of the camera. Then we hear the voice of a
man, apparently on the telephone. ‘Hello’, he asks, ‘is this the Barkhor
Street Residents’ Committee? Who am I speaking to? Bianba?’ We then
cut indoors, to a medium shot of a man talking on the phone: ‘Please
have the guards bring over the headman’s salary. Please come over now,
we’re waiting over here.’ The camera then cuts outside again, to a group
of young men standing in line, one next to the other. The camera pans
across slowly from right to left as the voice of the man on the phone
is heard, introducing these youths as potential recruits for the police
academy. We have now clearly shifted away from the juweihui and are
firmly established within the space of the paichusuo.
This is a very skilful piece of editing. Duan shot No. 16 Barkhor South
Street primarily on one camera (Voci, 2004, p. 100); it is therefore highly
unlikely that he could have captured both parties involved in a single
telephone call. Instead, what we have is an ‘indefinite temporal ellipsis’
(Nichols, 1981, p. 219): a moment when continuity between sequences
is maintained despite disruption of temporal flow. This is achieved via
‘temporal proximity’ (p. 220): the placing of logically or analytically
related speech or sound before and after a visual cut, such that the
images appear connected, even though the sound does not actually
continue uninterrupted across them. In other words, the telephone call
made to the juweihui at the end of the meeting is not the telephone call
we hear being made in the police station; Duan has edited two separate
takes together in such a way that their proximity suggests continuity.
This continuity is therefore not strictly temporal in a linear sense, but is
provided by the overlap in activity between these two spaces, in this case
the exercise of local government authority. Each sequence may func-
tion as a small piece of the overall picture, but all are interlinked such
that they clearly suggest the documentary’s broader theme: political and
ideological control.
Although No. 16 Barkhor South Street is a study of the quotidian, it is
not the everyday activities of the juweihui that actually animate the doc-
umentary, but the larger ideological context in which these events take
place. Its profilmic activities are contingent in the sense of unplanned,
but subordinate to grander intellectual ambitions within the totality of
the documentary. The same is true of The Square. Here, the day-to-day
activities take place in Tiananmen Square, in central Beijing. As with
No. 16 Barkhor South Street, a basic temporal structure is maintained. The
film starts in the middle of one day, and continues through the bet-
ter part of 24 hours, concluding in the middle of the next. Yet, as in
No. 16 Barkhor South Street, this timeline is not defined precisely. While
certain of the events portrayed, such as the daily flag raising ceremony,
are clear markers of temporality, these are exceptional rather than repre-
sentative of the film as a whole. Indeed, though the directors could have
chosen to start and conclude the documentary with such temporally
specific moments, the shots that they actually selected – respectively,
a high-angle pan of the square taken from the Forbidden City and
an extended tracking shot of one of the Tiananmen policeman – are
chronologically unplaceable.7 While activities that share characteristics
are sometimes grouped together – there is an extended sequence that
links skateboarders, cyclists, joggers, old men playing frisbee and mar-
tial arts practitioners, for example – the significance of the events and
people whom we encounter over the course of the film is that they all
take place in, or adjacent to, the physical space of the square itself. This
is the only thing that connects them.
In turn, Tiananmen’s particular connotations are made very clear in
the film’s opening sequence. In a series of 24 shots, all taken in or imme-
diately outside the police station responsible for monitoring the square,
the directors capture an interview conducted with the two senior offi-
cers at the station, Commissar Zhen and Chief Liu, by a CCTV camera
crew headed by Shi Jian. As Duan and Zhang record the television crew
talking to the policemen about the station, their jobs and their general
attitude towards the work, we hear the officers emphasizing how the
square sits at the centre of Beijing, and how their police station thus
represents both capital and country to locals and foreigners alike:
Tiananmen is our capital’s centre. So we can say here the police

represent Beijing. They receive people [from] all over the country.
Besides, they represent China, because it’s open to tourists, including
foreigners [ . . . ] So it represents not only the capital, but also China.
Yet they also discuss how it is their responsibility, with a staff of only
100, to maintain harmony in a site that can see upwards of half a mil-
lion visitors a day. In order to do so, they themselves not only disperse
among these crowds, but also rely on the support of those who work in
and around the neighbourhood. As Chief Liu says,
we try to make use of the shops and pedlars. They help us safe-
guard the square. We often visit the units [danwei] in the area, seeking
opinions, knowing tendencies [sic]. Then we rely on observation and
hunch.
These discussions clearly establish what follows as a meditation both on

the power of history, as mediated through Tiananmen, and the exercise
of state power in the physical space of the square. The various interac-
tions between the police, camera crew, local and foreign tourists, and
miscellaneous street vendors that dominate the majority of the film are
thus shaped by, and representative of, the significance of the context in
which they occur. Above all, they form a counterpoint to certain other
events that haunt discussion through their absent presence: those of
4 June 1989.
This is suggested by a very short, four-shot transition sequence that

connects the initial scene in the police station with the rest of the film.
The final shot of the film crew interviewing the officers cuts away to the
initial shot in this sequence. It is a close-up of Mao’s face, or two-thirds
of it: a portrait, slightly off centre, which fills almost half the screen,
but framed on either side so that the image is incomplete and almost
two-dimensional. The sound of people working can be heard, but it is
hard to identify the actual activity. The film then cuts to a close-up of
the source of the sound: it is carpenters planing wood. We appear to
be in a workshop, but where exactly the space is located is difficult to
tell. The camera tilts slowly upwards, to reveal behind the workmen the
same portrait of Mao’s face that we have seen in shot one. This time,
however, we can see that it is framed through an opening in the wall
of the workshop. The camera cuts again to a close-up of a carpenter’s
hands at work, tilting slowly upwards before cutting to the final shot.
This is a full shot of the workmen, framed again through an opening in
a wall; a smaller segment of the Mao portrait is visible again in the back-
ground, thus providing us with the perspective necessary to understand
the spatial relationship between the image and the carpenter. The cam-
era then cuts to the square itself. In the distance we can see the façade of
the Forbidden City, hung with its now barely visible image of the Great
Helmsman.
This sequence is unusual, almost unsettling. It bears no obvious causal
or temporal relationship to either the scene that precedes it, or that
which follows. When and where it occurs is not immediately clear. Its
significance, I would suggest, is that it allows the directors to introduce
the image of Mao, an image that recurs throughout the film, functioning
as a point of visual reference in a documentary that has no clear charac-
ters or storyline.8 The nature of the activity we see depicted in this brief
scene is essentially unimportant; what is important is that it takes place
under the watchful eyes of the Chairman, somewhere in the proximity
of Tiananmen Square, thus hinting at the centrality of ideology and pol-
itics to the overall theme of the film. Yet what is most interesting is that,
through a series of spatial reframings that invert the classical relation-
ship between an establishing shot (which here comes last, as opposed to
first) and a close-up (which here comes first, as opposed to last), Zhang
and Duan edit this sequence in a manner that mirrors the structure of
the entire documentary. We start with a detail; we finish with an over-
all picture; and the two are connected through spatial proximity. The
form of the documentary as a whole – one in which individual, inter-
nally coherent sequences are edited such that they build up a broader
picture of the documentary’s subject matter – is thus replicated over the

course of this one short scene.
Both of these documentaries therefore display complex formal struc-
tures that derive from spatial rather than temporal relations. Their
sequences are not indicative of a linear causality in the way that,
for example, Nichols has proposed is the case for the expository
documentary.9 Instead, we are faced with individual, internally coher-
ent scenes that appear to be linked associatively through the spaces
in which they occur, and by broader, more abstract issues, of which
they are suggestive. These scenes are then edited in such a way that,
together, they provide a more complete picture of the themes that they
indirectly hint at individually. Nichols (1981) has christened this par-
ticular documentary structure ‘metaphoric’ (p. 234) or ‘mosaic’ (p. 211).
Its practitioner extraordinaire, from whom the early independent doc-
umentary directors adapted it, is the American documentary filmmaker
Frederick Wiseman.
Public documentary and the metaphorical mode:

the influence of Frederick Wiseman
Frederick Wiseman is one of the United States’ most prominent direc-

tors of documentary, a man who, along with his contemporaries Robert
Drew, the Maysles brothers, Don Pennebaker and Richard Leacock,
helped establish the American direct cinema tradition of the 1960s.
This tradition emerged in the wake of specific technological develop-
ments, most obviously mobile cameras with embedded microphones,
that enabled synchronous sound shoots for the first time (Chanan,
2007, pp. 170–2; Winston, 1995, pp. 143–8). The films of the direct cin-
ema movement were among the first to exploit the possibilities provided
by such developments, notably shooting in ‘real time’. These directors
thus deployed techniques such as long takes, synchronous sound and
indirect speech to try to capture the flow of lived experience, in the pro-
cess minimizing their onscreen presence, and developing a genre noted
for the unpredictability and ambiguity of its style and content (Barnouw,
1993, p. 238; Nichols, 1991, p. 39). In doing so, they attempted to
move the documentary away from a self-consciously didactic mode,
towards one that could illuminate the experience of ordinary individ-
uals. Wiseman was particularly significant in this respect: from the very
beginning, his films eschewed the grand political topics of, for example,
even Robert Drew’s Primary (1960), in favour of studies of the day-to-
day operation of institutions and the people involved with them.10 His
work is thus not just formally but also conceptually distinct from the
expository mode of documentary that was popular prior to the 1960s,
for it sets out to depict the organization of the everyday within particu-
lar social institutions and formations, presenting us with unremarkable
events that appear to reflect the nature of daily existence (Nichols, 1991,
pp. 38–44).
Wiseman’s influence on the pioneers of independent Chinese docu-
mentary is widely recognized. Wu Wenguang (2001b, pp. 11–14, 41–7,
104–9) has written extensively about the impact of the director’s films
on his understanding of documentary. Both Chris Berry (2007, p. 125)
and Paola Voci (2004, pp. 99–100) have commented on his influence
on Duan Jinchuan’s early works, while Duan (2005) himself has also
talked of being the Chinese documentary maker most heavily influ-
enced by Wiseman. However, this influence is usually explained in three
ways. The first, as suggested in Chapter 1, is simply exposure. Wiseman’s
films were some of the first foreign documentaries viewed by the early
independent documentary directors, initially at the Yamagata Interna-
tional Documentary Film Festival in the early 1990s. Because this was
a period when Chinese directors were still searching for a visual lan-
guage through which to express their ideas, Wiseman’s work not only
demonstrated a variety of different approaches to the shooting of doc-
umentary film, but also provided possible models for what they were
doing in China. Second, Wiseman’s interest in the day-to-day operation
of social and political institutions, simultaneously quotidian and engagé,
is thought to have appealed to the political and intellectual commit-
ments of the first wave of directors. Thus, Berry and Voci both appear to
locate Duan’s use of the metaphorical or mosaic technique in relation
to the director’s interest in the analysis of political and social institu-
tions, and the desire to break with pre-Tiananmen conventions and
the intellectual positions associated with them. Lastly, and paradoxi-
cally, the indirectness of direct cinema – for example, its avoidance of
commentary, voiceover or subtitles – is supposed to have had its own
particular attraction. Such indirectness has generally been understood
to encourage a greater engagement with the material on the part of the
audience; indeed, Duan Jinchuan has said as much (Zhu and Mei, 2004,
pp. 130–1). However, it also provided a discursive workspace for direc-
tors in the immediate post-Tiananmen environment, one that hardly
welcomed politically motivated art. As Chris Berry (2006, p. 114) has
noted of The Square, one advantage of Wiseman’s approach was that it
facilitated a perspective that was both independent and yet simultane-
ously ambiguous, ensuring that the film could not be easily labelled as
dissenting or, worse, counter-revolutionary.
It is important not to underestimate the significance of these fac-

tors when assessing Wiseman’s impact on Chinese documentary. The
rapprochement between early independent documentary and CCTV
was short lived. Equally importantly, while it may have temporarily
expedited the production of these documentaries, it did not neces-
sarily facilitate their exhibition. Despite being produced by CCTV,
No. 16 Barkhor South Street was broadcast only once by the channel,
in August 2001, and then in a heavily edited, 30-minute version of
the 100-minute original (X. Lin, 2005). The media climate remained
inhospitable to the critical aims of a director like Duan Jinchuan; col-
laboration with state television was not, ultimately, going to change
that. Indeed, it was precisely this friction that resulted in Duan and
Jiang Yue breaking with CCTV and establishing their own indepen-
dent production company in 1998 (W. Cui, 2003, p. 90; Zhu and Mei,
2004, p. 9). And yet, by focusing on Wiseman’s influence on Duan
Jinchuan’s films in relation to subject matter and mode of audience
address, scholars have tended to overlook one significant facet of the
director’s formal style: his statement that his films present ‘a theory
about the event, about the subject in the film’ (cited in Nichols, 1981,
p. 209). In other words, they offer a particular model of causality. The
profilmic activities that we see in a Wiseman documentary are sig-
nificant because of what they tell us about the institutional or social
space in which they occur. They are not absolutely contingent, in the
sense of happening purely by chance. Instead, they are usually under-
stood as the consequence of the limits placed upon such contingency
by the context in which they take place. Wiseman is interested not
so much in the apparent randomness of the quotidian, but in how
it becomes routinized – less contingent, more predictable – in specific
contexts.
Formally, Wiseman’s indirect mode is directly implicated in the way
that propositions about the profilmic are advanced. This is because the
relationship between individual sequences in a Wiseman documentary
is not one of linear causality, but of spatial coexistence (Nichols, 1981,
pp. 211–12). In a standard model of causality, B would follow A because
the latter is responsible for initiating the former. In a Wiseman film,
B follows A not because the latter has necessarily brought about the
former, but because both are a product of the multiple relationships
between events and individuals that are ultimately shaped by the shared
socioinstitutional space in which they are formed (p. 217). Arguably,
the ultimate causal factor must therefore be this space. Each scene,
though internally coherent, is thus intended to help us build up an
overall picture of the latter, whether it be a hospital, school or mental
institution, and to demonstrate how it operates. It is for this reason that

Nichols christened Wiseman’s aesthetic as ‘mosaic’, in the sense that
‘each sequence [conveys] a recognizable aspect of the [film’s] overall
design’ (p. 211).
Wiseman’s style may indeed encourage speculation about the mean-
ing of what happens on screen: the lack of linear causality makes us
think carefully about the relationship between what we are seeing,
and what we have just seen.11 However, it does so within a carefully
circumscribed diegetic space. In effect, Wiseman is using editing tech-
niques to structure and imbue the profilmic with specific meaning. This
does not imply that what we see in a Wiseman film is any less con-
tingent in the sense of being orchestrated. Rather, his profilmic events
are edited so that they are drawn into an overall relationship within
the diegesis that reflects the director’s understanding of why they hap-
pen. Their semiotic contingency is therefore diminished, for each takes
on a specific significance in relation to the film’s overall theme; this is
the hierarchization that Mary Ann Doane (2002, p. 144) has insisted
is antithetical to the true nature of contingency. Wiseman’s indirect,
mosaic style is more than simply an attempt to generate a sense of lived
experience, or to suggest how an institution may function. It is also
symptomatic of a desire to balance the inherent ambiguity and unpre-
dictability of shooting live with a sense of the complex social forces that
he clearly believes structure such apparent unpredictability, and which
are made manifest through real events. The consequence, however, is
that the incommensurability of the profilmic is ultimately subordinated
to the grander intellectual ambitions of the documentary diegesis, thus
imposing broad limitations upon the possible interpretations of the
former.
This, I would argue, is precisely what we see at work in the pub-
lic documentary genre, as exemplified by both No. 16 Barkhor South
Street and The Square. For sure, Duan’s commitment to the xianchang
aesthetic ensures that the events captured on camera are unscripted,
and his deployment of observational techniques results in films that
are far less obviously didactic than those of the 1980s zhuantipian. Nev-
ertheless, these films are far from being a simple ‘slice of life’, but are
edited into a complex structure that imbues each individual section with
significance within the context of the overall documentary diegesis.
In doing so, the films reduce the absolute contingency of the pro-
filmic by introducing a structural formalization that is clearly intended
to convey directorial understanding of the routinization of social
interactions – most obviously via conformity to professional roles, and
through the influence of historical and ideological conditioning – in the

spaces and institutions on which these films focus. Thus, we arguably
see a transformation of the profilmic event, symptomatic of the con-
tingency of real life encounters, into the diegetic event, in which that
contingency has been reduced, in order to bring a semiotic coherence
to the documentary as a whole. The profilmic event therefore plays a
comparatively small part in the overall formal structure of these films.
Instead, it is subordinated to the diegetic event, and the desire to con-
vey, within limits, a particular understanding of political and historical
causation. In a sense, while the principles of xianchang ensured that the
early independent documentary directors abdicated a degree of control
over the profilmic when on location, the formal qualities of the pub-
lic documentary allowed a director like Duan Jinchuan to reassert that
control from the editing suite.
That Duan understands his work in this manner is ironically under-
scored by the ways in which The Square and No. 16 Barkhor South
Street diverge from Wiseman’s model. Wiseman’s films may be orga-
nized metaphorically, and his work may be political in the sense that
it documents the organization and institutionalization of American
living, but his locations are rarely endowed with any immediate his-
torical or symbolic significance. In contrast, location and subject often
make the metaphorical inclinations of early independent Chinese doc-
umentary quite explicit. This is particularly true of The Square and
No. 16 Barkhor South Street, as the director himself has acknowledged
(J. Duan, 2005). The Square is in fact a remake of Wiseman’s Central Park
(1989), a film that Duan and Zhang saw before they set out to make
their own (Braester, 2010b, p. 182; Li, Liu and Wang, 2006, p. 212).
But whereas Central Park has no specific sociopolitical resonance in
an American context, Tiananmen has a cultural importance for the
Chinese that stretches back to at least the early twentieth century.
It is, as Wu Hung (2005, p. 16) has noted, ‘an architectural site that
provides a locus of coalescence for political expression, collective mem-
ory, identity and history.’ Barkhor Street, in turn, is one of the oldest
and most culturally significant streets in Lhasa. It was also the epicen-
tre of the political unrest that broke out in the city in October 1987
(X. Lü, 2003b, p. 74), which the Chinese government forcibly sup-
pressed, much as it did with subsequent events in Beijing. While the
place occupied by the street in the history of inter-ethnic conflict in
Tibet is obviously underscored by the film, the presence of juweihui
in neighbourhoods throughout China, not to mention certain simi-
larities between the events of October 1987 and those of June 1989,
endows the documentary with a significance beyond its immediate

context. Although it clearly draws on the specificity of the Tibetan expe-
rience, it can therefore also be understood as a commentary on the
operation of government institutions throughout China. It is in pre-
cisely this ‘duality’ that Duan locates the film’s ‘universality’ (X. Lü,
2003b, p. 75).
For Duan Jinchuan, the metaphorical or allegorical mode therefore
allows concrete relations of cause and effect to be established between
the quotidian and more abstract sociopolitical issues, in the process
imbuing both with meaning. It is intended to help signify that everyday
activities in specific spaces are of more than merely local importance,
providing the audience with crucial insights into the workings of ide-
ology, and the exercise of government power, at a national as well as
grassroots level. The metaphorical as film form and practice is thus
critical to the generation of the publicness of public documentary. How-
ever, at the level of mediation, this means that the mode functions
to contain the absolute semiotic contingency of the diegetic event in
the same way that Duan’s ethnographic film practice functions to pre-
empt the fundamental unpredictability of profilmic reality when on
location. This is vital if some degree of diegetic coherence is to be main-
tained in the director’s documentaries. And yet, as with Duan’s shooting
practice, which sets out to tame the contingent rather than eliminate
its presence on location, such editing techniques are suggestive rather
than prescriptive.12 They are certainly more indirect than those of the
zhuantipian of the 1980s. This reflects the centrality of xianchang as
an essential guarantor of documentary authenticity in the 1990s; the
director’s own desires for a more actively engaged audience and a less
pedagogical documentary form; and the complex politics of Chinese
media production and exhibition in the post-Tiananmen period. Each of
these conflicting pressures demanded a slightly different calibration of
the relationship between the profilmic and the diegetic event; part of the
attraction of Wiseman’s direct cinema technique was that, as an obvious
product of location shooting that also emphasized editing as a means to
achieve a formally coherent whole, it allowed a director such as Duan
Jinchuan to negotiate these conflicting pressures. A balance could thus
be struck between the need for both profilmic contingency and diegetic
stability, although one that I would suggest ultimately favoured the
latter. How and why the private documentary reverses this relation-
ship – resolving tensions between the extradiegetic and intradiegetic
in favour of the former – is what the second half of this chapter will
explore.

Springtime in Wushan
Springtime in Wushan is the first documentary by Beijing Film Academy

professor and film director Zhang Ming. Zhang is a native of Wushan
County, located on the Three Gorges in Sichuan Province, and had
already shot two feature films based there – Rainclouds Over Wushan
[Wushan yunyu] (1995) and Weekend Plot [Miyu shiqu xiaoshi] (2001) –
when he started to film his piece of non-fiction. However, he has argued
that the role Wushan and its people play in the documentary is different
from that of his features. As part of the Three Gorges dam project, the
old town where Zhang grew up was submerged by the rising waters of
the Yangtze River, and its residents relocated to a purpose-built replace-
ment further up the valley. The two features, shot considerably prior
to this move, thus focus far less on the significance of their location:
in Rainclouds Over Wushan, for example, Zhang has suggested that the
Three Gorges and the dam project exist merely as background, while
in Weekend Plot the former constitutes a location for the activities of the
film’s characters. This is not to say that these are ‘films about the scenery
in Wushan’ (Wushan de fengguang pian); rather, they are films about the
people of Wushan, in particular their ‘feelings about the uncertainty of
the future’ (Zhu and Wan, 2005, p. 176). In contrast, the focus of Spring-
time in Wushan is implicitly the present. The documentary takes place
over the 2003 Spring Festival, immediately prior to the submerging of
the old town where Zhang and his friend Zheng Jinzhong, who accom-
panies him through most of the documentary, grew up. All Wushan’s
residents have already been moved to the new town further up the val-
ley, where they are celebrating their first Chinese New Year. The director
has returned home both to be with his family over the holiday season,
and to see what remains of the old town before it disappears completely.
While there, he picks up his camera. Springtime in Wushan is therefore
a ‘testimonial’ (jianzheng) (Zhu and Wan, 2005, p. 176) to a moment in
time just prior to the disappearance of the old, but before the new has
fully emerged.
Zhang’s film shares certain preoccupations with much early public
documentary: the impact of rapid urbanization and industrialization
on Chinese society, and a desire to record the nature of this impact
before it becomes naturalized. However, the director approaches his
subject matter from a highly personal perspective, for he is still, how-
ever ambivalently, connected to the community that he is filming.13
This point of view manifests in two ways. First, Springtime in Wushan
features one of the stylistic rhetorical twists characteristic of the pri-

vate documentary form as a whole: visual or aural acknowledgement
of the director’s presence. Zhang does not hide behind the camera; in
interactions with both family and friends, in particular Zheng, who
almost takes the role of his on-camera alter ego, his position as direc-
tor is registered through conversation and commentary. Second, the
film integrates this investigation of Wushan’s modernization with the
stories of those who live there. The documentary’s initial scenes are
all, in a sense, attempts both to locate those traces of the past that
still remain in and around Wushan, and to explore what effect such a
momentous upheaval has had on the social fabric of the town through
the lives of Zhang’s friends and relatives. The opening, in which Zhang
and Zheng take a taxi down to the ruins of the old town and wander in
the rubble, endeavouring to locate old architectural landmarks amid a
landscape in which, as Zheng says, ‘Everything’s changed’, is the most
obvious in this regard, quite explicitly evoking the personal memories
invested in the remnants of place that surround the two men. As Wang
Qi (2006, p. 253) has noted, they are constructing a ‘mental map’ of the
past on the ruins of the present. The subsequent sequence, which fol-
lows Zhang, Zheng and some old friends from a tea house in the new
town, through a tour of the city’s nightlife, is an opportunity both for
the men to catch up, and for director and audience to take stock of the
social violence wrought by the enforced relocation of the community,
and the rapid commercialization that appears to have accompanied it.
The plastic coconut palm street lighting that adorns the main drag; the
omnipresent karaoke bars, and the girls that do or don’t frequent them
(as one friend comments, ‘What are we doing here since they’re [the
prostitutes] all gone? Where’s the fun in that?’); the hotel that Zheng
vetoes as a place to go and drink tea because it is frequented by the new
Wushan ‘bourgeoisie’ (baofahu), who make him feel ‘awkward’ (ganga):
all these images and incidents are part of this particular story. Finally,
the next day we follow the director and his father round the new town.
In this sequence, shots of the new buildings are accompanied by com-
mentary from the old man explaining their function in the new urban
landscape: elementary school, department store, ‘European-style’ hous-
ing. Thus is the old town that Zhang went searching for in the opening
sequence resurrected, and its ghost mapped onto the geography of this
emerging city space.
It would be perfectly possible for this structure – three interlocking
strands exploring the same theme from three slightly different, yet nec-
essarily connected, perspectives – to develop indefinitely over the course
of the documentary. However, in the following scene, we are exposed to

something entirely unexpected and unpredicted. This sequence occurs
in the teahouse where Zhang and his friends were initially reunited in
the film’s second extended section. The men sit around a low table, play-
ing poker and drinking tea. One of them, Qi Heping, makes a telephone
call to his girlfriend’s sister; he wants to know why he hasn’t heard from
his girlfriend over New Year. Slowly, as the conversation unfolds, we
gather the reason for the lack of communication: Qi’s girlfriend has been
jailed for brawling. The phone call ends; no one stops playing cards; one
of the group says ‘I don’t think it’s just about a fight – maybe there are
other reasons.’ And Qi picks up the phone once more, initiating a series
of phone calls – to the town’s assistant prosecutor, to a friend of his in
the Public Security Bureau – in an attempt to discover what exactly these
reasons might be.
Throughout this scene, an extended long take, Zhang keeps the cam-
era fixed on his friends. It seems he is unsure what to do. The measured,
deliberate manner in which all those present in the room continue with
their card game during Qi’s telephone calls suggests that, contrary to
appearances, they are also listening extremely carefully, attempting to
ascertain the precise nature of the conversation. So too is the viewer.
There is no preparation for this event, no sense that the space in which
it is taking place might have some bearing upon what is happening.
Instead, we are left trying to interpret the potential significance of this
news. Given its apparent lack of connection to the thematic concerns
that have dominated the documentary up until this point, it is, in the
semiotic sense, quite open-ended. This arrest could mean anything or
nothing, and, while appearing suggestively important, to what exact
degree this is the case is impossible to judge. The primary significance of
the event appears to be that it has simply happened – but that no one
knows how or why.
As the documentary progresses, the impact of this moment is gradu-
ally revealed. However, this does not happen through thematic editing,
as might have been the case in a Duan Jinchuan film; Zhang merely
tracks events as they develop over the coming days. In consequence, the
entire strand of the documentary exploring Zhang and Zheng’s relation-
ship with their friends gradually refocuses on Qi’s efforts to clarify the
reasons for his girlfriend’s imprisonment; to locate her; and, ultimately,
to visit her over the holiday period. Although the resulting storyline
is potentially highly charged, there is no explicit attempt to link these
events to more universal concerns, such as the state of the penal sys-
tem in provincial China. Instead, the focus remains resolutely on the
personal dimension of this experience, and particularly the nature of

Qi’s relationship with his girlfriend. But what I find particularly inter-
esting about this plot strand is the way in which Zhang responds to his
encounter with this event. Rather than downplaying its significance, or
trying to incorporate it into one of the documentary’s previous themes,
he allows it to shape the direction in which the film develops. The pro-
filmic therefore becomes something that the diegetic responds to, rather
than immediately attempts to control. It presents an opportunity, not
just a threat.
In Zhang’s documentary, the relationship between the intradiegetic
and the extradiegetic thus differs slightly from that in the films of Duan
Jinchuan. Whereas in The Square and No. 16 Barkhor South Street pro-
filmic events are significant for what they can tell us about a wider
frame of reference, in Springtime in Wushan what happens in the tea-
house is important precisely because it does not appear to fit such a
frame. It seems to be completely contingent, and, initially at any rate,
quite baffling. Zhang Ming’s camera thus retains the capacity ‘to “catch”
moments, to itself be surprised by meaning’ (Doane, 2002, p. 180).
In other words, the open-ended nature of the encounter with the pro-
filmic event takes precedence over closing down and interpreting this
moment in the documentary diegesis. At this point, the ‘irreducible
specificity’ (Z. Zhang, 2007, p. 20) of xianchang is underlined. In the
specific example of Springtime in Wushan, one might suggest that what
unfolds in the wake of Qi’s news reduces this particularity by folding
the arrest back into a context, although one that is presented as pri-
marily personal. But this too is a response to the event, rather than a
preconceived interpretative structure that serves to carry a message –
such as, one might suggest, Zhang’s interest in the destruction of his
hometown. In its very contingency, the unpredictable nature of mate-
rial reality serves to change the rules of the game, and, in the process,
the focus of the documentary.

Floating
Unlike Springtime in Wushan, Floating [Piao] (2005) is set in urban

China proper. The first full-length documentary from young filmmaker
Huang Weikai, it follows Yang Jiwei, a 30-something busker from the
province of Henan, as he attempts to make a precarious and quasi-
legal living in Guangzhou, on the Pearl River Delta. The director tracks
eight months in Yang’s life, covering his personal relationships and
professional tribulations, which culminate in his arrest and expulsion

from the city at the hands of the local police. Arguably, Floating therefore
engages with a number of themes characteristic of public documentary:
the life of the artist, explored so comprehensively by Wu Wenguang in
Bumming in Beijing and At Home in the World; the social environment
of the Chinese underclass, exemplified by Out of Phoenixbridge; and the
interaction of ordinary people with government institutions at a local
level, as discussed previously in relation to No. 16 Barkhor South Street.
Yet, much like Zhang Ming, Huang approaches his subject from a far
more personal angle. Floating is shot from the perspective of one indi-
vidual’s experience; there is no attempt to make institutional operations
a primary ‘character’ in the evolution of the documentary. Instead, we
get to see and hear scenes of great intimacy: the suicide attempt by
Yang’s first girlfriend, Peach, and his trip with her to the local hospital
to pump her stomach; his second girlfriend Haixia’s abortion, and the
impact this has on their budding relationship; how he feels about his
teenage love, Lijun, who still lives in his hometown back in Henan. And,
in contrast to Wu’s protagonists, Huang’s are not agonized intellectuals
with avant-garde affiliations, trying to realize their utopian ambitions
either at home or abroad. Yang and his friends are struggling to get by
in a thoroughly materialistic society whose values they simultaneously
endorse, and yet are denigrated by. To quote Yang: ‘I’m nothing. I’ve no
money [ . . . ] I’m nobody. I’m almost 30 and I don’t own a thing.’
In a sense, Floating displays aspects of both documentary forms, hold-
ing them in tension over the course of the film. Unlike Zhang Ming,
however, Huang Weikai saves his unexpected profilmic event until the
very end of the documentary. In the final sequence, Yang Jiwei is
unexpectedly arrested by the police, who discover that his temporary
residence permit has expired, and transport him to the Shahe Detention
and Repatriation Centre. What follows is a desperate 12-hour period in
which Haixia and Huang struggle to find enough money to bail the
busker out, and then deliver it to him in person. Arriving at Shahe the
morning after Yang’s incarceration, Huang waits outside the gates for
the bus that will transport his friend to the railway station, and thence
onto a train headed for Henan. In an extraordinary sequence, he physi-
cally chases the vehicle across Guangzhou, first on foot, then in a taxi,
and then on foot again. At last, he catches the bus as it lies stranded in
a traffic jam. In an inconclusive shot, we hear the director shouting that
Yang should use the money to bail himself out on the train, and watch
the bus as it disappears into the distance. Whether Huang has actually
managed to pass any money over is unclear. Finally, the camera cuts to a
scene of passing countryside, apparently shot from a moving train, with

Yang singing over the soundtrack. Intertitles inform us that the same
month Yang was repatriated, Sun Zhigang, a university graduate, was
beaten to death in a Guangzhou detention centre having been arrested
for not carrying his temporary residence permit; and that three months
later, the State Council abolished the detention system.
By concluding Floating with a direct reference to such a high profile
case of official misconduct, Huang Weikai frames Yang’s arrest as the
consequence of broader institutional practices that are inherently unfair
and potentially fatal, inviting the viewer to see it not as an aberration,
but as a symptom of more general problems in the Chinese polity.14
In doing so, he has clearly decided to end the film on a consciously
political note, one more obviously in keeping with the traditions of the
public documentary than the private. And yet, this framing is retrospec-
tive. During the actual bus chase sequence itself, for example, the overtly
vérité nature of the flailing, unfocused camerawork directs our attention
to the genuinely contingent nature of the incident. Its dramatic ten-
sion derives precisely from the fact that its outcome is as unclear now
as it must have to been to Huang then, while the ambiguities surround-
ing Yang’s fate are never clarified. Does he get the money? Does he use
it to bail himself out? In this sense, the entire sequence is left deftly
open-ended, a classic example of the filmmaker’s encounter with the
vicissitudes of the profilmic. This is underlined by Huang’s decision to
invert the documentary’s chronological development in order to close
with Yang’s detention. Although the film is structured in reverse, start-
ing in January 2003 and moving slowly back in time to August 2002,
this final sequence is dated March 2003. Any sense of moving towards
a diegetic climax that might conclude or explain Yang Jiwei’s story –
which would logically be its profilmic ‘beginning’, possibly even the first
meeting between the director and his subject – is thus radically undercut
by this sudden reversal of narrative flow. While Yang’s arrest may be the
documentary’s high point, on immediate viewing the event is easier to
appreciate as an isolated yet visceral occurrence rather than as evidence
of a broader crisis in Chinese urban governance.
I would therefore argue that, while Floating positions its unexpected
event more explicitly than Springtime in Wushan, it also seeks to retain
that sense of profilmic uncontrollability, of being surprised by material
reality. It does so by saving its explicit framing of Yang’s deportation
till the very end of the film, and by uncoupling the busker’s arrest
from the formal structure of the rest of the documentary. The impact
of this sequence thus derives in part from its slightly isolated nature,
which serves to intensify both the particularity of the moment and its
status as a signifier of liveness. This dual effect helps Huang Weikai
mediate between the demands of the profilmic and the diegetic, and
of the private and the public elements of the documentary, in a manner
that situates his work somewhere between Duan Jinchuan’s and Zhang
Ming’s. It is this negotiation between the public and private elements
of the documentary, and the role of the unexpected event in this pro-
cess, that is illustrated even more clearly in a key work of independent
Chinese documentary: Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks.
Structure and event in West of the Tracks
Unlike Floating, no single story structures the triptych that is West of the
Tracks. Despite the fact that Rails, the final third of the documentary,
focuses closely on a father–son relationship, the politically symbolic
nature of the site where it was shot has led critics to frame the work in
terms derived more obviously from the public than the private tradition.
Zhang Yaxuan has argued that, in its entirety, Wang Bing’s film develops
less through incidents and characters than in relation to time and space
(Zhang and Zhang, 2003, p. 154). Lü Xinyu (2005c, pp. 128–9) has noted
how Rust, the first part of the documentary, is strictly structured round
factory routines and working times: as we move from factory to fac-
tory, through the different stages of smelting, electrolysis and refining,
a narrative emerges that takes as its subject the process of production
itself. Tracing the eclipse of this process through the historical icons
of the factories and those who work in them, the director thus cap-
tures the ruination of Chinese socialism and its ideals. Even the railway
scavenger Lao Du in Rails has been described as ‘more an archetype or
“everyman” than a character or personality’ (J. Li, 2008). This critical
tendency is only reinforced by the manner in which the documentary is
shot. Wang Bing adopts an observational approach that owes as much
to the early independent documentary filmmakers as it does to more
contemporary directors, or to reflexive and experimental styles. One of
the most striking things about the film, as Owen Hatherley (2009, p. 24)
has pointed out, is how inconspicuous the filmmaker appears, ‘how eas-
ily he assimilates himself into [the] mundanely apocalyptic landscape’
of Tiexi District.
West of the Tracks would therefore appear to have more in common
with No. 16 Barkhor South Street or The Square than Floating or Springtime
in Wushan. And yet, as in these latter two films, the contingency of the
profilmic event is critical to the structure and effect of the documentary.
This is demonstrated most clearly in a now-famous scene from Rust that

takes place entirely within the confines of a tiny room in the foundry’s
zinc plant. The initial shot is empty of people: the camera is focused on
the door, behind which hangs a large coat; to the front of shot are set
a table and chair. We hear a voice from off screen, and the camera pans
left to reveal a worker, lying on a bench along the wall. He starts to talk
about his past, describing his education, or rather lack of it, during what
is clearly identifiable as the Cultural Revolution. ‘I was sent down for
two years,’ he says, before going on to outline how the disruptions of the
period left him with only the bare minimum of skills: ‘It was the same
for everyone my age, none of us got any education.’ Wang cuts in closer
as the man shifts slightly sideways, turning into the camera; he starts to
talk about school exams, and we hear other people enter the room, one
of whom passes in and out of shot behind the worker, who continues
talking. Suddenly a second voice interjects, ‘The plant’s shutting down
in two days.’ ‘What?’ says our first worker, turning his face away from
the camera to look off screen at this new interlocutor. ‘We’ve two more
days,’ is the response. ‘Are you serious?’ enquires the first worker. ‘Yeah.
They’re shutting down the zinc smelting plant in two days,’ continues
the voice. At this point, the camera pans right to reveal the source of this
information: one of the worker’s colleagues. This man reports that the
news has just been broken by the factory manager. The camera then cuts
to a third worker, with whom a discussion about the ethics of stealing a
tool kit is initiated: is it theirs, or does it belong to the factory? A fourth
man comes in; the three then exit, leaving behind the very first worker.
The camera cuts to a medium close-up of his profile, cigarette in hand,
silent and motionless. Then he sighs, ‘I can’t believe we’re bankrupt.
It happened so fast.’ The camera pauses for a few more seconds on his
face, before cutting away to a long shot of the factory floor in operation.
Wang, we see, has managed to capture the exact moment at which the
zinc plant maintenance worker learns of the factory’s demise.
The resignation with which the plant’s employees accept this news is
in itself extraordinary, but the scene is significant in other ways. It is
a pivotal moment for this section of the film. In its wake, Rust shifts
from examining the industrial life of the factory and its workers to the
incredibly rapid process – a mere 48 hours – wherein the plant is closed
down and the employees laid off. Indeed, the section concludes with
an extended sequence following those workers who have been sent for
detoxification in the wake of the factory’s collapse. But the scene is also
a turning point for the trilogy as a whole. Everything that occurs in
Remnants is largely consequent upon it. The appropriation of land, the
destruction of the residents’ housing, their enforced removal and the

dispersal of the community across the city: all of this is a result of the
factory’s bankruptcy. In a sense, then, it is the single moment within
the entire film that is perhaps most representative of the experience
Wang Bing is trying to convey: the destruction of working-class liveli-
hoods in a particular time and place, but also in a manner beyond the
immediate control of those most directly affected. This is not, however,
a moment that was planned or even predicted. As Wang points out, the
maintenance worker, lying on the bench and talking about his child-
hood, had no idea that in 10 minutes time his life would be changed
irrevocably, and neither did the director (Y. Zhang, 2002). Indeed, when
Wang started shooting, the foundry was operating normally. He selected
it not because it was obviously going bankrupt, but because of its sta-
tus and historical importance (the Electric Cable Factory and the Steel
Rolling Mill he chose in part because he had good relationships with
certain of the employees, particularly in the former, and could there-
fore shoot scenes featuring the factory’s leadership without interference)
(X. Lü, 2005c, p. 127; Y. Zhang, 2002). And yet, for the director, it is pre-
cisely the unexpectedness of this particular encounter that generates its
emotional power:
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, [so] you will remember it very clearly.
(Y. Zhang, 2002)
The sequence is key not simply to the film’s narrative direction, but also,
Wang appears to suggest, to our ability to empathize with its subjects
and their individual stories.
One could argue that, as per Zhang Ming, Wang Bing responds to,
rather than attempts to control, the unexpected profilmic event, and
that this is what distinguishes West of the Tracks from The Square and
No. 16 Barkhor South Street. I would suggest that the question of affect
is as important. As we have seen, Duan Jinchuan uses observational
techniques in his documentaries as a way of constructing an argu-
ment about the historical world, but an argument that encourages
critical enquiry on the part of his audience. In contrast, conveying emo-
tional experience seems as, if not more, central to Wang Bing’s use of
the observational aesthetic. Despite the many explicitly public quali-
ties of West of the Tracks, critics have also been drawn to contemplate
the film’s emotive elements, its capacity to be ‘at once epic and inti-
mate’ (Sante, 2009, p. 7). Lü Xinyu (2009, p. 4) argues that this latter
quality is central to what Wang Bing is seeking to achieve in the
documentary:
He allows us to see and understand that the destiny of art in con-

temporary China is to re-establish a connection with its citizens, to
depict not just their poverty but their tenacity, to validate the feelings
they have about their lives.
For several commentators, this validation is achieved via the film’s rep-
resentation of working life, in particular that of Lao Du and his son
in Rails. Andrew Ross (2009, p. 39) has described this section of West
of the Tracks as ‘intensely intimate’, while for Wang Qi (2006, p. 252),
it allows the director to ground the grand abstractions of the factory
sequences in concrete personal experience, potentially redeeming the
erasure of individual histories witnessed in the first two-thirds of the
documentary. What Wang Bing’s discussion of the zinc plant worker
does, however, is link his filmmaking practice, albeit haltingly, to the
generation of this experience. Retaining the unexpected impact of this
news after mediation, he seems to suggest, ensures that its experiential
quality for the worker – and, indeed, the director – is conveyed in full
to the viewer. It allows us to literally place ourselves in his position, to
hear and understand this news almost as if him. Contingency lends this
event a visceral quality: what it means is less important than how it feels.
This encourages us to connect intuitively with the worker, even when
what we are seeing is not obviously personal or intimate. Here, the pri-
vate as an emotional state is directly connected to the unexpected and
the uncontrollable: to liveness itself.15
None of this is to deny the more overtly metaphorical elements of
West of the Tracks. As with Floating, except perhaps more explicitly so,
the documentary moves between the registers of private and public,
often attempting to balance the two. What it does suggest, however,
is that Wang Bing has interwoven the contingent event and the pri-
vate in ways that allow us to connect them more explicitly to xianchang.
In West of the Tracks, the unexpected event plays a critical part in signi-
fying the liveness of Wang’s filming practice, and an equally critical part
in conveying the private elements that critics seem to associate, per-
haps counterintuitively, with the documentary. But what we can also
begin to see is how the concept of the private as specific, particular or
contingent – as prior to meaning, if we return to Mary Ann Doane’s
(1997, p. 142) definition – can be translated into the idea of the private
as emotional experience. This is not to equate the types of experience
represented in Rust, Remnants or Rails with, for example, the represen-
tation of, say, family breakdown; again, they have the explicit potential
for much broader applicability. And yet, as Wang Bing has tried to artic-
ulate, perhaps the power of the unexpected can also help convey the
individual dimension of historical tragedy as shared experience, thus
balancing once again the demands of the personal and the communal.
Towards a contingent documentary practice
Compared with both The Square and No. 16 Barkhor South Street, all three
of the documentaries discussed above make a feature of the unexpected
profilmic event. Unlike Duan Jinchuan, the filmmakers seem to place far
less emphasis on containing the contingency of this moment through
editing than on foregrounding it. Indeed, in the case of Wang Bing,
there appears to be a perceptible move towards the valorization of the
unexpected as a critical element of the documentary diegesis. The way
in which these three documentaries mediate liveness thus leans towards
preserving the open-endedness of the profilmic, rather than presenting
events in a synecdochic manner, as per Frederick Wiseman. This sug-
gests a less immediate concern with the meaning of what is shown on
screen – at least, meaning in the sense of a grand narrative – than with
the status of such events as accidental, unexpected and uncontrollable.
The arrest of Yang Jiwei or the sudden collapse of a Tiexi District fac-
tory thus become as important as visceral signifiers of material reality’s
unpredictability, and the unstable relationship of the director to this
reality, as they do of a larger picture that needs to be comprehended.
Indeed, Wang Bing seems to suggest that feeling is more significant than
meaning, and that it is primarily through the former that an under-
standing of deindustrialization and its human consequences can most
effectively be conveyed.
I would argue that this shift has in part been caused by explicit differ-
ences in documentary film practice that separate Duan Jinchuan from
Zhang Ming, Huang Weikai and Wang Bing. As previously indicated,
Duan is famous for his extensive preshoot preparation. I have quite
explicitly linked this to a desire to manage the problems of location
shooting, and its potential consequences for the documentary as fin-
ished product. In contrast, this sense of preparation is missing from
these other directors’ discussions of their work, in which they exhibit
a much more laissez-faire approach to the filming of a documentary.
For example, Zhang Ming stresses that starting to shoot Springtime in

Wushan was not something he had planned to do,
but when walking with a friend down the road from the new town
to the ruins of the old, I switched on the DV camera I was carry-
ing . . . . I’d had this tiny DVCAM camera for three years, but this was
the first time I’d used it to start filming.
(Zhu and Wan, 2005, p. 176)
Similarly, Wang Bing intended to shoot a feature film when he first

returned to Shenyang from Beijing. It was only when it became clear
that the technical, logistical and financial demands of such an undertak-
ing were significantly beyond his means that his thoughts turned to the
documentary form. In consequence, after renting a DV camera and buy-
ing some 20-odd DV cassettes, he suddenly found that, camera in hand,
he was unsure what to do next; he had no clear sense of how to go about
structuring his film in relation to a potential subject (Y. Zhang, 2002).
Nor are such sentiments unique to these filmmakers. Wu Wenguang has
talked of adopting a style of working that eschews such preparation alto-
gether. With regards to his 2005 documentary Fuck Cinema [Cao tama
de dianying], for example, he has described himself as coming across the
topic unexpectedly, rather than deliberately selecting it (W. Wu, 2005).16
This sense of stumbling across the subject of one’s film, sometimes lit-
erally, is echoed by other filmmakers. Hu Xinyu started to shoot what
eventually became The Man at the request of Lao Su, one of the protag-
onists, who thought he would shortly be leaving Taiyuan; the director
never expected it to become the subject of a full-length film (C. Cui,
2007). Du Haibin says that he came across the vagrant boys who became
the subject of Along the Railroad when he was actually out scouting for
locations for a feature film he wished to shoot as a graduation piece
(W. Wu, 2001a, p. 213). Not only is Duan’s metaphorical editing practice
something that these filmmakers eschew, but so is his careful preshoot
preparation. Given that this is the case, it should hardly be surprising
that the unexpected and unpredictable are much more clearly identi-
fiable in Springtime in Wushan, Floating and West of the Tracks than in
either The Square or No. 16 Barkhor South Street.
Certain scholars have described these changes in practice as a self-
conscious fetishization of an amateur aesthetic, locating them firmly
within changes to the political economy of Chinese documentary pro-
duction during the 1990s (c.f. Y. Zhang 2004, pp. 125–6). Yet I think
this terminology obscures a second, equally important point: that such
changes in practice also reflect an understanding of what documentary

is, and how the director should relate to his or her material. This is
connected to the shift from the metaphorical to the particular that
I identified at the beginning of this chapter. As we have seen, in the
public documentary, the desire for the filmmaker to reveal the wider
significance of the events that he or she is portraying resulted in an
emphasis on editing as a way of shaping the material resulting from
location shooting. Duan Jinchuan makes this quite clear when he says
that the questions that arise for him during the editing process are ‘what
structural material will emerge [through editing], or how to actualize
my previous ideas [about the subject], sometimes to the point of having
to do moderate restructuring: this is the situation when I make films’
(W. Wang, 2000, p. 132). Duan, therefore, came to The Square and No. 16
Barkhor South Street with a particular set of issues, primarily political,
that he was looking to express. The material he selected was, to some
extent, a vehicle to illustrate these concerns, and therefore structured
with this in mind. But in the last decade, other directors have begun
to articulate a rather different position regarding their role and work.
Increasingly, they seem to align the position of the documentary maker
with a focus on the transient or the fleeting. Wu Wenguang, for exam-
ple, has begun to emphasize that over-intellectualizing a documentary
kills its most instinctive aspects; in order to preserve these, the director
should adopt the role of the ‘wanderer’ (manyouzhe), moving from place
to place until he or she alights on something that catches the eye (X. Lü,
2003b, p. 19). Ou Ning (2003, p. 35) puts it even more succinctly, com-
paring the documentary maker to the ‘flanêur’ (chengshi manbuzhe). The
attitude of these directors towards their material is thus inevitably rather
different from that of their predecessors. This is nicely illuminated by
Wang Bing’s description of planning West of the Tracks:
When you start you may plan the structure, style and content of your
film, but as you gradually get into it, when the object of your shoot
reveals itself is not up to you. In the midst of constant development,
things have their own cycle, and you have to slowly wait for this.
Only once this cycle has been constituted will you feel that your film
is slowly beginning to take shape.
(Y. Zhang, 2002)
Wang here implies that the nature and structure of his documentary
was not imposed externally, or developed prior to shooting; it evolved
instead out of the process of interaction with his environment and
his subject matter. Thus, to quote Zhu Chuanming, ‘The excitement of

shooting a documentary lies in never knowing what you will be going to
shoot; sometimes not even you yourself know what you are doing’ (Zhu
and Mei, 2004, p. 329). The contingent is no longer a problem that the
documentary director must manage; it is the raison d’être of the form.
In these statements, one has a strong sense of a shift away from the
metaphorical mode, towards one much closer in spirit to the private
or personal. No longer is the documentary understood, in almost alle-
gorical terms, as a means whereby universally applicable truths about
society as a whole are conveyed through observation of a part. Instead,
it is associated with a far more fragmented approach to immediate expe-
rience, one that is partial and particular. However, this approach is tied
to a sense of material contingency. Reality has its own unpredictable
rhythm. The role of the filmmaker is to capture this, rather than to man-
age or mould it. Documentary’s particularity is thus derived from a belief
that one cannot, or should not, pre-empt what will happen on location,
nor rationalize such events after filming in terms of one’s own politi-
cal convictions. This, in turn, is embodied in a shooting practice that
embeds contingency – in particular, lack of control over the profilmic –
more directly than in the processes developed by Duan Jinchuan, and
that implicitly moves away from using editing to make sense of its mate-
rial. Instead, the unexpected is embraced both as a visceral signifier of
reality and as a source of significant affective power.
What I am trying to suggest is that, at least in the examples consid-
ered here, there is a relationship between the management of liveness
and certain ways in which independent Chinese documentary has come
to be understood as public or private. This comes down to the par-
ticular execution of xianchang on the part of individual directors, and
how they have attempted to mediate contingency. In Duan Jinchuan’s
films, there is a comparative systematization of the unexpected, both on
location and through editing. The result is a complex cause and effect
structure that, though subtle, underpins the idea of these documentaries
as public in the semiotic sense. In the documentaries of Zhang Ming,
Huang Weikai and Wang Bing, however, this emphasis has shifted. What
these and other contemporary filmmakers have done, in abandoning
the metaphorical mode derived from Frederick Wiseman, and the quasi-
ethnographic approach to documentary practice that underpinned it,
is to discard those methods adopted by Duan Jinchuan to moderate
the dynamic of contingency inherent in location shooting. They have
sought instead to embrace the contingent, resulting in new ways of
conceptualizing the role of the director, the nature of the genre and
the kinds of stories that it can tell, all of which foreground the acci-
dental. Combined, these factors contribute to the sense of the private
documentary as covering material that is specific and ungeneralizable.
This has two implications. First, that the distinction between public
and private is perhaps not as absolute as certain directors would like
to make out. If different approaches to the same practice – xianchang –
actually contributed to the signification of these categories, then it per-
haps makes more sense to see the public and the private as different
points on a spectrum, rather than incompatible forms. This would allow
for the possibility of ‘mixed’ genres, of aspects of the personal being
identified in public works, and vice versa. This is already implied by
the ambiguous status of West of the Tracks, for example, which clearly
contains elements that suggest both personal and more political inter-
pretations. But it is equally true of Bumming in Beijing, where Zhang
Xiaping’s breakdown is both entirely unexpected and intensely per-
sonal, and yet embedded in a text that, if only retrospectively, has
come to acquire particular political overtones. This in turn suggests that
the idea of the private documentary emerging post-1997 as a symp-
tom of a generational shift may require some reassessment, and that
it might be possible to construct a genealogy of these elements in inde-
pendent documentary that stretches back much further, possibly even
to its emergence as a recognizable genre in the early 1990s.
The second implication, however, is that one should not take for
granted that a documentary marked as private or personal has no
broader social or political resonance. Although it is tempting to assume
that this turn to the personal is a result of a world where the ‘Over-
whelming and high-pressure control of political ideology has effectively
disappeared’ (X. Lü, 2009, p. 3) – in other words, in which political
ideology is no longer a determining factor in everyday life – making
documentaries that explicitly engage with political and social issues
remains a sensitive issue in China. While the boundary dividing accept-
able and unacceptable representation may be uncertainly delineated,
the consequences of transgressing it can be harsh.17 Implying that one’s
film is not political may therefore still be a necessary survival strategy for
filmmakers working in what is effectively a ‘grey zone’ of production.
Yet the inference here remains that the personal is, by definition, apo-
litical, and that making such a move, consciously or otherwise, reduces
the ‘social significance’ of the filmmaker’s work (Y. Zhang, 2004, p. 131).
Paul Pickowicz (2006, p. 15) makes this challenge most explicitly when
he describes ‘underground cinema’ (including independent documen-
tary) in contemporary China as ‘obsessed with the search for individual
identities [ . . . ] self-centered (and self-indulgent)’. In certain instances,

in particular those that focus on interiorization as a process of subject
formation, this may well be the case. But by connecting the unexpected
quality of liveness to the specificity of the personal or the private doc-
umentary, it is possible to see how the films discussed above do not
necessarily represent a retreat from the social or the political, but rather
an attempt to come to terms with its reformulation. Withdrawal into
an interior space, be that emotional or physical, is not the only way in
which the personal or private manifests in these documentaries. It is also
presented as a product of instability and of flux, of events that are hard
to predict and harder to control, and that are consequently difficult to
grasp or interpret. These events are not necessarily interior to the docu-
mentary subject; indeed, they are often visited on individuals, or groups
of individuals, from outside, in part explaining their unpredictability
and uncontrollability. In this sense, these documentaries manifest a
clear postsocialist sensibility, but one that permeates Chinese society
more broadly. They are both products of a period of ongoing transition,
and commentaries on the nature of social change in the PRC during the
post-reform era.
Conclusion
What I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter is the extent to which

independent documentary in China is a product of the interaction
between context and practice. Academic criticism has often understood
public and private documentary to be the expression of particular intel-
lectual and political commitments, each form quite distinct, sometimes
even representing different stages of documentary evolution. Yet the
continued importance of xianchang over the period under discussion
required directors to mediate their politics through this practice, and
the constraints it imposed. The emergence of these new forms or gen-
res can therefore be usefully interpreted in relation to the contingency
of liveness, embodied in this particular instance by the unexpected and
the specific. In Duan Jinchuan’s documentaries of the mid-1990s, I have
tried to argue that the formal qualities of the public documentary func-
tioned alongside an ethnographic approach to filmmaking as a way of
managing the limits of the unexpected, both ‘on the scene’ and within
the filmic diegesis, for political purposes. This reflected the ideologi-
cal commitments of the director, and the conditions under which the
films were produced. In contrast, more privately oriented documentaries
eschewed these forms and practices, embracing the unexpected and the
specific as ways of signifying the particularity of the experiences they

documented. And yet, this also suggests that the emergence of private
documentary cannot be directly equated to a process of subjective inte-
riorization, or a rejection of politics. As West of the Tracks demonstrates,
the contingent and the personal can be articulated in ways that are still
political, even if the manner in which these sentiments manifest dif-
fers significantly from that of The Square or No. 16 Barkhor South Street.
A simple division between public and private documentaries may thus
be harder to maintain than has sometimes been allowed for.
Ultimately, then, I have tried in this chapter to explore issues of docu-
mentary genre through the lens of xianchang. My aim has been to relate
arguments about the development of genre to elements integral to this
practice, demonstrating in the process how the two may be interrelated,
and how the emergence of public and private documentaries can be
understood, in part, with reference to the different ways in which partic-
ular forms of the contingent – the unexpected and the particular – have
been accommodated and shaped in the work of specific filmmakers.
In the next chapter, however, I wish to further expand upon this dis-
cussion. The careful reader may have noted that, behind the issue of the
public and the private, the unexpected and the specific, lies a question
of time – the time of the contingent, if you like. It is this question –
how is the ‘now’ of xianchang articulated in these documentaries? – that
I wish to address in Chapter 3.
3
Time, Space and Movement
Introduction
Independent Chinese documentary is usually associated with a

non-teleological sense of time. Often interpreted through the prism of
Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema, this distended temporality is under-
stood to reflect a loss of faith in narratives of progress, both socialist
and western, in early 1990s China. And yet, it is also clearly the time
of xianchang: time ‘in-the-now’, or the time of the contingent. What,
then, is the relationship between xianchang as a practice and this partic-
ular temporal sensibility? How, in other words, does the former generate
the latter?
In this chapter I answer this question by probing the connec-
tions between time, space and the execution of xianchang in three
documentaries: River Elegy, At Home in the World and In Public. Critical
here is the use of movement in these films, and the long-take aesthetic
characteristic of shooting ‘on the scene’. River Elegy, a traditional zhuan-
tipian, demonstrates a clearly teleological sense of time that effectively
spatializes the temporal, reflecting both the ideological predilections
of the programme’s production team and the technological limitations
of their film practice. In contrast, the temporality of Wu Wenguang’s
At Home in the World exemplifies time in the present, or time as time.
This is the result, I argue, of a particular combination of long-take aes-
thetics and of movement – both of the camera and of Wu’s subjects –
that helps generate a distinct sense of the documentary as unfolding
in ‘real time’. Finally, Jia Zhangke’s In Public creates an almost exagger-
ated sense of this latter temporality, through its use of excessively long
takes, and minimization of camera movement. The contrast between
Wu and Jia’s documentaries arises from the different ways in which the
74
Time, Space and Movement 75
two directors theorize their own filmmaking practices, but also signals
the distinct positions that both occupy within the world of global art
cinema. Not only does this comparison demonstrate how xianchang may
be rearticulated within different production contexts, it also suggests
how the different mediations of temporal contingency in these films are
markers of the conditions under which they have been produced.
The time of independent Chinese documentary
Wang Guangli, Shi Jian and the SWYC’s I Graduated! begins with a dis-
tinct sequence of three shots. Ranging between 30 and 45 seconds in
length, and accompanied by the sound of solo acoustic guitar, female
vocals and a male voice reciting song lyrics, each take is in black and
white, but characterized by a muted sepia light. The camera is positioned
at a slightly elevated eye level; it moves rapidly, if not entirely smoothly,
through the surrounding space, apparently mounted on a vehicle, pos-
sibly a bicycle or a small car. In the first take, it skirts the edge of what
appears to be a playing field, following the wire fencing that separates
the grass from the path running alongside it. In the second, it weaves
its way around a series of buildings that seem to be dormitories or class-
rooms, lined as they are on the outside with row upon row of bicycle
racks. Finally, in the third take, it is travelling along a city street. Corru-
gated iron dividers suggest a building site to one side, and, as the camera
presses forward, it is overtaken on the left by cars entering and leaving
the frame at speed. The screen then fades to black, leaving the uniniti-
ated viewer slightly disoriented. Not only is it unclear where these scenes
were filmed, it is also uncertain where the camera is headed. Does Wang
have a destination in mind? Or are we simply travelling aimlessly in
circles? At this point in the documentary, there is no way of knowing.
Instead, the viewer is simply left to experience the journey as it unfolds,
suspended in the moment.
The opening of I Graduated! exemplifies a sense of time that is sup-
posed to characterize much independent Chinese documentary and
Urban Generation cinema from the 1990s onwards. This ‘distended
form’ (Berry, 2007, p. 124) distinguished these films from the tightly
woven composition of the 1980s zhuantipian, and its fictional counter-
parts. Chris Berry has argued that, as a consequence of the continued
influence of the illustrated lecture format, the zhuantipian established a
‘rational, step-by-step logic’ as its foundational form (p. 124). In other
words, the manner in which it linked its images together demonstrated
a cause-and-effect rationale: the logic of argument. The result was an
implicitly narrative organizational structure that generated a strictly lin-

ear sense of film time. It was this structure that was abandoned by the
early independent documentary and feature filmmakers. Watching their
films, one becomes aware that they no longer conform to the narrative
structure of their predecessors, or to the sense of linear temporality to
which this is related. Instead,
it becomes hard to have a sense of teleology or progress as intervie-

wees ramble verbally in Wu [Wenguang]’s films and characters ramble
literally in Jia [Zhangke]’s [ . . . ] [T]he certainty of progress is replaced
by a contingent life in which characters react and respond rather than
initiate, looking for ways to get by rather than having a clear sense of
purpose.
(Berry, 2007, pp. 124–5)
The issue here is a shift from a developmental structure, in which a

film moves inexorably from beginning to end, towards an organiza-
tional form in which neither time nor argument are necessarily ordered
in such a rigid fashion. The temporality of early independent Chinese
documentary is thus fragmented and uncertain rather than sequentially
progressive: though not entirely divorced from their past, these films
seem uncertain of their relationship to the future. It is for this reason
that Berry (2009b, p. 114) has described the kind of impact they generate
as a mode of being ‘in-the-now’.
Theoretically, an alternative way to describe this shift is as a move-
ment away from a spatialized sense of time, towards one in which
time appears in something resembling its natural state. The idea that
chronological time is in fact time understood as space is summarized
succinctly by Ernesto Laclau (1990, p. 41), to the effect that ‘Any repe-
tition that is governed by a structural law of succession is space.’ Laclau
argues that time’s true form is that of dislocation or indeterminate pos-
sibility. The more one reduces variations in movement between one
point in time and the next, the more one effectively eradicates time as
time by eliminating the potential for change (p. 41). Thus, any strictly
regulated temporal model – for example, one in which past, present
and future are all clearly defined and fixed in chronological relation-
ship to one another – is resistant to time understood as transformative
possibility, for the relationship between its constituent parts is already
governed by a telos that has decided, a priori, the order in which these
stages will occur. The difference between two points in this temporal
arc is thus governed not by time but, to paraphrase Johannes Fabian
(1983, p. 16), distance. The shift from zhuantipian to jilupian, from a

system of representation that still bore the imprint of socialist prac-
tice to one that was less formally proscribed, was therefore also a shift
away from a sense of time as space, and towards an awareness of time as
unstable and unpredictable: time as time. It is therefore perhaps unsur-
prising that the temporality of these films has been described as one of
contingency (c.f. Berry, 2009b, p. 115; Veg, 2007, p. 137).
This concept is critical for understanding one framework invoked by
Berry to explain this new sense of temporality: Gilles Deleuze’s theory
of film. Deleuze, in his writings on cinema, identifies two significant
formal systems at work in film history. The first, which he describes as
the movement-image, he associates with classical, pre-World War Two
cinema in both Europe and the United States. Its archetypal manifes-
tation is the action-image (Martin-Jones, 2006, p. 20). In this image,
the movement of the human body serves as the logical link between
shots of often incommensurate spaces, ensuring that the end of one shot
functions as the beginning of the next.1 Deleuze argues that, in conse-
quence, the cinema of the movement-image is always structured via a
basic causal progression. This is because the action-image is based on an
action-reaction schema, ‘organized by conflicts, oppositions, and reso-
lutions’ (Rodowick, 1997, p. 12). The films therefore develop logically,
but also teleologically; their temporality is fundamentally linear, under-
pinned by a constantly replicating cyclicality. The movement-image
thus effectively spatializes time, subordinating it on screen to repre-
sentation via movement through space. As a result, time appears only
indirectly in the movement-image, as change is marked exclusively by
movement.
The formal logic of the time-image is quite different. Here, time is no
longer subordinate to movement through space, but manifests itself
directly. Characteristically, this occurs in two ways: through ‘empty’
takes, shots in which there is no human protagonist on screen; or
through shots in which subjects are captured motionless, often in
moments of reverie or contemplation (Martin-Jones, 2006, p. 22).
At these points, time is presented without the mediating influence
of the protagonist’s body, emerging not through an individual’s
movement in space, but as a consequence of his or her immobility.2
Yet these moments of stillness have implications beyond the immediate
filmic diegesis. Without movement, the linear linkages that charac-
terize the movement-image are much harder to maintain. Connec-
tions between shots cease to be clearly determined, instead becoming
increasingly suggestive, even irrational. The linear temporality intrinsic
to the movement-image is replaced by one that is disrupted and

discontinuous, while the ordered flow of images is broken, and its com-
ponents relinked through disconnected space (Frampton, 2006, p. 62).
With no clear sense of what motivates the transition from one scene
to the next, the progression of images cannot be predicted a priori.
Thus, teleological time has broken down entirely, and time in its true
sense – that of absolute contingency – is made manifest. As Deleuze
(1992, p. 207) notes, ‘Chance becomes the sole guiding thread’ of a film’s
narrative development, and an individual’s temporal horizon becomes
bounded exclusively by the present.
Deleuze has proven useful in a Chinese context because, despite the
philosophical abstraction of his theories, they are also implicitly histor-
ical. The time-image and the movement-image are immanent in one
another; any realignment between the two is therefore always to some
degree internal to cinema as an art form. However, the shift in Europe
and the United States from a cinema of the latter to one of the former
is understood to have been catalysed by World War Two. The trauma of
the war challenged the logic of the old cinematic regime, and produced
a new kind of image. This manifested most clearly in the cinematic new
waves of postwar Europe: of Germany in 1968; of France in 1958; and of
Italy, where the earliest manifestation of the time-image had emerged in
the purely optical and sonic situations captured by neorealist filmmak-
ers a full decade earlier, in 1948 (Deleuze, 1989, p. 2; 1992, p. 211). The
emergence of the unstable temporality associated with the time-image
is thus a consequence of a loss of confidence in the grand narratives of
western modernity, and of the nation state. Italy’s schizophrenic posi-
tion as a loser in the war, but one with a strong popular resistance which
did not identify with fascism – a conflicted narrative of national iden-
tity, if you like – is, according to Deleuze (1992, pp. 211–12), in part
why the country was the first to develop a fully blown cinema of the
time-image.
It is this loss of faith in grand narratives that has provided the crucial
parallel with the Chinese context. The emergence of independent doc-
umentary in the PRC can be broadly contextualized against the failure
of two such narratives. The first is that of revolutionary socialism, the
certainties of which had been under attack since the late 1970s. Like the
whig ideology that underpinned European understandings of moder-
nity, revolutionary socialism also assumed a clear and obvious telos:
the ‘iron necessity of the historical rush toward the Communist utopia’
(B. Wang, 1997, p. 127). Standardized in the representational strategies
of socialist realist visual culture, this temporality was also spatialized,
in that it was understood as continuous progress towards an inevitable

political goal; it found an afterlife in the rhetorical strategies of certain
zhuantipian, oriented as they were towards goal-driven argument. The
second failure was the collapse of the utopian ideals associated with
the Culture Fever of the 1980s. This period saw the Chinese intellec-
tual class not only engage in extensive discussions of western theory
and culture, but also increasingly construct their own enlightenment
discourse to parallel that of the CCP. Central to this utopianism was a
deep-seated belief that the cultural elite could steer the state project of
modernization in an appropriate, and ultimately successful, direction
(J. Wang, 1996, p. 2). This faith was radically shaken by the events of
1989, and the three years of repression that followed. The fragmented
temporality of early independent Chinese documentary thus reflects the
sudden loss of faith in utopian teleologies, whether socialist or capital-
ist, that many Chinese intellectuals experienced in the early 1990s, and
the growing desire of certain artists to liberate representational forms
from their historical and ideological straitjacket. Time in these films is
no longer regulated, nor is the future predictable. Instead, their subjects
exist in an immediate temporal present – the ‘now’ – that manifests in
the wanderings, both literal and verbal, that Berry identifies in the films
of Jia Zhangke and the documentaries of Wu Wenguang; wanderings
in which the protagonists’ final destination is unclear, in which logic
plays no obvious part, and which are distinguished by aimlessness and
waiting, rather than by activity.
Even if one accepts this explanation, however, it still leaves unan-
swered the question of how this sense of time was produced through
cinematic praxis; somehow this phenomenological experience had to
be translated into film form. For Deleuze, movement of the body, or
its lack thereof, is clearly critical. But what makes such movement
possible on screen is, in the final analysis, a particular editing prac-
tice. Arguably, the difference between the movement-image and the
time-image is ultimately reducible to the difference between classical
Hollywood continuity editing, and the editing techniques employed by
postwar cinemas, both in and outside the United States. The former
sought to depict space and time in a manner easily comprehensible to
the viewer; the latter rendered the spatiotemporal relationship between
shots irrational and unpredictable, thus eliminating any sense of narra-
tive progression in a film (Martin-Jones, 2006, p. 25; Rodowick, 1997,
p. 186). But those cinemas that the philosopher invokes as most repre-
sentative of the time-image were also the most enthusiastic adopters
of neorealist practices. Their many differences notwithstanding, the
common interest of directors such as Godard and De Sica in exper-

imenting with location shooting, amateur actors, and natural sound
and lighting begs the question as to whether Deleuze’s regime of the
time-image is generated in part by multiple elements of this mode of
filmmaking, not just editing. Given that it is precisely these practices
that also characterize independent Chinese documentary and Urban
Generation feature film, this conundrum is equally relevant in the
context of contemporary China.
I would suggest that, in the PRC, this is indeed the case. As should now
be clear, while the temporality of these documentaries may be that of
the time-image, it is also very much that of xianchang. The overwhelm-
ing sense they generate of time in the present speaks directly to the
temporal dimension of the aesthetic: it is the ‘nowness’ of ‘here and
now’, the contingency of liveness as an experience bounded in time as
well as space. But in consequence, the emergence of this sense of time
must also be connected to the development of xianchang as a practice: its
execution at different moments, in individual films, by particular direc-
tors. While it might have been the consequence of specific approaches to
editing, it could also have resulted from any of the numerous cinemato-
graphic techniques that underpinned shooting ‘on the scene’. Useful as
Deleuze’s framework may be as an heuristic device, there is no a priori
reason to assume that what he argued was true for Italian Neorealism
or for the French New Wave will necessarily apply to contemporary
independent documentary filmmakers in China.
The rest of this chapter probes these questions through three case
studies. In particular, it looks at how these documentaries use specific
film techniques to articulate time in relation to space and movement,
thus generating different kinds of temporality. Using CCTV’s River Elegy
as a point of departure, I discuss how the series demonstrates one way in
which the zhuantipian could articulate a spatialized temporality: by pre-
senting time as teleology, and movement as a consequence of abstract
argument. Although events in River Elegy are not necessarily presented
chronologically, its grand narrative equates the future with progress,
while representing time through images that evoke space. This reflects
both the ideology that fuelled the series and the continued influence of
traditional documentary practice at the level of production. In contrast,
Wu Wenguang’s At Home in the World, released seven years later, clearly
demonstrates a non-teleological sense of time ‘in-the-now’. However,
contra Deleuze, this distended form is not the result of time’s separation
from movement through editing. Instead, it is a consequence of the way
in which Wu Wenguang has both theorized and executed the long take
in his documentary practice – and in particular how this technique is

articulated to movement, both of the camera and of his subjects. Finally,
Jia Zhangke’s In Public provides an example of time in the present
that, in its near complete disaggregation of time, space and movement,
matches Deleuze’s theory of the time-image almost perfectly. However,
this temporality is produced through a particularly exaggerated form
of the long-take aesthetic that reflects an understanding of the prac-
tice quite distinct from Wu Wenguang’s; a different set of cinematic
influences; and Jia’s ongoing integration into regional and transnational
networks of cinema production. In Public thus suggests how a thor-
oughly aestheticized form of xianchang may ironically be generated not
through a loss of confidence in, or reaction against, ideologies of moder-
nity and the market, but as a consequence of a director’s assimilation
into that market, in the form of the global art cinema industry.
The movement-image and the zhuantipian: River Elegy
As has been noted, despite its self-proclaimed political radicalism, River

Elegy was in many ways a very traditional media product. ‘Logocentric’
(Voci, 2004, p. 76) in form – due to budget limitations, it overwhelm-
ingly followed the classic production practice of first drafting the script
and then locating archival images to act as visual illustration, finally uni-
fying the whole through narrative voiceover (Bodman and Wan, 1991,
pp. 4–5) – the six parts into which the series was divided each addressed
different thematic aspects of the programme’s dominant rhetorical the-
sis: that China could only revive its dying culture through wholesale
westernization and modernization (J. Wang, 1996, pp. 118–19). Yet, as
Richard Bodman has pointed out, due to its thematic emphasis, River
Elegy is not organized in a strictly chronological fashion. Indeed, within
each of the thematic threads constituted by the individual episodes, the
narrative jumps through time and space: while the voiceover spends
much time discussing ancient history, for example, the visual images
provide constant references to the recent past, especially the Cultural
Revolution (Bodman and Wan, 1991, p. 5). How, then, is a sense of
spatialized time manifested in the series?
The answer lies in the combination of form and image through
which River Elegy builds up its argument. This in turn is derived from
a particular theory of Chinese historical causality: the theory of ultra-
stability. According to the proponents of the theory, Jin Guantao and
Liu Qingfeng, Chinese history is fundamentally cyclical in nature, alter-
nating constantly between periods of order and periods of disturbance.
This cyclicality, suggest Jin and Liu, explains what they see as the persis-
tence of China’s traditional feudal society, and the country’s resistance
to modernization (Bodman and Wan, 1991, pp. 82–3; J. Wang, 1996,
pp. 127–8). However, the consequence of such a model is an exclusively
synchronic view of Chinese history: ‘insofar as there is movement [ . . . ]
at all, there is no development, only cyclical recurrence’ (J. Wang, 1996,
p. 128). The possibility of a radical break with this circle of repetition
is never really countenanced; Chinese society is instead condemned to
oscillate between the twin poles of tranquillity and chaos. In this sense,
the characteristics of the theory of ultra-stability correspond precisely to
those of spatialized temporality.
Despite nominally presenting itself as critical of much Chinese his-
tory and historical thinking, River Elegy ironically ends up reinforcing
these characteristics. Throughout the series, tradition is associated with
China, and modernity with the west. In consequence, it is only through
a wholesale rejection of things domestic that the country can mod-
ernize, for Chinese culture and its concomitant values are understood
as rooted indelibly in the past. This is realized most obviously via the
manipulation of colour symbolism. For example, in episode six, Azure
[Weilanse], the colour yellow is linked, in a classic manner, to the Yellow
River and the yellow earth of the Loess Plateau. Yet whereas these sym-
bols are traditionally seen as the incubators of the best of Chinese
culture, both traditional and revolutionary, in River Elegy they are repre-
sented in a strongly negative light. Despotic and capricious, the Yellow
River is portrayed as weighed down by historical tradition (its sediment)
and limited in outlook (the set course of the river bed), while the culture
it has germinated is introspective, defensive, monistic and incapable of
innovation (Bodman and Wan, 1991, p. 9; X. Chen, 1995, pp. 29–30).
In contrast, blue, a colour with no traditional connotations in China,
is associated with technologically advanced modernity. This is captured
through the image of the ‘blue planet’ – the earth photographed from
space – that the directors selected to accompany the episode’s title
sequence (Bodman and Wan, 1991, p. 249), and in images of the sea
that recur regularly thereafter. Azure culture, a product of the latter, is
seen as dynamic, inventive, pluralistic and individualistic. Seafaring led
to trade, which in turn generated industrialization, science, democracy,
and associated values such as political accountability and transparency
(Bodman and Wan, 1991, p. 9; X. Chen, 1995, pp. 31–2). It is these val-
ues that have allowed the west to dominate the modern world, and pre-
cisely these values that China lacks. Thus, if the country is to modernize,
it must become more western. This is quite literally signified in the
episode’s final scene, where the camera captures the mouth of the Yellow
River from above, at the point where it joins the East China Sea. Here,
yellow silt and blue water finally intermingle. The river’s geographical
journey, from the hinterlands of the Loess Plateau to the coast, thus rep-
resents the temporal journey China should make, abandoning its past
in order to realize its future potential. As Chinese culture is exhorted to
‘go west’ while it journeys eastwards, so modernization is quite literally
spatialized.
If River Elegy presents a teleological, spatialized sense of time, it is not
because its individual episodes portray simple, chronologically ordered
events. Neither is it because it uses the movement of the human body
to unify space and time: the abstract nature of its subject matter would
make this almost impossible. Rather, it is for two interrelated reasons.
First, because the grand narrative of the series – that of China’s need
to abandon its past in order to achieve full modernity – equates the
future with progress, even as it worries that the weight of history will
permanently handicap the country. The logic of its argument, whether
conducted in a single episode or over the course of all six parts, is there-
fore teleological. The issue at hand is not where the past and future
may be located, or what their relationship is to one another, but how to
move from one clearly defined stage to the next. In this sense, time as
progress is understood as movement through space, even though China
itself risks being forever condemned to historical cyclicality.
The second reason, however, is because the manner in which the
series unifies this argument replicates such logic. The documentary’s var-
ious themes are woven together through the use of repeated symbolic
imagery (Bodman and Wan, 1991, p. 5). This imagery, in turn, reiter-
ates the spatial distinctions between the modern (Euro-America) and the
pre-modern (Asia) that are implicit in the film’s structure: yellowness is
linked to China, which in turn is connected to history and backward-
ness, while blue is related to the west, which represents the future and
modernity. The logic behind the movement from one image to another,
or the juxtaposition of two different images – when, for example, we cut
from an image of the Gobi Desert to that of waves on the ocean, or from
a shot of an interior in the Forbidden City to that of a steamer on a Scan-
dinavian fjord – is thus that of the grand narrative that lies behind it.
Time in River Elegy is therefore constantly manifested through reference
to images that evoke space.
Considered in Deleuzian terms, River Elegy is closer to a form
of the movement-image called the relation-image than it is to the
action-image. Whereas the latter is associated with specific events and
attributes, the former belongs to the realm of symbolization, where

signs make general statements about qualities and events (Marks, 2000,
pp. 197–9). The relation-image is thus a type of movement-image that
is characterized by its symbolic qualities.3 River Elegy’s implicit structur-
ing as an intellectual argument, and its consistent use of the symbolic
to ‘think’ that argument, can therefore be understood as an example of
the movement-image, although a more rarefied expression of this form
than the films of Buster Keaton. But while this abstraction is partly a
consequence both of the documentary’s subject matter and of its cul-
tural milieu, it also reflects the process of River Elegy’s production. Given
the scripting of the documentary, and director Xia Jun’s fundamental
reliance on editing and montage to construct the body of the film from
archival images, the manner in which River Elegy articulates time and
space should hardly be surprising; without purpose-shot live footage,
even generating temporality through the embodied movement of one’s
subjects becomes an infinitely complex task. The sense of time with
which the film has been associated thus arises from the interconnec-
tion of certain ideological convictions, specific filmmaking practices and
particular production contexts.4
River Elegy should not be seen as necessarily representative of all
zhuantipian, for it is a particularly extreme example of the form. If one
were to analyse Shi Jian’s Tiananmen, for example, or The Great Wall,
which were neither scripted in advance nor predominantly composed of
archival footage, the sense of temporality identified might be closer than
expected to that of the distended form. However, it is precisely for these
reasons that River Elegy helps bring into focus what other, more experi-
mental television documentaries, do not: how the relationship between
ideology, practice and production plays out in the construction of dif-
ferent kinds of mediated time. To understand how live time emerges
from the teleological convictions of socialist television practice, then,
we therefore need to consider how this relationship is reconstructed
in the early 1990s. Wu Wenguang’s At Home in the World provides an
excellent window through which to do so.
The distended form and the jilupian: At Home in the World
At Home in the World has aptly been described as the sequel to Bumming
in Beijing. Shot during 1993, some four to five years after the footage for
Bumming in Beijing was collected, it takes the same group of artist friends
who featured in the earlier documentary, but reflects on how their lives
have changed in the intervening years. Only one, theatre director Mou
Sen, has remained in China. The others have scattered, marrying foreign
citizens and emigrating to the United States and Europe. Broadly speak-
ing, the documentary is structured around a series of tableaux dedicated
to these various individuals. Some of the sequences take place in China,
in Beijing and Kunming, focusing on life there in the case of Mou, or
on the feelings and responses of other members of the group on their
return to the country, sometimes for the first time since they left. Other
sequences occur abroad, in Belgium, France, Italy and Austria, after Wu
took advantage of a trip overseas to visit his friends in their new homes.
At Home in the World is clearly more digressive than River Elegy in the
broadest sense. The documentary consciously rejects the grand narra-
tives of the Culture Fever. In returning to film those friends whom he
immortalized in the late 1980s, Wu both resurrects the cultural logic of
the era and demonstrates its fallaciousness. Most of his subjects have
realized the dream of moving to a better life in the west that is implicit
in River Elegy: as Zhang Dali says, ‘I was very excited when I left China.
I thought, “at last I’ve escaped, finally left China and gone abroad”.’ Yet,
ultimately, this dream has proven illusory. All the émigrés are lonely and
culturally disoriented; only Zhang Xiaping seems comparatively materi-
ally comfortable; the others do not even appear to have the advantage
of financial stability, with Gao Bo reduced to selling paintings by the
Seine to make ends meet. Ironically, only Mou Sen, who alone elected
to stay in Beijing, is artistically productive and satisfied with his life.
Thus, as we move from a sequence titled ‘Living in China’, to one called
‘Living in France’ and then on to ‘Living in Italy’, At Home in the World
eerily shadows River Elegy’s obsessive geographical ruminations, while
presenting a conclusion that implicitly questions the assumptions of
its predecessor. The spatialization of time underlying the zhuantipian’s
argument is revealed as irrelevant to personal happiness; the relation-
ship between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ is no longer as simple as that of the
‘primitive’ to the ‘modern’. Instead, the teleological assumptions of the
1980s begin to break down, the boundaries between these various cate-
gories blur, and the trajectory of the artists’ lives is opened up to critical
reflection and questioning.
Since At Home in the World eschews the symbolic and temporal logic
of River Elegy at a macro level, it should perhaps be unsurprising that,
at a micro level, Wu’s documentary avoids the practices of the zhuantip-
ian. Unscripted, it is faithful to the principles of xianchang. Individual
sections are not constructed by editing archival images into rhetorical
sequences. Instead, the temporality of each individual scene is generated
through the concrete articulations of time and space that result from
location shooting, with quite distinct consequences. Take the opening

of Mou Sen’s segment, set in Beijing. This is the sequence with which
Wu chooses to start the documentary proper. It opens with a shot of a
hutong (‘alley’) street name, on a wall outside an alleyway entrance, the
camera tilted upwards. The camera then moves down, panning across
right and forwards into the hutong itself. We can see Mou and his girl-
friend, Du Ke, walking away from us down the alley. The camera follows,
tracking them with a jerky, handheld feel. The film then cuts to a sim-
ilar shot of the couple, closer up and further into the hutong complex.
Walking in single file, Du leading, they continue down the lane; with
the exception of one brief moment when the camera moves slightly left
to take in a bicycle propped against the hutong wall, the couple fill the
frame. They come to a door and stop. The camera draws in closer as Du
removes a key and stoops to open the lock. An intertitle announces that
this is the couple’s home, and the camera tracks them over the thresh-
old, across the side of a small interior courtyard and through the front
door of their house (essentially a single room). As Mou and Du begin
to unpack their shopping, it draws in, peering over their shoulders from
behind, before the shot fades to black, and another intertitle appears:
‘Living in China’.
What unfolds within the interior of the house is a study in domes-
ticity. We start with a close-up of Mou Sen, still in the room, taking off
his top in order to wash it. The camera, never still, moves constantly.
As Mou walks towards the door, across and out of shot, it follows him,
cutting, just at the point where he exits the room, to another interior
shot, this time a medium shot of the couple, obscured by shelves. This
is followed by a medium close-up of them cooking, and then another
of them from the waist upwards, sitting down, eating. For the first time
since arriving at the house, Wu then cuts outside. An exterior shot of
the courtyard frames the door to the room in the centre of the compo-
sition. The door is open, and we can see inside, adding a layer of depth
to the frame. The camera remains steady, almost unmoving, as Mou and
Du pass in and out of the interior space, washing their clothes. We then
cut to another exterior shot in a slightly different space, as the couple
prepare to put the clothes out to dry. The camera follows Mou as he
turns and walks back round a corner, and we are back once again in
the courtyard. The camera frames the space in precisely the same way
as the previous shot, and we watch as Mou now hangs the clothes in
the doorway where he had previously been washing them. As he stands
there, framed by the unmoving camera, Du enters from the lower left
of the shot, walks round him and back into the house. Mou finishes his
task and walks through the door into the inside of the room to join her.
We then cut to both of them, sitting on the doorstep – Du in profile,
Mou facing the camera – in medium shot. Here begins a brief interview,
a sequence of six different shots. The camera remains steady as it cuts
in and out of close-ups and medium shots, with Wu, off screen, asking
questions about how the couple met, how they live, what they intend
to do in the future. Once over, the camera cuts to another exterior shot,
but this time outside the house entirely, on a lane somewhere in or near
the hutong complex.
Like many sequences in At Home in the World, the documentary’s
opening fits the distended temporal form of Deleuze’s time-image.
It starts with almost a full minute of ‘rambling’, as the camera sets off
behind the protagonists down the hutong towards an unknown destina-
tion, before segueing into a study of domestic life without clear direction
or temporal limits. But unlike the time-image, this sense of temporal-
ity is not achieved via the eradication of movement from the shot, or
through dissociative editing. On the contrary, movement – in two dif-
ferent forms – is central to this sequence. First and most obvious is the
movement of the human body through the built environment. It is the
constant presence of Mou and Du that connects one shot to the next, as
we move through a series of confined and relatively anonymous envi-
ronments. Not once are we presented with a frame in which they are
absent; even when cutting, or when shifting from one space to another
that is not obviously contiguous, the movement of Wu’s protagonists
therefore provides visual cues for the alert viewer.5 The second form
of movement – less obvious, perhaps, but equally significant – is that
of the technology itself. In the first half of the sequence, for example,
the camera both moves through space as it tracks its subjects from out-
side on the street to inside the house, and moves in the hands of the
director as it does so. The cinematic apparatus therefore shadows its
subjects, doubling their progress through the hutong with its own. While
at the level of the individual shot At Home in the World may present a
very different sense of temporality from River Elegy, the techniques it
employs to do so are not obviously those assumed in Deleuze’s theory
of cinema.
Why might this be the case? The comparative novelty of analogue
video in the early 1990s might explain Wu’s interest in camera move-
ment. Despite his retrospective complaints about the size of such appa-
ratus (W. Wu, 2010, p. 50), in practice, as Paola Voci (2004, p. 90) has
pointed out, the video format was simply easier to handle than celluloid.
This imbued the equipment with a greater degree of mobility, which
directors could then begin to exploit through, for example, the tracking
shot. But such experimentation can in turn be read against mainstream
documentary poetics. Wang Qi has suggested that the emergence of
mobile camerawork in independent Chinese documentary was a reac-
tion against the kind of aesthetic promulgated in the official media. She
characterizes this latter style as one that generated a ‘propagandistic,
surface reality’ of ‘flattened and glossed-over images’ (2006, p. 247), a
representation of the world far removed from that of individual phe-
nomenological experience – a description that could not unfairly be
applied to the diegetic universe of River Elegy. In contrast, camera move-
ment imbued film space with depth and volume. It thus shifted the
focus of the documentary away from the traditional off-screen narra-
tion, and towards the events captured on screen (pp. 246–7), generating
a very different sense of reality for the audience. Wu Wenguang’s exper-
iments with movement in At Home in the World could, therefore, reflect
this desire to explore the physical spaces of ‘the scene’ through the
mobility of the video camera, itself a comparatively novel technolog-
ical innovation, in self-conscious contrast to more accepted television
practice. But suggestive as this theory is, it does not entirely account
either for Wu’s interest in the movement of his protagonists, or for how
a sense of time ‘in-the-now’ may be produced in the documentary, if
not through editing and stillness. I would like to propose that it is Wu’s
theorization and use of the long take that provides this crucial link, and
that it does so by articulating movement to time and space in new and
important ways.
Temporality and the demands of xianchang: the long take
The history of the long take in Chinese cinema extends back to at

least the 1940s (L. Lee, 1991, pp. 13–14; Y. Zhang, 2006, p. 29).6 How-
ever, it has occupied a particularly critical position in Chinese film
theory since the late 1970s. Interest in the technique flowered in the
post-Mao period, on the back of new Chinese translations of the work
of André Bazin, and in the early 1980s Chinese film directors and
scholars began to rediscover the long-take aesthetic, exploring it as an
alternative to socialist realism and montage.7 The technique figured
prominently in the early feature films of the Fifth Generation direc-
tors, but began to fade from critical fashion following the introduction
to China of other theoretical approaches – semiotics, psychoanalysis,
feminism and ideological critique – by American academics from the
mid-1980s onwards (Lagesse, 2011, p. 320). It re-emerged after 1989,
however, in independent film, documentary and art, critically tied,

as I have suggested, to the theory and practice of xianchang. It thus
became one of the ways in which independent documentaries distin-
guished themselves from state-sponsored television productions (X. Lü,
2003a, p. 5).
The significance of the long take within the emerging film language of
the 1980s was, however, quite specific. Cecile Lagesse (2011, pp. 317–18)
has argued that appropriations of Bazin in Chinese film culture of the
period privileged the theorist’s ideas of form and style over questions of
content. This reflected a need to break decisively with the practices of
Maoist cinema, but to do so without forcing a confrontation with official
ideology, or rejecting the entirety of the Chinese cinematic canon. One
consequence of this was perhaps, as Zhang Xudong (1997, pp. 244–5)
has argued, the application of long-take principles to facilitate the devel-
opment of a cinematic aesthetic of spatial depth rather than of temporal
flow, explaining the abiding interest of the Fifth Generation directors in
landscape. Though this interpretation of Bazin may reflect the western
scholarly emphasis on the importance of spatial realism in his writings,8
it also chimed with a tendency among Chinese theorists to interpret the
long take in Chinese cinema as a spatial trope derived from traditional
painting (c.f. N. Lin, 1985), while simultaneously enabling these direc-
tors to develop that oblique and allegorical politics of the image for
which they ultimately became famous.
To some degree, this emphasis on the spatial significance of the long
take is replicated in Wu Wenguang’s theorization of the practice in
the 1990s. In an essay from 1996 entitled ‘Return to the scene: a doc-
umentary form I understand’ [‘Huidao xianchang: wo lijie de yi zhong
jilupian’], one of his earliest attempts to systematically articulate a theory
of xianchang, the director lists the technique as essential to maintain-
ing the purity of the live shooting experience (W. Wu, 2001b, p. 216).
Here, he speaks of the impact of the long take in terms of its ability
to capture complete scenes in one single shot. For example, while he
was shooting Bumming in Beijing, Wu’s friend Chen Zhen described to
him a scene from a Japanese documentary called Where is My Home?
The two elements of Chen’s description that had the strongest impact
on Wu were the fact that the sequence had been filmed on location,
and the unbroken continuity of the shooting process, wherein a sin-
gle long take followed the protagonist down a street in Tokyo, from
shop to shop, as he went looking for work (pp. 212–13). Obviously, this
sequence bears strong similarities to the opening of At Home in the World.
And yet, spatial integrity is not the only way in which Wu understands
the relationship between the long take and xianchang: time – what Bazin
(2005, p. 65) described as ‘the actual duration of the event’ – is as
important. According to Wu (2001b, p. 217),
The late Ogawa Shinsuke said the first essential component of doc-
umentary as he understood it was time. ‘Time’ as it is embodied
in the documentary is time manifested as an integrated [wanzheng]
temporal unit. Time manifests itself in process [guocheng]: this is the
practical expression of ‘xianchang’, and what is specifically meant by
the words ‘to document’. I understand ‘process’ to be the movement
of something between Point A and Point B, or the completion of
a course of action by the filmed subject. I believe that the capacity
of documentary to capture this ‘process’ live, in people or things, is
what endows documentary with its vitality. While news reporting is
also live, its emphasis is on outcome, not process. This is where it
differs significantly from documentary.
Wu goes on to describe a four-minute take from one of the films in

Ogawa’s Sanrizuka series that he sees as the embodiment of this sense of
documentary temporality (pp. 217–18). If the long take is a crucial part
of the xianchang aesthetic, it appears to be because it can capture the
unfolding of a subject’s actions in both time and space.
The extent to which this theory combines the Chinese interpretation
of Bazin with Wu Wenguang’s own reformulation of Japanese docu-
mentary practice is not a question I can answer here. However, I would
suggest that this articulation of xianchang’s relationship to the long take
has two clear implications. First, by the time Wu Wenguang formulated
these ideas, he had clearly concluded that the sense of time implicit in
xianchang was quite distinct. Unlike in socialist realism, or the main-
stream news media, it was not teleological. Rather, it was ongoing in
the present, an unfinished process without a distinct and obvious goal:
the distended form. Second, however, is that the most effective way
of mediating this sense of time on film was in relation to movement
through space, rather than through its erasure. In Wu Wenguang’s evo-
cation of xianchang, the manifestation of documentary time is clearly
linked to the completion of an action on the part of the filmed subject.
The experience of being ‘on the scene’ is best conveyed by respecting
this unity, ensuring that there is a temporal equivalence between what
happens in front of the camera, and what is then presented on screen to
the viewer. Rather than breaking up an action over a series of shots, as
would happen in montage or classical Hollywood editing, it is far better
to present it in ‘real time’, thus faithfully capturing the actual experience

of liveness. It is only the unbroken continuity of the long take that can
truly return an audience to the ‘now’ of xianchang filmmaking; but it is
through the movement of the documentary’s subjects, and by extension
of the camera recording them, that a phenomenological benchmark for
this ‘real time’ experience is established for the viewer.
The seeds of these principles are identifiable in At Home in the World.
Although not yet systematized, individual takes are far longer than
those in River Elegy. In the opening sequence previously discussed, for
example, Mou Sen and Du Ke’s passage through the hutong is pared
down to two shots, the first of which lasts 40 seconds. This in itself
would probably contribute to a growing sense of time ‘in-the-now’ on
the part of the viewer. However, these extended takes are also matched
with movement. The viewer watches Mou and Du trudge through the
alleyways for almost as long as it must have actually taken them to com-
plete this journey, intensifying the sense of temporal immediacy. ‘Real
time’ is therefore made concrete through the actions of the documen-
tary’s protagonists. But the emphasis here is not so much on movement
between shots, but on extended movement within a shot, amplified in
turn by the camera’s own perambulations. While movement across an
edit is retained, this is of secondary importance; what occurs within the
boundaries of the long take is of more interest to Wu than what happens
across it.9 This may help explain why At Home in the World does not fit
neatly into a Deleuzian cinematic paradigm, even if elements of these
ideas may usefully illuminate issues pertinent to independent Chinese
documentary in its earliest manifestations.
Understanding how At Home in the World generates a sense of time
as ambiguous rather than teleological requires consideration of how
the cultural assumptions tackled in the documentary interact with Wu
Wenguang’s filmmaking practice. At the level of the symbolic, Wu
presents a portrait of the ‘Tianamen Generation’ that effectively demon-
strates the problems with teleological thinking and the spatialization of
time. At a more mundane level, however, At Home in the World generates
time ‘in-the-now’ through its experimentation with long-take aesthet-
ics, capturing the temporal and the spatial through movement to create
the experience of ‘real time’ on screen. In part, this suggests the novelty
of location shooting and of the mobile video camera, both of which
allowed for the exploration of physical space in a far more pronounced
manner than was possible prior to the 1990s. But it also reflects the way
in which the long take was understood by Wu Wenguang, and how he
theorized the technique. In turn, it is a slightly different interpretation
and execution of this practice that underpins the temporality of Jia

Zhangke’s In Public, the documentary I wish to consider next.
Time without movement: In Public
In Public is a 30-minute documentary short, and Jia Zhangke’s first

experiment with digital video (Z. Jia, 2009, p. 108). It was recorded
over a period of 45 days in and around the small mining town of
Datong, Shanxi Province, and features members of the general public –
passers-by, travellers, railway and bus workers – all captured on camera
in a variety of public spaces (Reynaud, 2002). Much as his documen-
tary Dong [Dong] (2006) inspired the feature Still Life [Sanxia hao ren]
(2006), In Public can be viewed as a companion piece to Jia’s Unknown
Pleasures [Ren xiao yao] (2002), which is also set in Datong. As Kevin
Lee (2003) has pointed out, however, the documentary’s treatment of
the city diverges from the feature film in significant ways, reflecting the
nature of In Public’s production, the manner in which it was shot and
Jia Zhangke’s approach to its central themes.
In Public opens with an exterior shot, a cityscape outside an unmarked
building at night. The camera slowly pans right and through an open
door to reveal two men, sitting in what appears to be a waiting room.
The noise of trains is audible in the background; we are in a train sta-
tion. The camera then cuts inside, to another door, marked as the ticket
inspection point, and to the head and shoulders of another man, facing
the camera. He moves, the camera follows him, while a further man –
in fact, one of the two initially captured waiting – wanders in and out
of shot. We track the original man from a distance as he walks up to the
ticket office. The camera then cuts back to an image of one of the men
sitting, waiting. Over the course of a single take, the man pulls out a
watch and looks at it; a female guard crosses left in front of the camera,
and then back again; the man stands up, then sits down; we pan away
from him, towards the open door and the ticket collection point, beside
which stands the female guard; a train arrives, and the guard opens and
closes the door; the man who had been sitting reappears in shot, enter-
ing from the left, walks over to the guard, stands beside her and asks
her a question; she ignores him, opening the door again; a brief conver-
sation between the man, the guard and someone outside ensues, after
which the man walks across the room towards the exit, and then back
to the guard, tracked all the while by the camera; some people enter the
room through the ticket inspection point, having clearly just come off
the train; they walk past; after further brief discussion, the man who
has been waiting hurries out through the inspection point, presumably
onto the station concourse. Finally, we cut to a shot of this man return-
ing through the door, accompanied by two other people and some bags.
They exit, and the camera pauses for several seconds on the open door,
the lights of trains moving in the night faintly visible in the darkness.
The camera then cuts outside. The light suggests early morning.
We can still hear the sound of trains, and a small wooden bridge is
framed against a backdrop suggestive of provincial urban decay. Peo-
ple walk across the bridge, and the camera tracks them to reveal what
appears to be a roadside bus stop, adjacent to some railway tracks. Over
the course of a sequence of six further shots, the camera captures buses
and passengers coming and going, focusing in particular on an old man
and a younger woman as they wait for a bus to arrive. The former stands
still and fiddles with his jacket zipper; the latter, having missed one bus,
wanders around, conversing with a man who appears and waits with
her for another. When it arrives, they both get on, and the camera cuts
to the inside of a moving bus. But it appears to be a different bus: we are
presented with a close-up of male faces, possibly manual workers. Over
the course of five more shots, Jia cuts between different passengers – a
small boy, the men caught in the first shot, other men standing behind
the boy – and between different parts of their bodies: their faces, their
eyes in close-up, a hand holding a cigarette that is tracked upwards to
reveal its owner. As we sense the bus drawing to a halt, the camera cuts
again to another interior, shot at night. Where we are now is unclear.
There are shelves, crockery, and small seats arranged in pairs, facing
each other across a table; a man is sitting at one of these, drinking beer.
We cut outside, looking in, as it emerges that this is a bus converted into
a restaurant. The camera pans across right to left to reveal, through win-
dows decorated with signs for wontons and dumplings, people sitting at
the tables, eating. The camera travels the length of the bus, right up to
the driver’s compartment, and then on, into complete darkness. From
this gloom emerges the sound of people playing pool.
At this point the camera cuts again, and we reach the documentary’s
final sequence. We appear to be in a bus station, but this particular room
has been turned into a pool hall. People play billiards; others chat, talk
on phones; one man appears to be etching or writing. The camera cuts
between different groups in different parts of the hall, but pauses on
a dapper man, sitting in a wheelchair, and the two women standing
behind him, collecting money from people as they exit the room. Then
the perspective shifts. We suddenly see the pool tables framed through
a curtain, behind which the camera has clearly been placed. We cut to
an empty floor, where a couple practise ballroom dancing moves. The

camera then cuts back to the pool hall, returning eventually to the dap-
per man; then it cuts again to the dancing couple, before cutting back
to a close-up of the man’s wheelchair, panning up to his hands, face, the
two women behind him, and then the curtain covering the exit beside
them. Suddenly, we cut to a new space. It is dark, but lit by disco lights.
A socialist song plays over a music system; people are ballroom dancing
to it. Are we behind the curtain? The camera pans across the room, to
reveal people sat around the edges and in the corners, watching from
sofas. We cut again, back to a medium close-up of the curtain hanging
behind the man in the wheelchair. People come through the curtain,
initially one at a time, then more and more. Some glance at the cam-
era, others ignore it. Are they leaving the dance floor, or entering the
pool hall from outside? It is hard to tell. The socialist song ends, and the
sound of pool being played off camera starts up again. We cut to credits:
the documentary has ended as gnomically as it began.
Jia has stated quite simply that In Public is ‘mainly about spaces’ (Veg,
2010, p. 62). True as this may be, the way in which the documentary
presents these spaces is quite unusual. For a start, they are completely
anonymous. The audience is never informed where the film is set: nei-
ther the city in which it was shot, nor the precise nature or location
of the specific spaces that feature, are identified, with the viewer left
to deduce where and what they are at his or her leisure. The same is
true of the people who move through them. Jia maintains a strictly
observational stance throughout the documentary: at no point does
he directly engage with anyone in front of the camera; not once does
anyone address him directly; conversation is never subtitled. We do
not know who these people are, where they come from, what they
are doing, where they are going, or their relationships, if any, to one
another. In this sense, they are indistinguishable from the spaces they
inhabit. Finally, unlike Duan Jinchuan and Zhang Yuan’s The Square, we
are not dealing with a single space that encompasses all the activity tak-
ing place within it. We are instead faced with a series of different spaces –
interior, exterior, constructed, natural – the relationship between which
is never made explicit. Thus, while the documentary may be said to
have a theme, it cannot really be said to possess a narrative thread.
In Public works not through analysis or argument, but rather via ‘inde-
terminacy and intuitive observation’ (Lee, 2003), unfolding in a manner
that, though compelling, is also fragmented and disorienting.
In part, this is deliberate. Jia (2009, p. 108) has stated that he made
every effort to excise all dramatic and narrative elements from the
documentary’s final cut, aiming to make the finished product as abstract
as possible. This included rejecting the use of subtitles, thus reducing

the human voice to just one element of the film’s diegetic environment,
rather than allowing it to dominate (p. 107). These decisions could be
interpreted as an attempt to focus the viewer’s attention on the places
where the film was shot, or as a reflection of the director’s comment
that he found the medium of digital video to display an unexpected
affinity for the filming of ‘abstract things’ (p. 108). However, I think
such judgements also reflect Jia’s interest in the temporality, as well as
the materiality, of these spaces. What connects these locations, aside
from their association with travel, is the fact that, in many of them, ‘the
spaces of the past and the spaces of the present [are] often superimposed’
(p. 108). In the restaurant that was a bus, and the pool hall or dance hall
converted from the bus station, this sense of spatial repurposing thus
generates an awareness of historical time. Through close observation of
these places now, what has been will gradually manifest itself; the atten-
tive viewer may thus grasp the complex social reality that Jia believes
is embedded in these apparently unremarkable corners of the city (p.
108). If In Public displays no obvious interest in the restless progress of
narrative time, this is because, on some level, the documentary seeks to
arrest that progress. By concentrating on the present, Jia aims to make
us aware that the past is not a foreign country, but rather a temporality –
‘then’ – that also exists in the ‘now’, its traces eminently identifiable if
we search hard enough for them.
Much like At Home in the World, In Public is infused with a sense of time
that its director clearly understands to be non-teleological. It is also char-
acterized by the filming techniques associated with xianchang, including
the long-take aesthetic that I argued underpins Wu Wenguang’s par-
ticular articulation of time and space. And yet, the way in which Jia
Zhangke uses this technique is subtly different from Wu. First, the long
take itself is extended to the point of excess. In the extracts I analysed
from At Home in the World, no single shot breaks one minute in length.
In contrast, the third shot alone of In Public lasts almost a full five min-
utes. Confined entirely to the interior of the railway station, the only
activity we actually see in this scene is the movement either of the man
waiting for his relatives, or of one of the station employees, as they occa-
sionally pass in front of the camera, moving from one side of the room
to the other. Jia makes no effort to minimize the temporal dimension of
this experience; instead, the length of the take almost seems to draw it
out to breaking point. Second, this technique is not linked to movement
through space. The handheld camerawork that characterized sections of
Wu Wenguang’s film is noticeably missing from Jia’s. Instead, the cam-
era frequently remains motionless, and, when movement does occur,
it is always smooth and highly controlled. There are no equivalents of

those sequences in At Home in the World in which Wu tracks his subjects
through their urban environment. Rather, during In Public the camera
hovers immobile, allowing members of the general public to wander in
and out of shot without focusing on any single individual (as per the
scene described above); or it divides its focus between different people
apparently at random, starting with one, cutting to another, and then
panning off – seemingly on a whim – to track a third, only to return to
one of the previous characters a little later (see the recurrent interest dis-
played in the wheelchair-bound man in the pool hall). Indeed, at times
Jia is not afraid of having the camera focus on spaces emptied entirely
of people: the film opens with just such a shot, in diametric contrast
to the manner in which Wu opens At Home in the World. With noth-
ing to explicitly link the various locations documented, the relationship
between the film’s sequences thus becomes harder to establish, and each
segment starts to feel comparatively autonomous. The far more self-
consciously distanced aesthetic of In Public does not articulate a sense
of ‘real time’ through movement in the manner of At Home in the World.
Instead, it uses a combination of extended takes and lack of movement
to generate what, in Deleuzian terms, might be considered ‘ “a little
time in its pure state” ’ (Deleuze, 1989, p. 17): time experienced as dura-
tion, unmediated by anyone or anything in shot, unfolding directly on
screen.
One immediate explanation for this departure might simply be that,
by the time Jia came to shoot In Public, the novelty of mobile camera-
work had worn off. Perhaps, over a decade after the events of 1989 and
the introduction to China of the analogue video camera, the desire to
explore the depth of reality’s mise-en-scène through the handheld cam-
era had begun to wane. Logical as this may seem, however, it is not
the case. As outlined briefly in Chapter 1 – and as I will explore fur-
ther in my next chapter – the arrival of the digital video camera at the
end of the 1990s reignited interest in, and concern over, technological
mobility and the limits of documentary representation. As importantly,
the articulation of the long take with movement through space has
remained a stylistic trope of independent Chinese documentary well
into the twenty-first century. What Wang Qi (2006, p. 248) has termed
the ‘entry shot’ – an extended take or takes in which the camera self-
consciously performs entry into the physical space that it will continue
to explore over the course of the film – opens such documentaries as
West of the Tracks, Springtime in Wushan, Li Yifan and Yan Yu’s Before the
Flood [Yanmo] (2005), and Zhou Hao and Ji Jianghong’s Houjie Township
[Hou Jie] (2002), all of which were produced after In Public. Understand-
ing the peculiarities of Jia Zhangke’s style, therefore, requires one to look
beyond social and technological factors. It demands consideration both
of the director’s own interpretation of the long take’s cinematic signifi-
cance, and of the particular industrial conditions under which In Public
was produced and circulated, for these conditions had a demonstrable
impact on the documentary’s textuality, and in particular its articulation
of time ‘in-the-now’.
Jia Zhangke, the long take and global art cinema
Long takes have always been associated with Jia Zhangke’s cinema.
In an essay from 1997, the director has described how a particular
sequence in Xiao Shan Going Home [Xiao Shan hui jia] (1995) – the film
that launched his international career – has constantly attracted ques-
tions. This sequence captures the film’s protagonist, migrant worker
Xiao Shan, as he wanders across Beijing. Jia notes how people always
ask him why he used seven minutes of footage, almost a tenth of the
film’s total length, and merely two shots to, in effect, capture so little: to
his interrogators, ‘this 7 minutes was precisely equivalent to 28 adver-
tisements, or two MTV music videos . . . ’ (Z. Jia, 2009, p. 17). The director
rejects the commercial logic of this question out of hand. He describes
this technique as a ‘test of concentration’ for people who have become
inured ‘to audio-visual experiences that change by the second’ (p. 17).
He then proceeds to elaborate further on the implications of this idea:
In Xiao Shan Going Home our camera no longer floats about restlessly.
I was willing to face reality head on, even though that reality includes
the weak and even sordid parts found in the depths of human nature.
I was willing to gaze quietly, interrupted only by the next gaze in the
next shot. We are not like Hou Hsiao-hsien. He follows his gazing
with a camera pan, allowing the distant landscape of mountains and
waters to assuage the grief within him. We have the strength to con-
tinue gazing, because – I do not turn away [from what needs to be
seen].
(pp. 18–19)
Jia’s discussion of Xiao Shan Going Home provides some insight into
why the director’s use of the long take differs from Wu Wenguang’s.
Though published only one year after Wu’s essay on xianchang,
his conceptualization of the technique’s significance is nevertheless
distinct. Jia explicitly pits his own aesthetic against the implicit
‘Hollywoodization’ of Chinese entertainment media represented by the
MTV style. This is in contrast to Wu’s essay, in which long-take docu-
mentary filmmaking is placed in opposition to television news – still
primarily the province of the state – and suggests that, by this stage,
the younger director already viewed the market, rather than the CCP,
as his primary opponent. The ethical compulsion he associates with
the long take is thus connected to the post-1992 liberalization of the
Chinese economy, and his own desire to stand witness to the social
impact of commercialization. This is something the mainstream media
cannot do, because it is actively implicated in effecting these changes.
But Jia locates the possibility of resistance within the temporality of the
long take. Unlike Wu, he seeks quite self-consciously to separate the
technique from movement, in particular movement of the camera. It is
not simply the duration of the long take but also its stillness that allows
the viewer – whether the director, cinematographer or audience mem-
ber – to absorb the details of the cinematic image. This in turn is what
enables the complexity of historical reality identified in In Public’s urban
spaces to surface, warts and all, on the cinema screen.
This essay also hints at reasons for this difference in approach that are
not simply generational. The genealogy of practice that Jia implies in his
commentary diverges from that articulated by Wu Wenguang. In ‘Return
to the scene’, Wu positions his understanding of the long take in rela-
tion to the highly politicized Japanese documentary film tradition of
Ogawa Shinsuke. Jia, in contrast, nods to the more aestheticized vision
of the Taiwanese New Wave auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose cinema of
long takes, long shots and highly restrained camera movement finds
as many echoes in Jia’s oeuvre as does the work of the early indepen-
dent documentary directors.10 Even presented, as it is here, through the
‘anxiety of influence’ (Bloom, 1973) experienced by a young director,
this allows us to place Jia’s film practice at the intersection of mul-
tiple moving image traditions, including those from outside the PRC
proper. Elsewhere, Jia has explicitly acknowledged this cultural inheri-
tance, ascribing it to his training: ‘I have been through film school and
to say that I haven’t been influenced by these directors [Hou and Ozu
Yasujiro] would be a lie’ (Teo, 2001). Such aesthetic and industrial posi-
tioning contrasts quite dramatically with Wu, whose own documentary
theory and practice were clearly informed – positively and negatively –
both by his early background in television and by his experiences at the
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
In practice, Jia’s description of his aesthetic in Xiao Shan Going
Home is somewhat idealized. The sequence in question is composed
of more than two shots, and the film as a whole is characterized

by considerable handheld camera movement. Given that it was shot
on a shoestring budget, and mostly filmed in public spaces around
and about Beijing, this should hardly be surprising. Indeed, as Jason
McGrath (2007, p. 96) has pointed out, the average length of take
in Xiao Shan Going Home is 18 seconds; while perhaps longer than
average for a commercial feature, this is nothing compared to In Pub-
lic. The film is thus perhaps closer in style to At Home in the World
than one might expect from Jia’s description. But what is remarkable
about Jia’s subsequent productions is the speed with which practice
and theory have since converged. Xiao Wu, his first full-length fea-
ture, boasts an average shot duration of 33 seconds, while in Platform
[Zhantai] (2000), his follow-up film, this is extended to 76 seconds,
with camera movement limited exclusively to slow pans (McGrath,
2007, p. 96). In Unknown Pleasures, the companion piece to In Public,
this average length grows even further, to around 90 seconds (p. 104).
Arguably, In Public thus represents an aesthetic archetype that Jia artic-
ulated early in his career, but only managed to fully execute some
years later.
What lies behind this convergence? Jason McGrath has argued that
it reflects Jia’s gradual integration into the industry of the global art
film. The director may invoke Hou Hsiao-hsien, however critically, in
implicit contrast to the commercial aesthetic of global television, but
international art cinema is no less a business than Hollywood, however
different its component parts. The success of Asian art house directors,
such as Hou, Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang and Wong Kar-wai, stems in
part from a globally receptive attitude to their work that is framed by
a particular set of aesthetic expectations (J. Ma, 2010, pp. 16–17). Their
fame is thus ultimately dependent on the execution of specific stylistic
tropes that effectively distinguish their films from American products in
the global marketplace. In the 1990s, this difference was characterized
by a cinematic style
so exclusively reliant on the long take, so concerned with show-

ing in detail the real-time intervals between narrative actions, that
[ . . . ] Bazinian long-take realism [was] pushed nearly to, and some-
times passed, the point that it [became] its ostensible opposite – an
intriguing kind of formalism.
(McGrath, 2007, p. 102)
McGrath points out that there is a direct relationship between Jia’s adop-
tion of this style, as mapped through the increasing length of his shots
and a gradual elimination of camera movement, and the ever more

transnational nature of his productions. Thus, Xiao Shan Going Home
was produced entirely domestically, and would probably have remained
an obscure student work had a reporter from Hong Kong not suggested
that it be submitted to the 1997 Hong Kong Independent Short Film
and Video Awards (p. 88); Xiao Wu, which built on its predecessor’s suc-
cess, won seven different international film festival prizes (p. 96); and
Platform, the film McGrath sees as epitomizing this global art house
aesthetic, was funded through a consortium of investors from Japan,
France, Switzerland, Hong Kong and the PRC (p. 97). In other words,
Jia’s long-take aesthetic was formed not simply in reaction against, but
also by, the forces of global capital. The more transnational his produc-
tions became, and the more international his intended audience, the
further his cinematic practice departed from its original low budget,
handheld cinematic roots, adapting instead to generic expectations of
what global art cinema should look like.
In Public is a clear product of this milieu. Produced by Korea’s Sidus
Corporation, the film was part of an omnibus commission from the
Jeonju International Film Festival on the topic of ‘space’ (Z. Jia, 2009,
p. 102). Jia was one of three filmmakers engaged to produce a short
film for the project; the other two were Taiwan-based Malaysian Chinese
director Tsai Ming-liang, doyenne of the Taiwanese post-New Wave, and
British artist and director John Akomfrah, a founder member of the
1980s avant-garde media group Black Audio Film Collective (Reynaud,
2002). As such, the documentary is far more directly embedded in
the workings of the international art cinema market than At Home in
the World. Although Wu had won the Ogawa Shinsuke Award at the
Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival for My Time in the
Red Guards, At Home in the World was not produced specifically for a fes-
tival. While NHK provided some limited seed money, Wu has reported
that he clashed with the channel early on, and the documentary was
only completed after a friend in Japan gave the director enough money
to travel to Europe and shoot the requisite overseas footage (F. Fang,
2003, pp. 350, 383). Although Wu’s career trajectory since then has
become more closely imbricated with both international funders and
the global art market, it is clear that the dynamics of this relationship
were more ambiguous during the filming of At Home in the World than
during the production of In Public. Jia’s documentary may react against
the teleologies implicit in globalization, seeking to suspend time, recon-
nect with history and revalue a discarded past, but it remains, on many
levels, ironically yet indisputably a product of that very process.
My point here is not to invalidate Jia’s own interpretation of his

film practice and its particular genealogy. How he comprehends the
importance of the long take has direct bearing upon the way in which
space and time are articulated in his films, and on the kind of cultural
labour he clearly understands his aesthetic to be doing. How he nar-
rates his own influences can in turn enable us to make sense of the
particularity of his films. But these practices are not static, and they
do not preclude adaptation to the demands of circumstance. In Public
reflects this. The documentary’s production of time ‘in-the-now’, medi-
ated without movement through the long take, is consonant with Jia’s
longstanding theorization of the technique in relation to the commer-
cialization of Chinese media culture, the influences he acknowledges
on his filmmaking through his training, and the institutionalization of
this aesthetic following the director’s elevation to the status of global
auteur. All of these factors subtly distinguish his position from that of
Wu Wenguang, and help to explain why In Public and At Home in the
World, though in some ways very similar, are also quite different.
Conclusion
This chapter has addressed the emergence of a particular temporality

associated with much independent Chinese documentary: what has
broadly been understood to be an overwhelming sense of time in the
present, rather than as a narrative progression moving smoothly into
the future. It is this sense of time that documentary prior to the early
1990s is supposed to lack, and its emergence has been understood, with
reference to the Gilles Deleuze’s theoretical framework, as the conse-
quence of a crisis of faith in narratives of progress, both socialist and
otherwise. This leaves open, however, the question of how such a tem-
porality is produced through cinematic praxis. I have tried to suggest
that this distended form can be understood both as a representation
and as a consequence of xianchang: a product of the contingent ‘now’
of shooting live, inflected by the particular interpretations of individ-
ual filmmakers at a given moment, and structured by the conditions
of production under which they worked. This helps explain some of
the differences between the films discussed. River Elegy combines ide-
ological commitment to a particular enlightenment agenda with a
production process dependent on editing and archival clips, generat-
ing an abstracted, spatialized temporality. At Home in the World, which
is partly a reaction against the ideology of the 1980s, captures a more
concrete sense of ‘here and now’ through location shooting. However,
in a clear departure from Deleuze’s formula, this is achieved through

the joining of the long take to movement, both of the camera and
of the documentary subject, thus generating a sense of ‘real time’ on
screen. This reflects the novelty of the analogue video camera, but,
perhaps more importantly, Wu Wenguang’s own theorization of the sig-
nificance of the long take, and how time should be understood in the
documentary film. Finally, In Public is characterized by a highly stylized
manifestation of this aesthetic, in which extreme long takes are com-
bined with limited, controlled camera movement to create a minimalist
formalism. The origins of this style can be traced back to Jia Zhangke’s
cinematic inheritance, and the director’s own assessment of the long-
take aesthetic’s significance in his films. However, it is arguably also a
product of the position he was beginning to acquire within the global
system of art film production when he was commissioned to shoot the
documentary. In Public, therefore, not only conjures multiple possible
genealogies for xianchang, but also demonstrates how the practice can
metamorphose in different contexts, and in response to different pres-
sures. In the process, it suggests why the temporal contingency of these
documentaries is a complex and multifaceted quality that cannot be
simply or straightforwardly mapped onto any one ideological scenario.
If In Public brings this chapter to a close, it is also a point of depar-
ture for the one to follow. Jia Zhangke may have used digital video
to consider the relationship between time and space, but for many
filmmakers in China this new technology promised something quite
different. These directors understood the medium to be not abstract
but peculiarly physical, almost haptic, in its imagery; they thought it
capable of getting closer to material reality than either film or analogue
video. Although this facility was sometimes framed in relation to per-
ceptions of digital’s unique indexicality, the increased mobility of the
camera – ironically, something that Jia deliberately avoided exploiting
while shooting In Public – was also invoked. While for some this was
a liberation, for others it proved more problematic; it is precisely this
dynamic, and what it can tell us about shooting live, that I want to
consider in the next chapter.
4
Ethics, the Body and Digital Video
Introduction
This chapter considers xianchang as a corporeal process. Embodied

experience has long been understood as critical to the practice. And yet,
the question of whose experience is being embodied – that of the director
or of the documentary subject – raises interesting questions concern-
ing the ethics of documentary representation. Using Hu Shu’s Leave Me
Alone, I first explore concerns that emerged in the early 2000s regard-
ing the representation of the subaltern body in independent Chinese
documentary. These worries focused on the unbalanced relationship
between the filmmaker and the filmed subject, and how this could lead
to images that were sensationalist and exploitative, rather than straight-
forwardly intersubjective. Such concerns were exacerbated by emergent
digital video technology: lightweight digital hardware facilitated access
to subaltern space, while ease of electronic duplication made control
over the image harder to exercise. All these apprehensions illuminate
how ‘the scene’ of filmmaking is a contingent social space, in which
unequal relations of power between those in front of and behind the
camera must constantly be negotiated and renegotiated. Equally, they
underline how these relations may be captured in images, and how the
act of mediation can constitute a form of social violence against the
vulnerable and the marginal as a result of the knowledge it conveys.
In this chapter I use representations of the queer body in independent
Chinese documentary to explore these concerns. Early documentaries
on homosexuality were often filmed by heterosexual directors, who
came to their subjects from the outside, looking in. Through their imag-
ination of the queer body, these documentaries thus visualized the
complex and unequal relationship between director and subject that
103
existed during the filming process. Occasionally objectifying, sometimes

spectacular, these filmmakers made use of the digital camera in a man-
ner that was at times voyeuristic and salacious. But the democratization
of production accelerated by digital formats has also resulted in a slew
of documentaries on queer subject matter, by queer directors. These
directors deconstruct the imagery of the earlier films while simulta-
neously offering up a new queer iconography. Furthermore, they use
the act of digital filmmaking to generate new sexual identities, facili-
tating the emergence of the queer body as the agent, rather than the
object, of xianchang. In the process, not only do these directors point
to the contingent power relations at play in the mediation of liveness,
they also demonstrate how subaltern access to the means of produc-
tion can change the dynamic of such relations in ways that are radical,
irreversible and visually identifiable.
Xianchang and the corporeal image
Hu Shu’s documentary Leave Me Alone is a film about prostitutes. It fol-

lows the lives of two sisters, Yang Hong and Yezi, and their friend,
Sanwennuan, all of whom work as bar girls in the southwestern town
of Guiyang, Guizhou Province. Incorporating ‘investigative reporting on
prostitution into a personal narrative’ (Voci, 2010, p. 32), Leave Me Alone
follows its subjects through their day and night jobs, their relationships
with one another, boyfriend trouble and ultimately their conflict with
the authorities. The sisters are arrested and cautioned by the police.
No longer able to support themselves as sex workers, they leave Guiyang
and return home to their family, where they discover that their parents
have divorced and their mother has disappeared. Interestingly, as he
moves between these different elements of the narrative, Hu Shu also
deploys different aspects of the documentary aesthetic to express them.
Leave Me Alone starts with a brief first person voiceover, before moving
into intertitles – again, in the first person – recounting how the direc-
tor met his subjects. Hu thus makes no attempt at the beginning of the
film to conceal himself or his perspective. Nevertheless, the documen-
tary’s primary filming techniques are those of direct cinema, with an
emphasis on minimal editing, ‘raw shots’ and long takes (Voci, 2010,
p. 32). The shifts in tone between the personal and the journalistic are
thus matched by a style that also moves between the reflexive and the
observational in its approach to its subjects.
Half way through Leave Me Alone, however, there is a scene in which
all the various elements of the documentary are brought into interesting
Ethics, the Body and Digital Video 105
alignment. The sequence takes place immediately following a night in

which Yang Hong’s boyfriend, Liang, has apparently slept with Yezi.
The couple then argue over their relationship, with Liang indicating his
desire to end it, or at least to leave the apartment he shares with the sis-
ters. The scene starts with a close-up of Yang Hong, apparently sitting in
bed. She looks as though she has been crying. Sentimental Chinese pop
music plays in the background. The camera then cuts to a medium shot
of Yezi, in bed, with a male figure, Liang, sitting to the left of the camera
with his back to the viewer. The camera cuts in closer to capture Yezi’s
facial expression, before fading into a medium shot of Yang. She is still
sat in bed, smoking. After dragging on a lit cigarette, she taps it gently
on the inside of the packet, transfers it to her other hand, and, slowly
but quite deliberately, stubs it out on her right wrist. In medium shot,
this action is slightly unclear, but, as if to better observe what is happen-
ing, the camera immediately zooms in, focusing on Yang’s face and her
fingers as she gently massages what is presumably a cigarette burn.
This scene is a shocking reminder that xianchang has long been under-
stood as not merely visual, but also haptic and sensuous. These qualities
are a consequence not simply of the materiality of the aesthetic – the
manner in which it is drawn to the ruins and remnants of China’s urban
fabric, for example – but also its physicality. As Qiu Zhijie (2003, p. 2)
has emphasized, ‘Your emotions and your body are all part of xianchang’,
a quotation that underlines the centrality of affective and corporeal
experience to the practice. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the visual culture
of xianchang has therefore frequently integrated the human body, often
naked or battered, into ‘the scene’ it is representing (Z. Zhang, 2010, p.
102). Sometimes this is the body of the filmmaker or artist; on other
occasions, it is that of the film’s subject or subjects.1 But I would argue
that there is a critical difference between these two tendencies. The rein-
sertion of the artist’s body into the work suggests not only a desire to
assert one’s presence ‘on the scene’ at the moment of documentation,
but also a desire to rehumanize the physical environment, and to recon-
nect with a materiality that many feel has been overwhelmed by the
breakneck speed of recent economic development (S. Lu, 2007b, pp.
158–9). Such an act seems primarily concerned with the recuperation
of experiences that have been marginalized by modernization, although
with an emphasis on the personal perspective of the artist. In contrast,
the reinsertion of the body of the documentary subject connects the
question of presence to the problem of intersubjectivity: how to under-
stand the experience of someone other than oneself. This use of the body
implies a belief in the mimetic power of representation, a sense that
Our relationship to images involves not only looking across bound-

aries but undergoing effects from across them, much as we undergo
effects from looking at people in daily life and being looked at by
them.
(MacDougall, 2006, p. 24)
In other words, by foregrounding the embodied experience of the filmed

subject on screen, the viewer may actually feel what it is like to be that
individual in real life. This particular manifestation of the ‘corporeal
image’ (MacDougall, 2006) is not simply a prerequisite for the repre-
sentation of reality, or an opportunity to resensitize an audience to the
material dimensions of reality, but, more importantly, a potential point
of entry into the world of the documentary subject portrayed on screen.
A scene such as that of Yang Hong’s self-harming could therefore
be understood as a manifestation of xianchang’s material and ethical
dimensions, in particular its ‘sense of urgency and social responsibility’
(Z. Zhang, 2002, p. 116). From this perspective, it could be interpreted
as an attempt to convey the social and emotional pain that lies behind
the prostitute’s decision to inflict physical damage on her own body.
But are all corporeal representations equally ethical? Do they by default
incline the viewer towards empathy and intersubjective identification?
Critics of Hu Shu’s film have suggested otherwise. In an interview with
the director, Zhu Jinjiang and Mei Bing (2004, p. 391) explicitly raise
the question of intervention: why, they ask, if Hu could see his subject
abusing herself in this manner, did he not intercede and restrain her?
Why did he choose instead to continue recording her actions in a ‘cool’
or ‘detached’ (lengjing) manner that feels ‘cruel’ (canku)? Given the way
in which the scene is filmed, this comment calls to mind Libby Saxton’s
glossing of Bill Nichols, to the effect that
a shot which shakes as the filmmaker hurries to the aid of a person

in danger attests to an ethic of courage, whereas a static long shot of
the same subject begs questions about whether she or he may have
had a duty to intervene.
(Downing and Saxton, 2010, p. 28)
The controlled style of this particular take, combined with Hu’s use of
zoom to focus on Yang Hong, uncomfortably implicates the director
in her self-harming.2 Zheng Tiantian elaborates further. She has argued
that the simple act of recording scenes of degradation does not auto-
matically generate empathy for those captured in them. In fact, certain
images, depending on how they are presented, may stimulate precisely

the opposite reaction, with the viewer consciously distancing himself
or herself from the film’s subjects by condemning them as ‘disgusting
and marginal’ (T. Zheng, no date). Hu’s failure to adequately investi-
gate the reasons behind his subjects’ behaviour means that, rather than
being invited to share and understand the pain of Yang Hong and her
sister, the audience is instead faced with the director’s ‘voyeuristic plea-
sure’ (T. Zheng, no date) at watching his subjects self-mutilate and fight.
Because moral significance is generated as much through the formal
organization of profilmic reality as through the nature of that reality
itself (Downing and Saxton, 2010, p. 22), the way in which these images
are presented on screen may therefore condition how we view the doc-
umentary’s subjects. While this is true of all documentary images, it is
especially pertinent to representations of the body in pain, for the lat-
ter tread an unusually fine line between eliciting sympathy for those
represented, and merely objectifying them as spectacle. This point is
emphasized by Susan Sontag (2003, p. 85), who has asserted of war
photography that
Most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a pruri-

ent interest [ . . . ] All images that display the violation of an attractive
body are, to a certain degree, pornographic. But images of the repul-
sive can also allure [ . . . ] Calling such wishes ‘morbid’ suggests a rare
aberration, but the attraction to such sights is not rare, and is a
perennial source of inner torment.
In other words, corporeal images are inherently unstable, being poten-

tially both redemptive and exploitative.
The contingency of the contact zone
Arguably, there is a highly developed historical awareness in China of

the problems inherent to corporeal image making. This is the result
of a tradition of visualizing the human body as ‘a site of personal
pain, national trauma, and voyeuristic pleasure’ (Berry, 2008, p. 28)
that stretches back to at least the nineteenth century. The most famous
manifestation of this practice, however, is undoubtedly the writer Lu
Xun’s account of watching a slide show depicting the beheading of a
Chinese prisoner. In this extract from the 1922 preface to his first col-
lection of short stories, A call to arms [Nahan], Lu recalls his time as a
student in Tokyo, sitting in lectures and looking at lantern slides of the
Russo-Japanese war. One day, an image was projected of a group of

Chinese: a single man with his hands tied, surrounded by others, star-
ing. The accompanying commentary described the bound man as a spy
for the Russians, awaiting decapitation as punishment; those standing
around him ‘had come to enjoy the spectacle’ (X. Lu, 1994, p. 3). Lu
comments that ‘The people of a weak and backward country, however
strong and healthy that may be, can only serve to be made examples
of, or to witness such futile spectacles’ (p. 3). He credits this realization
with his decision to drop medicine, and instead to focus his energies on
writing; while the former might heal the Chinese physically, only the
latter could mend their broken spirit.
This complex account of primal violence, though often understood as
a catalyst for the foundation of the modern literary tradition in China
(c.f. D. Wang, 2004, pp. 15–40), is also a self-conscious meditation upon
the problems of visualizing the subaltern body. In Lu Xun’s account,
there is nothing inherently intersubjective about this image of a man
bound. Rather, it contains the potential to generate both critical aware-
ness and unreflexive pleasure. The latter is symbolized by the Chinese
in the photograph who gaze at the captured prisoner, but also by the
Japanese students gathered in the lecture theatre, ‘clapping and cheer-
ing’ (X. Lu, 1994, p. 2) at these slides. The former is epitomized by Lu
Xun himself, both present in the room yet distanced from his class-
mates, and looking back on the scene from some 20 years later, at the
point of writing. Finally, there is the reader: as Michael Berry (2008,
p. 48) has noted, in presenting these multiple perspectives, the preface
prompts us to consider how we would respond to this moment, and
through whose eyes we would view it. The capacity of the corporeal
image to both provoke and inhibit identification, and thus the issue
of how it is constituted, and for whom, is therefore raised directly as
a problem. But at the same time, this predicament is coupled to oth-
ers surrounding the means of production. The Japanese, through the
camera and the slide projector, have acquired the power to produce an
image of the Chinese body as a passive object, and screen it for the
pleasure of this Tokyo audience. Lu Xun, disenfranchised and alienated,
responds by attempting to reclaim this power through writing, rework-
ing the scene as a catalyst for righteous outrage and political action.
To enable this act of reappropriation, however, he must stake a claim to
his chosen technology: the pen.
These discussions highlight the extent to which the documentary
image is both the product of, and reproduces, power dynamics. This
problem is brought into sharp focus around questions of control
and consent. What, for example, are the acceptable limits of live
filmmaking? When should a director stop shooting and intervene in
what is happening on location? Will the documentary subject ever feel
empowered enough to insist that the camera be turned off, and, should
this happen, how will the director respond? As this suggests, the act of
shooting live is not simply temporally, spatially or semiotically contin-
gent. It is also a contingent social space, emerging through dialogical
interactions – those of director and subject – in which equality is not a
given, but has to be constantly negotiated. From this perspective, ‘the
scene’ is what Mary Louise Pratt (1992, p. 4) has termed a ‘contact zone’:
a place ‘where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each
other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and sub-
ordination.’ However, these relations extend beyond the time and space
of filming. Control over the production and circulation of the documen-
tary is also implicated in this power dynamic. Who determines what is
included in the final cut? Where will it be shown, to whom, and for what
purpose? These questions are important because, as David MacDougall
(2006, p. 5) has pointed out, the visual is a form of knowledge. How a
film represents its subjects, and the kinds of affective power its images
generate, can therefore have very real implications for those captured on
camera. At stake here is not simply the representation of actual physi-
cal brutality, but the potential social violence of iconography; a violence
that may be intensified if the act of representation cuts across bound-
aries of social inequality, or if the images captured are of a particularly
sensitive nature.
The lightness of the digital
Such issues are longstanding in the field of independent Chinese doc-

umentary production. Nevertheless, they were brought to a head with
the arrival of digital video. Scenes such as those from Leave Me Alone
were perceived to have proliferated following the dissemination of the
technology, as a consequence of its particular materiality. Wang Yiman
(2005, p. 20), for example, has argued that such sequences are character-
istic of a genre she describes as ‘the “documentary of cruelty” ’, which
is in turn directly connected to the hyper-indexicality of the digital, as
understood in the Chinese context. In western film theory, digital video
has often been regarded as a particularly anti-indexical technology, one
that threatens the physical link between image and material reality sup-
posedly inherent to celluloid, and critical to the documentary as a form.3
In China, however, Wang suggests that the medium was understood to
be possessed of an indexicality so acute that its images were, in turn,

intrinsically violent or cruel. The digital was seen as unparalleled in
its capacity to capture experiential reality, ‘the ostensibly inconsequen-
tial real-life details, as perceived and experienced, yet not systematized,
by the amateur-author behind the DV lens’ (p. 22). It could, therefore,
strip away a subject’s performativity, expose accepted representational
conventions as just that – mere conventions – and convey unavoidable
specifics that, in their lack of standardization, suggested the messiness
of material existence. The cruelty of digital video – whether to the sub-
ject represented, or the viewer forced to watch this representation – was
a consequence of the clarity with which the medium revealed reality, a
clarity which, certain directors claimed, viewers were both excited by
and yet unable to bear (p. 20). The medium was, in a sense, ‘realer
than real’, and it was precisely this quality that rendered the images
it produced so hard to watch.
Wang’s argument recalls Walter Benjamin’s (1999) discussion of film
and photography, in particular his belief that the camera, by revealing
what the eye was incapable of perceiving, could shock the insensate
twentieth-century viewer back into an awareness of his or her mate-
rial environment. Other formulations of this problem, however, have
focused less on the question of digital indexicality, and more on tech-
nical flexibility: what Paola Voci (2010) has termed the medium’s
‘lightness’. Smaller and more portable than even the analogue video
technology highlighted briefly in the previous chapter, the DV cam-
era could penetrate with comparative ease spaces that were previously
inaccessible. While these included public spaces that were formerly off
limits, or simply extremely difficult for an individual unaffiliated with
state media to film – for example, the government office in Zhao Liang’s
Petition [Shangfang] (2008) – more immediate concern was expressed
over the facility with which the personal could be captured for pub-
lic exhibition, especially given the low impedance factor of the digital
image: the ease with which it can be duplicated and circulated, both
online and via DVDs. Although a boon for self-expression, where such
material concerned the private intimacies of a director’s subjects, the
problems became more obviously pronounced. This conundrum was
exacerbated by the interest in socially marginal subjects further stim-
ulated by the technology’s popularization. In an environment in which
predominantly middle-class directors could document the lives of the
disenfranchised in increasing detail, and circulate the product with
growing ease, ethical questions around representation and exploitation
became more pressing.4 Finally, the imbrication of power and visuality
was thrown into stark relief by the democratization of production appar-

ently promised by the new technology. Although some established
documentary directors voiced anxieties over digital video’s challenge to
professional practices, worrying that it might result in the manipulation
of the unwary by amateur filmmakers (c.f. Zhang Yuan, cited in Y. Wang,
2005, p. 20; J. Duan, 2005), this broadening of access suddenly made
critical documentary reflection by the subaltern subject on media repre-
sentation of the subaltern subject a genuine possibility. We are back, in
a sense, to Lu Xun and his pen.
In the preface to A call to arms, the subaltern in question is the
national subject. In Leave Me Alone, the subject is the social subaltern.
This chapter seeks to extend this debate still further by exploring the
intersection of these issues – the corporeal image, the subaltern subject
and digital video – in relation to representations of the sexual sub-
altern in independent Chinese documentary. As part of the wave of
digital documentaries on socially marginal groups, the early 2000s saw
the emergence of a number of works focused on the queer subject, in
particular the fanchuan, or cross-dressed performer. A practice with a
venerable history in China, cross-dressing has long provided a way for
the queer subject to negotiate public space, whether through theatri-
cal or documentary performance, in a manner that renders his or her
actual sexual identity ambiguous. It can therefore be understood as a
defence mechanism against the potential social violence of homopho-
bia, and thus as a form of empowerment. For the primarily heterosexual
directors of these documentaries, however, the embodied experience of
the fanchuan appears to have been a way to explore questions of social
marginality through xianchang. This required a degree of disambigua-
tion around the identity of their subjects – specifically, their gender and
sexual orientation – that sat uneasily with the inherently boundary-
blurring nature of cross-dressed performance. The consequence is a
conflict within these films between the desire to reveal, and the need
to conceal, the body of their subjects, a conflict that translates into the
representation of the queer body as the focus for voyeuristic curiosity
on the part of both camera and audience. Such tensions are only exacer-
bated by the light qualities of digital video, while also speaking directly
to the question of subaltern representation, and the problem of ‘the
scene’ as the site of particular power dynamics.
In contrast, contemporary documentaries by directors who identify as
queer take a very different approach to these issues. Borne on the wave
of socially engaged media production facilitated by the growth of digi-
tal video, these directors come to their subject matter from a position
within the community, rather than outside it. In consequence, they

are less concerned either with questions of ambiguity, or of intersub-
jective knowledge, than with the articulation of an unmistakably queer
identity in ways that are neither spectacular nor voyeuristic. This often
involves critical reflection on ways of imagining the queer body, and the
exploitation of the light qualities of digital media to publicly articulate
a different kind of sexuality. Thus, Cui Zi’en’s Queer China, ‘Comrade’,
China interrogates historical representations of homosexuality, in the
process reclaiming the corporeal image as a signifier of queer desire
and queer agency, while Fan Popo and David Cheng’s New Beijing, New
Marriage uses performance and the act of documentation to effect this
same agency on central Beijing’s Qianmen Street. In the process, how-
ever, these films both illuminate the contingent power dynamics at play
in shooting ‘on the scene’, and demonstrate how the rise of minor-
ity directors, facilitated by the spread of digital video, has exposed the
implication of these power dynamics in the iconography of subaltern –
in this instance queer – representation.5
Representing homosexuality: independent Chinese

documentary and the queer body
Independent Chinese documentary has long been associated with the

subaltern subject. While such a focus is identifiable as far back as Duan
Jinchuan’s first films on Tibet, early digital productions such as Wu
Wenguang’s Jianghu: Life on the Road, Yang Lina’s Old Men and Wang
Jianwei’s Living Elsewhere [Shenghuo zai bie chu] (1999) expanded the
purview of independent documentary to incorporate the socially disen-
franchised, and the marginal, in a multiplicity of manifestations. This
rapidly came to include sexual minorities. In 2000, Zhang Yuan shot
Miss Jin Xing [Jin Xing xiaojie], about a male dancer of the same name
choosing to undergo gender reassignment. A year later, Ying Weiwei’s
The Box [Hezi] (2001), about a lesbian couple’s relationship, was released.
Since then, a steady stream of independent documentaries has been pro-
duced that focuses on the lives of queer or transgendered Chinese men
and women, mainly made using digital technology.
What is striking about this early work, however, is its preoccupa-
tion with Chinese male homosexuality as performance. Most of these
films focus on queer subjects who are performers, in particular, although
not exclusively, fanchuan: men who perform dressed as women, or, in
vernacular English, ‘drag queens’.6 Even when the films showcase pro-
tagonists who do not make their living in this manner, they often
explicitly feature scenes of (predominantly drag) performance, usually

in gay bars or clubs.7 This focus not only reflects the ubiquity of male
cross-dressed performance within the Chinese queer community, but
also – perhaps inadvertently – highlights its significance. Cross-dressing
has traditionally been one of the few ways in which the queer Chinese
subject can gain access to ‘public space, public discourse, and public
record’ (Berry, 2009a, p. 172). However, it is also a way in which said
subject can strategically frame a public identity while self-consciously
retaining a degree of ambiguity about his actual sexual orientation.
Through the citation of accepted theatrical or operatic codes of cross-
dressing, the fanchuan fashions his subjectivity against the regime of
public gender hetero-normativity. At the same time, by expressing this
identity through paradigms derived from the stage, some room is still
left for denial; after all, what we see could merely be performance and
nothing more. In this manner, the queer subject negotiates access to
public space without having to commit to a stable, identifiable sexuality
(S. Chao, 2010b, p. 162).
Seen from the bottom up, the cross-dressed performance of the
fanchuan may therefore be understood as an act of self-empowerment,
and as a ‘survival strategy’ (S. Chao, 2010b, p. 162). It is a way in which
queer men can negotiate an identity that neither entirely conforms
to social expectations, nor unduly exposes individuals to the possible
violence that might accompany an unequivocal ‘outing’ (p. 162). In a
similar manner, however, it can be understood as a way in which the
fanchuan negotiates his relationship with the documentary director and
the DV camera: in other words, how he manages the contingent and
unequal power relations that manifest not simply in the everyday world,
but also ‘on the scene’ of filmmaking. The camera, like the stage, pro-
vides an opportunity for public exhibition of the documentary subject’s
identity. Indeed, it is precisely for this reason that individuals may agree
to participate in a project in the first place.8 Yet the subject of these
films, as previously discussed, does not have complete control over the
conditions under which his identity will be made public. Outside of
explicitly participatory production strategies, he cannot dictate abso-
lutely what is captured on location, or how it is captured, or to whom it
will circulate (and in what form) after shooting has finished – a situation
aggravated by the lightness of the digital. In appearing on camera ‘in
character’, it could be argued that these individuals are simply attempt-
ing to pre-empt the difficulties presented for the queer subject both
by the digital medium and by their socially subordinate status vis-à-vis
the filmmaker, as they seek to control their conditions of exposure to
a wider world that may not always be entirely accepting of their sexual
identity.
In a similar manner, certain of these documentaries feature tech-
niques that formally mirror this interest in performance on the part of
the films’ subjects. These practices include the combining of scripted,
re-enacted and unscripted scenes or storylines; the mixing of actors and
non-professionals; and the use of camerawork that both pastiches the
vérité practices of documentary, and reveals each film’s status as a con-
structed artefact and product of mediation. Such techniques place these
documentaries at the intersection of the reflexive and the performa-
tive modes of filmmaking.9 More importantly, they serve to deliberately
blur the line between documentary and fiction, making it hard to
identify those elements of a film that are real, and those that are
not. As Chao Shi-yan (2010b, pp. 157–9) has written of Tangtang, the
assumed correspondence of xianchang to reality is thus destabilized, and
the performance of gender becomes a vehicle through which the doc-
umentary can formally probe the limits of xianchang as an aesthetic.
But in unsettling these boundaries, a director also ensures that it is
extremely difficult for an audience to distinguish those filmed subjects
who are actually queer from those merely acting queer. Cui Zi’en, for
example, has said that in Night Scene he chose to mix actors and non-
professionals, documentary and dramatic footage, precisely to render
the real rent boys who appear in the film harder to identify, both on and
off screen (cited in Voci, 2010, p. 208 n.28). This move can, therefore, be
understood not just as formally experimental, but also ethical. It demon-
strates Cui’s sense of responsibility for his subjects: how he recognizes
that a straightforward documentary account of their lives might place
them in a vulnerable position, and how his concern for their welfare
extends beyond the limits of the film shoot.
Cui’s attitude, however, is unusual. It perhaps reflects his status as
the only self-identified queer filmmaker in this group of digital pio-
neers. For the majority of these (heterosexual) directors, I would propose
that the overarching framework of xianchang renders their focus on
fanchuan perfectly comprehensible. While an interest in the formally
experimental can be explained by their backgrounds in filmmaking and
the fine arts rather than the mass media,10 they are perhaps less inter-
ested in performance per se than in the queer body as a conduit to the
social experience of the documentary subject. Jiang Zhi, for example,
has described Xiang Pingli as a study of the ‘third sex’: neither man nor
woman, but somewhere in between. However, he also believes that, as
members of a social underclass, his subjects’ desire to transform their
bodies derived less from a commitment to confronting sexual politics

than from an urgent need to develop strategic modes of day-to-day
survival (Z. Li, 2009). Translating this experience into visual form thus
becomes a way of reflecting on the relationship between particular kinds
of bodies, social exclusion and postsocialist transition. Regardless of the
way Jiang plays with the boundaries between the real and the fictional
in his film, embodied knowledge in Xiang Pingli seems to function both
as a bridge to intersubjective experience – the world of these individuals
is, after all, far removed from that of the filmmaker – and as a point of
entry ‘into an understanding of [ . . . ] more general processes at work in
society’ (Nichols, 2010, p. 201).
As a result, I would suggest that one can often trace a tension in
these documentaries between the impulse to conceal, and the urge to
reveal. On the one hand, they try to render the identity of the docu-
mentary subject uncertain and difficult to pin down, in the manner of
the protagonists themselves. On the other hand, they seek to generate
knowledge through or about these subjects: to function as an ‘inscribing
practice’ (Connerton, 1989, p. 73) – a way of storing information about
the human subject long after that subject has ceased to be present in
front of the camera – an impulse not entirely compatible with any sus-
tained degree of ambiguity. Since the body of the fanchuan is critical to
both desires, it is often on this body that these tensions play out. For
every attempt in these films to blur the boundaries between the real and
the performed, then, one can locate an image that appears to demystify
the physical reality of the queer body. The most extreme examples are
to be found in the sequences of the male body before, during and after
surgery, captured in Zhang Yuan and Jiang Zhi’s films. Others would
include those scenes in which the queer performer is inspected as he
gets dressed or undressed, often backstage, before or after a performance.
At these moments, the queer body can also become a problematic site
of voyeuristic spectacle. Chao Shi-yan (2010b) has pointed to such a
dynamic towards the end of Meimei. In this sequence, a friend of the pro-
tagonist, called Mr Lee, has just finished a performance in a beer garden.
Backstage, as he undresses, some members of the audience linger, finally
catching sight of him partially naked and out of costume. Chao ascribes
these viewers’ curiosity to a desire to confirm the actual gender of the
performer, thus ensuring that ‘cross-dressing is solely for entertainment
purposes and that gender ambiguity is “properly” limited to the stage’
(p. 167). Thus, while the ambiguities of performance may indeed endow
the queer subject with a degree of agency in social space, the audience’s
need to inspect his body backstage reveals a desire to unambiguously
establish his ‘real’ gender, and thus a clearly recognizable identity, be

that male or female.
If Zhang Hanzi’s camera records the gaze of the diegetic audience in
his documentary, at other moments in other films the camera itself
seems to replicate this curiosity. Several illustrative instances occur in
Du Haibin’s Beautiful Men. Du’s film is centred round a gay bar in
Chengdu, Sichuan Province, which is famous for its fanchuan perfor-
mances. The director’s protagonists are all themselves performers, or
involved in the management of the bar. Consequently, although the
documentary does investigate the private lives of its subjects, much of
the action revolves around preparation for, and execution of, these drag
shows. This includes scenes shot both on and backstage. In these latter
sequences, the camera lingers with something approaching fascination
on its subjects as they prepare either for the stage, or for life off it. About
20 minutes into the film, for example, we find ourselves watching as
the fanchuan prepare to go onstage for a number. As they file out of
the dressing room, one, named Shu Qi, lingers behind. Seemingly half
aware of the camera and half caught up in his own stage persona, he
looks over his shoulder into the mirror and poses slightly – exposing his
thigh through the slit at the top of his skirt – before turning and disap-
pearing through the curtain backstage. The camera pauses briefly before
following him. It passes through the curtain, into darkness, before peek-
ing through a gap in the wings to allow us a view from behind of the
fanchuan performing. Some 10 minutes later, we are presented with a
further dressing room scene, although this time post-performance (not
apparently the same one). Here, the fanchuan are getting changed into
everyday clothing. The camera focuses on one boy, sitting at front of
shot, still wearing makeup, a wig and a padded bra. He takes the wig
off, glances at the camera, and strikes a stylized pose with his arms
and head, singing along to the music we can hear coming from the
stage. Then, throwing off his bra, he stands up abruptly, sliding the
padding down his naked torso and over the jeans that he is now shown
to be wearing on his lower body. As the camera draws back and down,
revealing this sight to the viewer, the fanchuan says
Finished. Work’s over. At last we can go home and be men. I’m also
going to be a man. Every day, we have to play at being men and
women.
In these brief sequences, the camera is drawn to the bodies of the per-
formers. In the first, it suggests the provocative presence of flesh under
Shu Qi’s costume. In the second, it seems to be confirming that, beneath

their clothes and make-up, the fanchuan are ‘real’ men (even while the
fanchuan himself complicates this desire by implying that masculinity
itself is merely a performance). In both, the queer performer’s body
is central, but in neither is the perspective necessarily intersubjective.
Indeed, the viewer is placed in precisely the position of the audience in
Meimei, encouraging a dynamic of voyeuristic curiosity and slightly las-
civious pleasure. But it is the intimation of how the size and flexibility of
DV technology facilitates the framing of these images that is particularly
interesting. First, as Shu Qi poses in the mirror, it seems briefly possible
that he has forgotten the presence of the camera, and that what we are
seeing is a personal moment never intended for public consumption.
Second, in following the fanchuan out of the dressing room, backstage,
and in permitting us a brief glimpse of the show from a position in
which he remains unnoticed, Du Haibin emphasizes, however uninten-
tionally, that it is precisely the lightness of the digital – the ease with
which the camera can move between these different spaces – that makes
such voyeurism possible.11 The complex power dynamics that lie behind
these particular corporeal images are thus suggestively, if unconsciously,
linked to the particularities of digital production that have concerned
so many documentary directors, in China and elsewhere.
Queer activism and independent Chinese documentary
In these earliest documentaries on queer material, then, there is a

particular focus on fanchuan, performance and the male body. More
contemporary documentaries, however, are striking for the ways in
which they break with this tradition. Their subject matter, though not
excluding questions of performance and performers, has now expanded.
It includes reflections on queer history and the emergence of a self-
conscious queer community in China, as in Cui’s Queer China, ‘Comrade’
China; ‘coming out’ (chu gui) stories such as Fan Popo’s Chinese Closet
[Guizu] (2009); explicit discussions of sexual encounters and lifestyles,
exemplified by Zhou Ming’s All About Gay Sex [Gay na huar] (2010), and,
to a lesser extent, Qiu Jiongjiong’s Madame [Gu nainai] (2009); and con-
siderations of the everyday quality of queer life in a range of different
contexts, from the publicly staged gay weddings of New Beijing, New
Marriage, to the multiple topics tackled in the webcast Queer Comrades
[Tongzhi yi fanren] (2007– ). The performative and reflexive elements of
xianchang have been diluted by what appears to be a more traditional
broadcasting aesthetic – interviews and direct to camera address, for
example – such that even a documentary like New Beijing, New Marriage,
which explicitly considers issues of performance and performativity,
does so in a less self-consciously aestheticized manner. Finally, the queer
body is not as conspicuous in these films as in those just discussed, and,
where it is represented, such imagery works in rather different ways, as
I shall elaborate below.12
One factor explaining this pluralization might be the professional
backgrounds of the new directors, which are more varied than their pre-
decessors. Fan Popo, one of the most prolific of this group, studied at
the Beijing Film Academy, but did not start to make films until after
he had graduated (Collett, 2010); the first coproducers, and cohosts,
of Queer Comrades, Wei Jiangang and Steven Jiang, trained in acting
and broadcasting, respectively; and even Cui Zi’en, whose film practice
spans the entire decade, and is the most self-consciously avant garde
of this group, had already diversified into more straightforward non-
fiction production prior to releasing Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China.13 The
less obviously experimental approach to the genre exhibited by some of
these individuals may thus in part reflect their professional background,
or lack thereof. In this sense, these directors are a manifestation of digital
video’s capacity to blur, or even break down, pre-existing institutional
and aesthetic boundaries, as discussed in Chapter 1. But as important,
I would suggest, is the fact that these filmmakers all explicitly identify as
queer. They do not come to their subject matter from the outside, look-
ing in. Instead, they approach it from the inside, as individuals who
are already part of the subculture they are documenting. Questions of
intersubjective identification are thus less immediately obvious in their
work, because it is naturally of a far more auto-ethnographic bent.
In consequence, the purpose of these films is rather different from
that of their predecessors. Unlike Tangtang, Meimei or even Cui Zi’en’s
earlier films that capture queer issues through an experimental lens,
they seek to document and sustain a community from a diversity of
perspectives, rather than predominantly focusing on one single element
thereof. But they also take a rather different approach to the nature
of queer identity. Many of these directors are not simply queer, but
also closely involved in Chinese lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
(LGBT) social activism. For them, documentary functions both as a way
of raising public awareness of queer issues and as a forum for the public
validation of that identity. Cui Zi’en has of course been a long-time fig-
urehead for the Chinese queer community. However, Fan Popo and Wei
Jiangang are also both involved in community politics in China, and
have worked with, or received training from, local and international
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in this arena. This

explains how their work is positioned. Fan (2010) has described Chinese
Closet as a form of ‘public education’ (gonggong jiaoyu) for his audi-
ence; Queer Comrades explicitly frames itself as presenting stories by and
about Chinese queer empowerment (‘Guanyu women’, no date). It is
also reflected in the way many of these producers actively attempt to
bring their work to a wider audience. Fan Popo helped found the China
Queer Film Festival Tour in 2008 as a way of circulating films shown at
the Beijing Queer Film Festival to viewers outside the capital (Collett,
2010), while Queer Comrades makes use of the webcast format to reach a
general public. Though well aware of the problems incurred in making
one’s sexual identity common knowledge, these directors are therefore
less concerned with the issue of ambiguity. Instead, they see the act of
articulating an unmistakably queer identity as a political and ethical
decision in its own right.
In this sense, contemporary queer documentary could be seen as part
of the wave of socially engaged media that has swept China in the wake
of digital video. In a similar manner to more explicitly activist direc-
tors such as Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie, those involved have grasped the
possibilities the medium presents for communication, organization and
political representation. It does not follow, however, that these queer
documentaries are engaged in the kind of ‘rightful resistance’ (O’Brien
and Li, 2006) that might be imputed to other forms of community-
based media in China. Historically, LGBT activists in China have been
divided about invoking rights-based discourses: while some hope that
anti-discrimination legislation will be enacted, others regard it as irrel-
evant to the more pressing issue of social discrimination (Y. Li, 2006,
pp. 96–8); still others have viewed rights-based initiatives with deep
scepticism, considering them positively detrimental to the relationship
of queer Chinese to the state (L. Ho, 2010, pp. 28–9). More practi-
cally, the ongoing negotiation of relationships with government has
a necessary impact on the discursive boundaries of this work.14 Thus,
while some of these documentaries do address such questions directly,
I think their socially engaged sensibility also manifests visually, through
consideration of mediated, rather than political, representation. This is
demonstrated in the way these films critically rework the trope of the
queer body, a process that allows for reflection on queer agency and the
act of queer mediation, but also ultimately effects such agency through
mediation. The consequence is not merely a new understanding of the
queer body’s significance in relation to the formation of sexual subjec-
tivity, but also a repositioning of the subaltern body in the production
of xianchang. Two examples of this phenomenon can be found in Queer

China, ‘Comrade’ China and New Beijing, New Marriage.
‘To whom do our bodies belong?’: Queer China,

‘Comrade’ China
Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China is a feature-length documentary directed

by independent filmmaker and Beijing Film Academy faculty member
Cui Zi’en. Divided into nine sections, each dealing with a discrete ele-
ment of queer life in China, it is composed almost entirely of talking
heads discussing issues ranging from gay marriage to homosexuality
in classical Chinese literature. These are interspersed with remediated
footage of television broadcasts, feature films, documentaries, amateur
or personal video, and occasional vérité footage. The heads are presented
in a traditional broadcasting format: individuals sit facing the camera,
and are shot three-quarter length, predominantly indoors, in spaces not
obviously identifiable to the casual viewer. The style of these sequences
is pure observational documentary. In comparison with much of Cui’s
highly experimental oeuvre to date, it is therefore perhaps unsurpris-
ing that Bérénice Reynaud (2010a) has described Queer China, ‘Comrade’
China as ‘Espousing a more traditional form’ of documentary.
In contrast to an earlier film such as Night Scene, Cui makes no attempt
to anonymize his subjects in Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China. There is no
mixing of actors and non-professionals, and the talking heads are iden-
tified by name through occasional intertitles. Indeed, the point is that
they are identifiable: much of what is discussed on film concerns sexual
subjectivity, and these individuals weave their own personal experi-
ences as queer men and women – or as social activists involved with
the emergence of the queer community – into the historical narrative
that emerges over the course of the documentary. These techniques
clearly function to make ‘queerness’ visible and audible to the viewer.
But they also present a very different image of the queer subject from
that of a film such as Beautiful Men. Cui’s camera displays little interest
in the bodies of his interlocutors. We may see the head and shoulders of
the documentary’s subjects, but rarely their entire torso; they are never
naked, or even half-dressed. Poised, clothed and articulate, Cui’s inter-
locutors thus appear the very antithesis of spectacular or objectified, and
quite different from the images we sometimes glimpse in the earliest
fanchuan documentaries.
Is this decision self-conscious? Perhaps. Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China
is highly aware of the role of mediation in queer existence: the
introduction to the film on the DVD release packaging starts quite

simply with the phrase ‘We are in an age when images possess [the]
power to affect the world.’ Not only does the documentary thematically
address the function of technologies from the pager to the internet in
the construction of a queer community in China, but it also replays and
reframes images of homosexuality from Chinese television and cinema
within the main body of the film. These images include, among others,
the surgery scenes from Miss Jin Xing; a sequence from Xiang Pingli in
which one of the characters is attacked and beaten; and scenes of police
harassment excerpted from Zhang Yuan’s feature East Palace, West Palace
[Donggong xigong] (1996). The stark difference between representations
of the queer subject in this footage, and that shot specifically for Queer
China, ‘Comrade’ China, is thus revealed through the documentary’s dia-
logical structure. But just as interesting is how the documentary makes
use of the queer body in a manner distinct from Cui’s earlier work.
As Wang Qi (forthcoming) has pointed out, the naked body is a recur-
rent trope in Cui’s experimental film and video pieces. While the precise
manifestation of this body varies – encompassing, for example, humans
and aliens in The Narrow Path [Wu yu] (2003), the transgendered pater-
nal/maternal body in Enter the Clowns [Choujue deng chang] (2002), and
the eroticized, cross-dressed body in Night Scene – its presence has been
consistent. In not overtly featuring such imagery, Queer China, ‘Comrade’
China thus departs from the representational practice established by the
director’s earlier corpus of film and video.
Part of the reason for this divergence might be the differences between
experimental video and documentary practice, in particular the more
obviously political nature of documentary as a genre. Yet the naked
human form has not been eradicated entirely from Queer China, ‘Com-
rade’ China, for it returns in several of the interviews. The first is
with lesbian activist, artist and filmmaker Shi Tou. When we initially
encounter Shi, five minutes into the documentary, she is sitting inside,
framed from the shoulder up, speaking directly to the camera on the
subject of marriage and coming out. The location of the interview is
unclear, although it appears to be a domestic space of some description.
Hanging on the wall behind Shi is a large oil painting, probably one of
her own. On the left side of the canvas, directly behind her head, we
can see the upper torso of a female nude. About 10 minutes after this
initial sequence, the documentary returns to the artist, and this mise-en-
scène is repeated, but even more explicitly. As she discusses the history of
China’s first lesbian social organizations, framed behind her left shoul-
der can be seen another painting of a female nude; to the right of the
shot are a further series of similar images, although it is unclear whether

these are painting or photographs. These are hung vertically down the
wall, and fill most of the right-hand side of the screen. Visually, the
artist is thus closely associated with the naked female body. The second
context in which such images occur is an interview with queer activist
Zhang Yi. Again, this takes place inside what is probably the subject’s
flat. Again, Zhang is sitting on a chair, at a slight angle, talking directly
to the camera. The wall behind him is covered with photographs and
postcards. Most prominent, however, and by far the largest of any of
these images, is a framed black and white portrait hung on the wall
just behind his head. Of whom this is a portrait is unclear. However,
it is very obviously the reclining torso of a young man, with his arms
behind his head, either naked or clad only in a pale vest that fades into
the photographic tone of his body.
In these interviews, the corporeal image reappears remediated.
No longer manifested though the body of the queer subject on camera,
it is rather revisited as bodily representation within the mise-en-scène.
As such, its function is different. The paintings and photographs iden-
tifiable in these sequences still suggest desire and the pleasures of the
gaze. However, as none of these objects are the primary focus of these
sequences – which remains the interviewees – the gaze implied is no
longer primarily that of the viewer, or of the camera. Instead, it is the
gaze of the diegetic queer subject. That such photographs and paintings
hang in these domestic spaces stands as testimony to Shi Tou and Zhang
Yi’s respective sexual orientations. Because these images have apparently
been taken, made or chosen by Shi and Zhang, however, they also sug-
gest the agency of these individuals in their production or selection, and
not just the agency of the director in documenting their presence. They
thus exist in the film not simply as tropes through which Cui can probe
the limits of reality, or attempt to access the world of his subjects, but as
symptoms of these subjects’ own decisions to embrace, explore and ulti-
mately affirm their sexual identity, and the pleasures it may offer them
and others.
The use of the body in Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China thus illus-
trates not only how the queer subject can assert control over his or
her identity, but also over how that identity is signified. The talking
heads of Cui Zi’en’s interviewees provide an implicit contrast with the
footage that the documentary remediates, suggesting one way in which
queer directors might both present their subjects as interlocutors, and
avoid the problem of voyeurism that troubled the films about fanchuan.
Simultaneously, the photographs and paintings produced and collected
by Shi Tou and Zhang Yi demonstrate how corporeal images can be
appropriated by queer subjects, and used to make unambiguous and pos-

itive statements about their sexual identity, without said subjects being
reduced to self-objectification. Given the critical perspective on estab-
lished tropes of the queer body that they provide, both kinds of image
can therefore be understood as a form of indirect commentary on queer
agency and self-representation. In this sense, they are entirely consistent
with the thrust of Cui’s earlier work, in which provocative use of the cor-
poreal is deployed as a challenge to official discourse and historiography
(Q. Wang, forthcoming). At the same time, however, these remediated
representations underline the fact that the act of documentary inscrip-
tion is not neutral, but moulded by the subjectivity of the director. They
thus encourage consideration of the contingent power dynamics that
structure the act of mediation, and the forms of subaltern representa-
tion that emerge from it. Activist Tong Ge, commenting on sexuality
and internalized repression in the film, declares that ‘the most impor-
tant question for me is: to whom do our bodies belong? Do I have the
right to use my own body as I wish?’ This is a question that, visually,
Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China constantly returns to, even if, ultimately,
it provides the viewer with no definitive answer.
New Beijing, New Marriage: queer performance

and queer agency
If Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China rearticulates and reappropriates the body

as a figure of queer desire, Fan Popo and David Cheng’s New Beijing,
New Marriage reworks performance to further assert queer agency, in
the process directly addressing the issue of audience viewing practices.
This short documentary chronicles the performance of two gay wed-
dings at Beijing’s Qianmen Street on Valentine’s Day 2009. Tracking
the participants – one female and one male couple, respectively – as
they don western-style wedding clothes, travel by taxi to the venue, and
have wedding photographs taken in full view of members of the general
public, the film then turns its gaze outwards. The directors and their sub-
jects question this public on its views of homosexuality; ask whether, as
individuals, they would accept gay marriage; and finally get people to
pose for photographs with the happy couples. The film concludes with
a montage of gay wedding stills from around the world, and an appeal
for the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships in China.
As in Meimei, the subjects of New Beijing, New Marriage use perfor-
mance to access public space. The nature of their performance, however,
is rather different. The codes borrowed here are not theatrical, but every-
day. They do not involve cross-dressing, but rather the appropriation by
queer subjects of the gendered identities associated with heterosexual

marriage. This facilitates the minimization of voyeuristic bodily display
within the diegesis of the documentary. In the opening sequence, for
example, the brides and grooms prepare for the wedding ceremony in a
flat somewhere in Beijing. As the camera circles the couples, they apply
makeup, false eyelashes, have their hair done and adjust their bow ties
and veils. In contrast to the dressing room scenes in Meimei or Beautiful
Men, however – sequences that are perhaps analogous in terms of their
focus on ritual preparation – New Beijing, New Marriage avoids images of
its subjects in any state of undress. The documentary thus steers clear
of both biological essentialization and audience titillation. At the same
time, however, any sense of sexual identity as a set of dramatic prac-
tices, to be adopted or disposed of at will, is also quietly marginalized.
The focus is instead on queer sexuality as an incorporated identity, one
tied to physical and emotional desire as symbolized by the wedding cer-
emony. Not only does the documentary thus position homosexuality
as a constituent part of everyday life, but it also suggests how embod-
ied experience is fundamental to the day-to-day experience of living
‘queerly’.
If the nature of their performance differs, the claims on public space
made by the film’s subjects through performance are also much more
direct than in the earlier documentaries. While the fanchuan exploited
theatrical codes to pass in public, the couples in New Beijing, New Mar-
riage appropriate the modern ritual of the wedding photograph in order
to appear in everyday contexts as identifiably queer. This is something
they articulate consciously from the very beginning of the documen-
tary: as one of the women says while being made up, ‘With this event,
we hope to draw people’s attention to the existence of [the] gay com-
munity.’ The fact that this community exists not simply at the margins
of society, but as an integral part of it, is emphasized: as one of the
grooms says to the camera, and to the crowd, at Qianmen, ‘You, and
your friends, classmates, family members, colleagues . . . they may be gay
too. Except that you don’t know about them.’ Strategic audience mis-
recognition of the event as two heterosexual marriages is also something
that the participants are aware of, and keen to avert. As they walk down
Qianmen, for example, one of the women comments that they should
keep their distance from the men, in order to avoid being mistaken for
a pair of straight couples. But performance in New Beijing, New Marriage
is not simply about questions of visibility: it is also about agency. This is
highlighted by the fact that, after being photographed in wedding poses,
the couples not only pronounce their homosexuality for the crowd on
camera, but wade out into the onlookers to engage with them (‘Will you
support our same sex wedding?’ is one of the questions directly posed
to those watching). The rituals of marriage allow the film’s subjects to
enter not only public space, but also public discourse. As a result, the
couples can talk directly to members of the general public in a man-
ner that emphasizes their social agency, but not at the expense of their
sexual identity.
The relationship of the film’s subjects to public space is reproduced
in interesting ways by Fan and Cheng’s camerawork. If documentaries
like Meimei and Beautiful Men exploit the mobility of the digital cam-
era to enter places hidden from public view, New Beijing, New Marriage
reverses this dynamic. Although starting with a couple of brief shots of
Qianmen, the film then cuts back to the interior of the flat where the
couples are getting dressed and made up. From here, the camera fol-
lows its subjects into the liminal space of a taxi – neither private nor
exactly public – back into the indisputably public space of Qianmen,
where the wedding takes place and the film ultimately concludes. New
Beijing, New Marriage is thus structured round a progression outwards
into exterior space, rather than inwards into interiors. Furthermore, the
formal approach that Fan and Cheng adopt is quite distinct. While the
directors make no attempt to shroud their filmmaking in a performative
aesthetic, neither do they replicate the more traditional observational-
ism that dominates much of Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China. Instead, once
at Qianmen, Fan and Cheng’s camera weaves its way round the wedding,
out into the crowd gathered to enjoy the spectacle. When the couples
plunge into the surrounding throng to talk directly to their audience,
the directors not only follow, but imitate. Approaching members of the
general public with the camera, we hear one of their voices, off screen,
asking questions similar to those posed by the film’s subjects.
New Beijing, New Marriage in effect embraces a vérité mode com-
mon in early queer documentary in the United States, much of which
focused on participatory recording of public events – marches, parades,
demonstrations – that were historically unprecedented, and thus inter-
esting enough to require no formal elaboration beyond the act of
documentation (Waugh, 1997, p. 113). In doing so, I would argue that
the directors make a political statement in two ways. First, they present
the film as a straightforward public record of everything captured on
camera, implicitly acknowledging that there is no need to render the
sexual identity of its protagonists ambiguous. Second, they both suggest
their own sexual orientations, and emphasize their agency as queer
subjects. The projection of the directorial voice from off screen clearly
indicates the presence of the filmmakers ‘on the scene’, alongside the
couples in Qianmen. The nature of the questions asked also implies their
own identification with the queer community. And, in turning their
camera on the crowd, Fan and Cheng transform the heterosexual spec-
tators from observers into the observed, staking a claim to engage on
their own terms with the general public. As the couples use performance
to enter public space and discourse as queer subjects, so the directors
use the act of filming to do the same. In the process, they suggest how
documentary filmmaking can facilitate the emergence of this subject as
an active social agent not just through representation, but also through
material practice.
In New Beijing, New Marriage, the queer body is no longer a metonym
for more general social anxieties, or a spectacle for objectification by the
camera. Instead, it has become a site for the active production of new
sexual identities, exemplified by the documentary subjects’ appropria-
tion and performance of the rites associated with the heterosexual white
wedding. This is not sexuality as theatrical supplement, nor embod-
iment as physical evidence of gender identity. Rather, it is identity
enacted through what Paul Connerton (1989, pp. 72–3) has described
as incorporation: embodied presence and physical activity as vehicles
to both sustain established forms of social knowledge and generate new
ones. But equally importantly, the function of documentary filmmaking
itself has been transformed. The film’s desire to stand as the record of
these events may suggest the continuing influence of inscription, but
this is complemented by a more explicit sense of the filmmaking pro-
cess as an incorporating practice for the directors themselves. Much as
the couples in New Beijing, New Marriage can be said to articulate their
new identities through the physical performance of the rituals associ-
ated with marriage, so Fan and Cheng use the documentation of these
rituals as a conduit through which to publicly perform their own queer
subjectivity. In doing so, the directors come to physically embody this
subjectivity in much the same way as do the film’s brides and grooms.
If digital technology has enabled the queer subject to be incorporated
into the documentary production process in a quite literal manner, this
subject has, in New Beijing, New Marriage, exploited the lightness of such
technology to reformulate the act of documentation as one of performa-
tive incorporation. This in turn has generated new ways of imagining
queer identity and the queer body in China. While New Beijing, New
Marriage takes performance as one of its key tropes, it avoids images that
might be construed as objectifying or voyeuristic, focusing instead on
the ways in which the body can facilitate queer agency, and the unam-
biguous public articulation of sexual identity, through the appropriation
of particular heterosexual ceremonies and social roles. And yet, as with

Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China, the ability to make these identities public
is also linked to the power to mediate. The act of (digital) filmmaking
itself therefore becomes a way for the queer subject to enter public space
on something approaching his or her own terms, suggesting how the
power to represent differently is linked to the power to represent at all,
and how incorporation is therefore connected to inclusion. In doing
so, the directors subtly highlight the complex and contingent power
dynamics at play during live filmmaking – who is filming whom, for
what purpose and with what audience in mind? – and thus the ethi-
cal dilemmas presented by the use of the corporeal image as a trope of
intersubjective experience.
Conclusion
In his detailed study of queer cultural production by ethnic minority

Americans, José Esteban Muñoz (1999) has argued for the centrality
of a concept he calls ‘disidentification’. A complex and elusive term,
Muñoz defines disidentification as a cultural strategy through which
minority subjects neither assimilate completely to, nor directly resist,
majoritarian cultural discourse, but rather transform it from within.
In consequence, he suggests that the practice
is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of

disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of
a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s
universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its work-
ings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and
identifications. (p. 31)
Disidentification is how queer subjects in general – and, in Muñoz’s

reading, queer subjects of colour in particular – appropriate a cultural
form that might otherwise exclude or even denigrate them. In doing so,
these subjects transfigure an image, text or practice into a temporary site
for the affirmation of queer identity, while nonetheless acknowledging
the roots of such a discourse in the erasure of their subjectivity.
Without wishing to imply a precise equivalence between Chinese
and American queer culture, I would suggest that both Queer China,
‘Comrade’ China and New Beijing, New Marriage are examples of
disidentification in action. Each documentary reworks a number of
discourses around queer identity in a manner that allows the direc-
tors to imagine queer subjectivity in new and quite self-consciously
affirmative ways. In Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China, not only is the queer
body presented in a manner that deliberately underplays its physicality
and accentuates its sobriety, but the corporeal image, reappropriated as a
sign of homosexual desire, is itself queered. In New Beijing, New Marriage,
the wedding ceremony is reclaimed, its rituals of exclusion reworked as
means through which queer identity can be articulated both in public
space and in public discourse. In the process, the act of performance,
ambiguously positioned between agency and exploitation in the films
about fanchuan, is also disidentified as empowering, while the queer
body, no longer inscribed for objectification by the camera or the viewer,
is instead transformed into the site through which this public interven-
tion is effected. Both films therefore recalibrate existing representational
discourses to suggest the agency of the queer subject, and celebrate queer
sexual identity and history.
However, as Muñoz has suggested, disidentification also facilitates fur-
ther reflection on what is at stake in the making of a film. Through
their self-conscious meditations on mediation, Queer China, ‘Comrade’
China and New Beijing, New Marriage reveal the power dynamics behind
the production of the documentary image. In documentaries such as
Beautiful Men and Meimei, the image of the queer body as spectacle
speaks directly to the tensions between filmmaker and subaltern subject,
as played out ‘on the scene’ of filmmaking. In Queer China, ‘Comrade’
China, the reappropriation of the body as a positive signifier of queer
sexuality emphasizes the dissonance between this form of corporeal
representation and the way in which it manifested in the earliest inde-
pendent documentaries on queer subject matter. Here, the power of
the image is illuminated, but also the power in the image: those spe-
cific social inequalities reproduced in the filmmaking process, which are
transformed into audiovisual discourse in the finished product. This is
emphasized further in New Beijing, New Marriage. In explicitly turning
the camera on the crowd, the film accentuates both the authority of the
individual behind the camera and, ironically, how rarely this privilege
is conferred on the minority subject. Fan and Cheng, therefore, bring to
the fore the uneven intersubjective relations constitutive of the act of
location shooting, and how these may, in turn, impact upon the kinds
of knowledge produced about the documentary subject. At the same
time, the directors effect new forms of subjectivity through the process
of filmmaking that challenge these same power inequalities, and present
the queer subject in new and unexpected ways.
Ultimately, this returns us to Pratt’s notion of the contact zone, and
how it illuminates the practice of xianchang. As I noted before, it allows
us to think of both ‘the scene’ and liveness as social spaces formed

through the interaction of director and documentary subject. This space
may be contingent and unequal, but it is also open to negotiation and
compromise. In this particular instance, however, both this inequality
and the possibility of its rectification are tied to the potential of digi-
tal video as a medium. While the lightness of the digital contributed
to the voyeuristic manifestations of queer corporeality in the earliest
digital documentaries, in opening up the production process to queer
directors, it also presented the possibility for a radically altered director–
subject relationship. No longer was the subject confined in front of the
camera; now it was possible for the subject to be a director, and vice
versa. It is this shift that has facilitated the process of reflection and
appropriation – or, as Muñoz would have it, disidentification – that
I have detailed in Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China and New Beijing, New
Marriage, and which contributes to the emergence of an incorporated
sense of queer agency in the latter documentary. By extension, it is this
process that also enables the queer body to play a role in the produc-
tion of xianchang that is not plagued by the problems of voyeurism and
objectification.
The implications of this conclusion, however, extend beyond the
problem of subaltern representation. Digital video may have rendered
the relationship between minority subjects and mainstream directors
particularly complicated, but in helping to blur the lines between the
director and his or her subject more generally, it has also destabilized
the very act of documentary filmmaking. The implications of this shift
for professional documentarians, touching as it does directly on ques-
tions of intersubjectivity and representation, is not something that can
necessarily be avoided; this is true even for those directors who do not
work with subaltern communities. If it is now possible for the ordinary
film subject to be a producer – in other words, to actually engage in
mediation – how, if at all, should this be acknowledged in the docu-
mentary practice of individual filmmakers? What impact, in turn, might
this have on xianchang? My final chapter picks up this thread, and con-
siders it in relation to an element of location shooting critical both to
the generation of liveness as a poetics and to the diegetic positioning
of the documentary subject: sound practice, in particular the technique
known as the talking head.
5
Sound and Voice
Introduction
Sound is a critical, if under-analysed, element of xianchang. For the

earliest independent Chinese documentary directors, off-screen sound
signified the contingent or uncontrollable: live sound was thus cen-
tral to xianchang as a practice. At the same time, however, such sound
also drew attention to the constructed nature of documentary reality,
highlighting the presence of both director and camera ‘on the scene’ of
filmmaking. Initially, directors demonstrated a degree of ambivalence
about this reflexivity, in part, I would argue, because of xianchang’s
association with witness and testimony. This connection relied on the
qualities of presence and lived historical experience for its efficacy, qual-
ities that were complicated by the acknowledgement of documentation
as an act of mediation.
This chapter explores these questions in relation to sound practice
and the talking head. An apparent anachronism, the talking head as
used in the earliest of these documentaries was, I argue, actually a way
of bringing testimony and the contingent together in one place. This
meant that liveness rested in the voice of the documentary subject – or,
more specifically, in the failures of that voice – manifesting in effect as a
form of immediacy. And yet, in more recent work, certain directors have
begun to acknowledge the mediated nature of the talking head as a tech-
nique, playing with the ways in which it is self-consciously constructed,
both by those behind the camera and by those in front of it. This may be
a response to transformations in historical circumstance, and the weak-
ening of the impulse to stand witness, but, as importantly, it reflects
an acknowledgement, precipitated by the spread of digital video, of the
documentary subject’s capacity for mediation. It does not follow that
contingency plays no part in the sound practice of these filmmakers.
130
Sound and Voice 131
Instead, it means that the quality is generated not through the over-
coming of mediated distance – in the immediacy of the subject’s voice,
for example – but through the inevitable creation of that distance during
filmmaking. In the final case studies considered here, liveness therefore
appears as a quality that is always already mediated, rather than one
that is apparently natural.
Xianchang, liveness and sound practice
Some 30 minutes into the second episode of Shi Jian’s Tiananmen, we

are presented with a sequence that has been noted for its avant-garde
qualities. The episode is entitled Pingfang, after a traditional Chinese
single storey house, and the camera has begun to explore the residen-
tial quarters located behind Tiananmen Square. Embarking on a series of
long takes that wind through a succession of hutong, it suddenly bumps
into some laundry, ‘and makes a loud noise, probably unintentionally’
(Voci, 2004, p. 89). We do not see this directly, but rather hear the sound
of the collision emanating from off screen. Nor is this the last of such
moments. In this sequence alone, there are several other instances in
which the crew’s equipment clearly knocks over, or into, objects of var-
ious kinds while progressing through the alleyways around the square.
Given the size of these pathways, the spatial constraints imposed upon
the crew, and the fact that the scene lasts 10 minutes, this should hardly
be surprising.
Although one might single out this sequence for its visual quali-
ties, in particular the unusual length of its takes, for Paola Voci it
exemplifies Tiananmen’s aural experimentalism. Voci (2004, p. 67) uses
the scene to illustrate what she has described as independent docu-
mentary’s ‘expansion of sound (beyond speech)’. As Chinese documen-
tary abandoned the practices of the Maoist era, and as incorporated
microphones and portable filmmaking equipment become more readily
available towards the end of the 1980s, what could be heard changed
as dramatically as what could be seen. Soundtracks were no longer
dominated by voiceovers, or technologically limited to dubbed sound.
Instead, they became more varied: ambient sound, conversation and
silence supplemented, at least initially, the received techniques of the
post-1949 period.1 This complexity is exemplified in the sequence
from Tiananmen, both by the sounds it incorporates and by those it
excludes. Despite its length, this scene is reliant almost exclusively
on the non-verbal – the everyday noises of hutong life – to hold the
attention of the ear.
The significance of these moments, however, is not limited to their

environmental quality. The very fact that they are off screen implies
the existence of physical space surrounding the camera, confirming the
authenticity of the shot by locating it ‘on the scene’, rather than in
the studio (Voci, 2004, p. 89). Furthermore, the unintentional, extra-
neous nature of these sounds suggests the unplanned, unstructured
nature of this filmed encounter with material existence: as Michel Chion
(1994, p. 107) says, ‘The risk of direct sound and location shooting is
that unplanned [ . . . ] sounds [ . . . ] can intrude [into the film], take on
an autonomous existence.’ They therefore speak directly to the spon-
taneous, unscripted temper of the xianchang aesthetic, and guarantee
the authenticity of the location as location, rather than as set. But –
and scholars have tended to focus more closely on this quality – such
sounds also suggest a self-reflexive element to the filming. As Voci (2004,
p. 89) has noted, they foreground the process of mediation involved in
documentary production by making one aware, however briefly, of the
presence of the camera. The paradigmatic example of such a moment is
probably Wu Wenguang’s ‘voices off’ in Bumming in Beijing. Both during
one of his interviews with Gao Bo and, most memorably, during Zhang
Xiaping’s nervous breakdown, we hear the director’s voice from off cam-
era, asking questions, prompting his subjects, trying to start a dialogue.
Although Wu is never visualized in these sequences, the performative
nature of these interventions draws attention, however unintention-
ally, to his role as director, and the consequent constructedness of the
documentary as text (Reynaud, 2003). The off-screen presence of Wang
Guangli’s voice on the soundtrack of I Graduated! has a similar, though
less pronounced, effect.
Such moments serve as reminders of the early interest in the media-
tion of xianchang exhibited by certain independent documentary direc-
tors. In practice, however, attitudes towards such self-reflexivity were
conflicted, and directors were sometimes hesitant about incorporating
elements that smacked too obviously of this quality into their mise-en-
scène. Although Bérénice Reynaud (2010b, p. 167) has noted the radical
nature of Wu’s use of sound in Bumming in Beijing, she also points out
that his self-confessed goal in the film was to ‘edit out [his] voice’.
This is reflected in the documentary’s production history. The com-
mercially available cut of the film is half the length of the 150-minute
original. It omits further material of a similarly reflexive nature, and
avoids subtitling Wu’s comments during the scene of Zhang’s break-
down (pp. 164–5).2 Such editing may in part have been a response
to pragmatic, commercial pressures, as well as possibly reflecting the
Sound and Voice 133
explicit and personal nature of the material excised. However, it also

suggests a degree of ambivalence over the mediated nature of documen-
tary production, particularly where this is signified through the presence
of the director on the soundtrack. In fact, despite the expansion of
sound beyond speech promised by synchronous sound technology,
the sonic world of the earliest independent documentaries remained
centred round the on-screen voice of the documentary subject. This sit-
uation was exemplified by the continued significance of one particular
form of sound practice: the talking head.
In this chapter, I employ the talking head as a window onto the rela-
tionship between sound practice, liveness and xianchang in independent
Chinese documentary. I argue that the persistence of such an apparent
anachronism can be related to tensions between liveness as presence
(the immediate) and distance (the mediated). As this brief overview sug-
gests, sound off screen played a critical role in establishing the liveness
of location shooting, in part because of its appearance as unplanned
and uncontrollable. Such sound thus signified immediate presence ‘on
the scene’, helping to mark the ‘hereness’ of xianchang. At the same
time, however, it served to draw attention to the mediated nature of
documentary production, usually by revealing either the presence of the
camera, or that of the individual operating it. Liveness was thus also gen-
erated through distance, or the act of filming. However, this presented
problems for some of the earliest documentaries of the 1990s. In films
such as Bumming in Beijing and I Graduated!, the desire to testify to the
events of 1989 necessitated the articulation of liveness as presence, and
the construction of witnessing as lived historical experience. The talking
head was one way in which this could be achieved. At the same time,
the need to validate this act of witnessing as real, unofficial and truth-
ful required the invocation of the spontaneous and uncontrolled. This
explains the precise form in which the talking head manifested in these
films, and in particular their emphasis on moments of vocal collapse.
The technique thus served to embody a form of liveness that was both
immediate and contingent, with the voice of the film’s subjects as the
site where this quality appeared to be located.
The talking head in early 1990s independent Chinese documentary
was thus shaped by a complex interplay of political and industrial
factors. However, while the form of liveness it embodied lives on in
contemporary activist video practice, other directors employ the tech-
nique in ways that highlight xianchang as an act of mediation. Using
Shu Haolun’s Nostalgia and Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir
as examples, I explore how these films present the talking head as
a product of technical intervention by the director, or as a response

of the documentary subject to the act of filmmaking. I connect this
increasingly catholic use of the trope not simply to changes in political
context, but also to the emergence of digital video. Unlike my previous
chapter, however, the question here is not of responsibility to self, but
of how to negotiate the self-mediating capacity of the filmed subject.
Once acknowledged, this capability suggests that the voice of the doc-
umentary subject is no more inherently contingent than a conscious
intervention by the documentary director during filming. However,
it does not follow that liveness has ceased to be important in these
films. Instead, the quality is understood to result from the encounter
of director and subject ‘on the scene’ of filmmaking (mediated dis-
tance), rather than existing independently of such an encounter, in
the timbre of the subject’s voice (immediacy). Ultimately, this encour-
ages an approach to the act of documentation that is reflected in
the increasingly experimental turn of much non-fiction production in
contemporary China.
Standing witness and talking heads: Bumming in Beijing

and I Graduated!
If the talking head can allow us to trace the evolving relationship

between sound practice and xianchang in Chinese documentary, the
question arises: what is a talking head? Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker
(2010, p. 5) ask us to imagine a scene in which
a seated individual speaks with conviction, eyes directed to an off-

camera listener (stationed slightly to the left and below the lens)
whose quality of attention is nevertheless palpable in the intensity
of the speaker’s gaze.
This accurately captures the technique in its classic manifestation, famil-

iar to many from the television documentary. In practice, while the
talking head is more malleable than such a description suggests, it is
this characteristic direct address to camera that is usually retained in its
many variants. This is certainly true of the earliest independent Chinese
documentaries, in which direct address featured prominently. Indeed,
what is perhaps surprising about these scenes – the artists sat in their
rented rooms, talking to Wu Wenguang’s camera; the students in I Grad-
uated!, perched on dorm room bunk beds, peering into Wang Guangli’s
lens; or the more composed professionals of 1966: My Time in the Red
Sound and Voice 135
Guards, reminiscing about the Cultural Revolution – is that, despite the

specificity of the historical experiences they discuss, the mise-en-scène of
these sequences is surprisingly familiar to the overseas viewer, even one
exposed to independent Chinese documentary for the very first time.
This familiarity may be explained by the long history of talking heads
in western documentary, one that stretches back to the 1930s, and in
particular Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton’s experiments with direct to
camera address in Housing Problems (1935). In consequence, the conno-
tations of the technique have become increasingly negative. On the one
hand, it tends to suggest ‘a lack of imagination on the part of film and
filmmaker’ (Sarkar and Walker, 2010, p. 2), reflecting its acceptance as
an established element of documentary language. On the other hand,
it has increasingly become associated with the exercise of institutional
power, embodied in the figure of the expert, ‘announcing official pol-
icy, imparting official information, or expressing an official attitude’
(Halpern Martineau, 1984, p. 256). In China, though the technique is
a more recent phenomenon, its first manifestations were also found
on state television. These took the form of location-based interviews,
which were conducted by programme presenters and introduced into
certain of the zhuantipian. Consequently, some directors have linked the
rather verbal forms of early independent documentary to the contin-
ued influence of CCTV, and its associated ideologies. Duan Jinchuan,
for example, has specifically connected the use of interview-based tech-
niques in work from the beginning of the 1990s to this phenomenon
(X. Lü, 2003b, p. 88), suggesting one reason for the director’s explicit
rejection of this style in the mid-1990s. And yet, as Bhaskar Sarkar and
Janet Walker (2010, p. 8) have pointed out, the talking head is, globally,
‘one of the most common and geopolitically significant [ . . . ] venues for
the attestation, reception, and mitigation of social suffering.’ While it
may be appropriated by the establishment, the technique also allows
precisely those people who might normally be excluded from official
narratives of contentious or traumatic historical events to be introduced
on camera.
Although there is a longstanding history of such acts of witnessing in
Chinese cultural production (c.f. Braester, 2003), Dai Jinhua has explic-
itly linked these qualities to xianchang. Dai (1999, p. 226) argues that
the properties of testimony and eye witnessing are integral to being ‘on
the scene’. Implicitly, these traits seem to be connected to what she also
describes as xianchang’s drive towards recording ‘a world that has already
vanished, or at least been scattered, from the cultural centre’ (p. 219);
its desire, then, to capture stories from the periphery, ones that have
been passed over by the mainstream media. In documentaries from the

mid-1990s onwards, this dynamic was associated with a turn towards
stories of the social subaltern: the laid-off worker, the homeless, ethnic,
or, as suggested in my previous chapter, sexual minorities. In the early
1990s, however, it was linked more explicitly to the ‘structuring absence’
(Berry, 2007, p. 118) of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 4 June 1989,
and the consequent collapse both of the democracy movement and
the cultural idealism of the 1980s. In attempting to process the con-
sequences of these events, however elliptically, independent Chinese
documentary turned its attention to a history that was subsequently
marginalized by the official media, even if those who participated in
this history were not per se marginal.
Interpreting the talking head in these documentaries as a consequence
of the turn to xianchang, and a desire for testimony ‘from below’, is con-
gruent with the specific ways the technique is applied in Bumming in
Beijing and I Graduated!. First, the voices we hear during these sequences
are not those of experts or television professionals, but of ordinary
people – if very specific subsets of such people.3 They therefore do not
obviously replicate the talking head as a symbol of official authority.
Instead, they suggest the desire, as Chris Berry (2007, p. 122) has noted,
to ‘give voice’ for the first time to the laobaixing – ‘the people’ – and thus
to provide a perspective distinct from that of the official media. Second,
the relationship between the talking heads and the director or camera-
man in these films is not that of a formal interview. In neither Bumming
in Beijing nor I Graduated! do the directors employ ‘question and answer’
routines with their subjects. Instead, they ‘prompt [ . . . ] conversation
through comments and reactions’ (Reynaud, 2010b, p. 162), engaging
with them as equals, rather than interrogating them in the manner of a
television presenter. Perhaps in the process they can be said to humanize
the voiceover, bringing it down to size and, in part, back on screen. But
finally, and perhaps most importantly, the failure of the human voice
is perhaps the most striking element of these films’ soundtracks, exem-
plified in Zhang Xiaping’s breakdown and descent into incoherence, or
the sequence in I Graduated! in which Tsinghua student ‘L.X.T.’ dissolves
into tears as she discusses the family friend blinded by People’s Libera-
tion Army (PLA) bullets. Aurally, their most memorable moments occur
not as a consequence of information conveyed via the talking head, but
through the affective power generated when the limits of the technique
are reached.4
One of the most striking formal qualities of these works is therefore
how they use the talking head to explore the limits of the spoken. What
Sound and Voice 137
is said is not significant: it is how it is said – the ‘grain of the voice’

(Barthes, 1977) – that stands as record.5 Their use of the talking head
is thus subtly different from that of the official television documentary.
Such difference is usually understood to reflect both the events being
witnessed and the conditions under which these documentaries were
produced. In its immediate aftermath, 4 June was too politically sen-
sitive to discuss directly. The associated feelings of loss and grief that
followed the massacre could not therefore be conveyed in words, but
had to be implied indirectly. This explains the importance of silence and
vocal inflection in these films (Berry, 2007, pp. 118, 122). I would sug-
gest, however, that these failures of voice are more broadly significant.
They are also directly connected to both the practice of xianchang and
the contingent qualities of liveness that this practice sought to convey.
In his study of vocal performance, Jacob Smith (2008, p. 96), drawing
on the work of Erving Goffman, has argued that vocal timbre is more
important than actual speech in conveying authentic meaning in film.
Words, or the ‘given’, are usually understood as controllable, and there-
fore potentially misleading. Vocal quality, however – the ‘given off’ –
is implicitly understood as harder to manipulate, and therefore realer,
more revealing. Sequences in which the human voice breaks out beyond
words, or what Goffman calls ‘flooding out’, are thus critical to suggest-
ing the material reality of mediated representation. As a consequence
of their uncontrollability, such scenes emphasize the unscripted, unper-
formed nature of what has been captured on film. But because of their
embodied quality – tears and laughter, for example, both being forms
of somatic experience – these moments also suggest the actual physical
presence of the subject when the film was shot. They therefore serve
to bridge the gap between the instant of recording and the instant of
screening, attempting to draw the audience from the ‘here and now’ of
viewing into the ‘here and now’ of filming.6
What I am suggesting is that talking heads in these films operate
as the locus of a particular sort of liveness, one that presents itself as
unmediated presence, rather than as a product of mediation. As such,
they work quite differently from off-camera sounds that seem to sig-
nify mediated distance. Perhaps this is inevitable. The authority of the
talking head as the articulator of hidden histories usually rests on the
subject’s ability to witness from a position of historical presence; it
is derived from having lived through and survived the events docu-
mented, rather than from having merely observed them. As such, it
is a form of what Roger Hallas (2009, p. 14), borrowing from Giorgio
Agamben, has termed ‘internal witness’. But in the Chinese context,
such moments of vocal collapse do more than validate the suffering of

the subjects in these documentaries as lived historical experience: they
also speak to xianchang as an aesthetic of presence, one linked irrevoca-
bly to the contingent place of filmmaking. Their apparent spontaneity
emphasizes the physical copresence of camera and subject during these
very moments of collapse, suggesting the raw, unmediated nature of
the footage captured. As Dai Jinhua (1999, p. 225) says of Bumming in
Beijing, the strong ‘sense of being on the scene’ (xianchanggan) the film
radiates is partly generated by the ‘feeling of closeness’ (pojingan) to its
subject matter that is fundamental to the documentary’s aesthetic. Here,
liveness brings us into direct contact with the material world, rather
than being a product of representation’s inevitable distance from the
extradiegetic. And it is precisely such contact, manifested most explicitly
in the spontaneous and unplanned, that authenticates the testimony of
these films as unofficial, and therefore truthful.
The ambivalent relationship in Bumming in Beijing between the direc-
torial voice off screen and the human voice on screen may thus reflect
more than tensions between official and independent approaches to
documentary. It also indicates the significance of a particular form of
xianchang in these early documentaries, the ways in which the talk-
ing head is repurposed to channel this quality, and the connection of
both these factors to the specific historical moment in which these films
emerged. As Nick Couldry (2003, p. 98) has pointed out, media products
exploit liveness as ‘a guarantee of actual connectibility to events of central
social significance.’ The earliest of the independent documentaries use
the talking head to suggest precisely such a connection to the disaster
of 1989. But they do so through a particular use of the voice – a spe-
cific form of witness – that is both suitably sensitized to the politicized
atmosphere in which these films were completed and first circulated,
and, through its suggestion of unmediated access to ‘the scene’ of the
profilmic event itself, also serves to mark these productions as distinct
from those of the mainstream Chinese media. What the viewer may
initially only appreciate as moments of aesthetic imperfection are in
fact the result of multiple and complex factors – political, industrial and
aesthetic – brought to bear upon these independent documentaries of
the 1990s.
The talking head today
Although the influence of Frederick Wiseman and direct cinema led

to the marginalization of the talking head during the 1990s, it never
Sound and Voice 139
entirely disappeared from independent Chinese documentary practice.

As early as 1997, Li Hong’s Out of Phoenixbridge made modified use of
direct address in the director’s encounter with her subjects, women from
Anhui Province living and working as internal migrants in Beijing. Wu
Wenguang’s Jianghu: Life on the Road, though mostly shot in the obser-
vational mode, also features short scenes where his subjects address the
camera directly, and in which Wu’s voice can again be heard, from off
screen, prompting them with questions. Finally, in The Box, Ying Weiwei
includes extended sequences of her lesbian subjects talking at length to
the camera about their relationship with one another, their families and
other significant figures in their past. Perhaps reflecting Ying’s own pro-
fessional background in television, these sequences are shot in a manner
closer to the talking head of traditional broadcasting than in either Li
or Wu’s documentary. They take place inside, with the women tightly
framed against plain, undecorated walls, and only faint classical music
in the background of the soundtrack to distract from what they are say-
ing. Not only does this serve to anonymize the couple’s environment,
but it further focuses attention on the deeply personal nature of their
monologues.
The examples aside – and there are no doubt others – the return of
direct address has been most closely associated with the rise of Chinese
video activism, as noted in Chapter 4. Given the intimate relationship
I am proposing between the talking head, liveness and testimony, this
should perhaps be unsurprising; it would hardly be unreasonable to
associate a resurgence of the technique with a confluence of similar
desires and concerns. Indeed, the presence of variations on the talking
head in work by Zhao Liang, Hu Jie, Ai Xiaoming and – as touched on
previously – Cui Zi’en suggests the continued importance of the inter-
nal witness to certain contemporary directors.7 Documentaries by these
filmmakers all deal with the exercise of power by the Chinese state, and
in particular its abuse by authority figures at the expense of ordinary
people. Far more explicit than the documentaries of the early 1990s,
they once more root their testimonial function in the embodied voice
of the testifying subject on screen, and, as such, clearly function as unof-
ficial oral histories ‘from below’.8 Li Jie (2010, p. 39), for example, has
connected the use of direct address to the camera in the works of Zhao
Liang and Ai Xiaoming both to the Maoist tradition of ‘speaking bitter-
ness’ (su ku) and to broader global trends in human rights documentary
filmmaking. By extension, one might expect a concomitant sense of
liveness as unmediated presence to pervade such work, a point I would
not dispute. And yet, this is not the only way in which the talking head
manifests in contemporary independent Chinese documentary. Despite

the significance of filmmakers such as Ai and Zhao, other directors have
elected to use the technique in a manner that complicates its received
status in the field. In the process, they have constructed a rather differ-
ent relationship between the on-screen human voice and the quality of
liveness to that presented in Bumming in Beijing and I Graduated!. In con-
trast to these early documentaries, the two examples I wish to discuss
below – Shu Haolun’s Nostalgia and Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese
Memoir – both explore the talking head’s relationship to liveness as a
mediated experience, rather than as immediate presence.
Nostalgia: deconstructing the talking head
Nostalgia focuses on the impending destruction of the Shanghai

longtang – neighbourhoods composed of colonial-era housing – in which
Shu Haolun grew up. The genesis of the film lies in a phone call made
to the director by his grandmother. She informed her grandson that
Dazhongli, where his family home was located, had just been purchased
by a Hong Kong developer, in preparation for demolition and rede-
velopment. Shu, who immediately decided to return to Shanghai and
record the area before it disappeared, was thus ‘prodded into filmmaking
because of his personal attachment to [these] doomed spaces’ (Braester,
2010b, p. 278). The resulting documentary features a combination of
location vérité sequences, shot in and around the housing complex,
interspersed with reflective meditations on the past, voiced by the
filmmaker, that often incorporate extensive non-diegetic material. Nos-
talgia is therefore an extremely personal take on China’s modernization
process, and its social and material consequences.
The on-screen use of the human voice, in the shape of the talking
heads of Shu’s grandmother, her friends and her neighbours, thus forms
an integral part of Nostalgia’s narrative. It is through these interviews
that Shu reconstructs the oral history of his family and their relationship
to the area. As such, they clearly constitute an act of internal witnessing,
for the veracity of this history derives from the fact that Shu’s grand-
mother has lived in Shanghai nearly all her life. The stories that she
tells, about the subdivision of the family home in the wake of the revo-
lution, for example, not only personalize the consequences of national
events, but also construct a narrative of said history as lived experience.
However, the moments of flooding out that characterize Bumming in
Beijing and I Graduated! are notably absent. Instead, from the very begin-
ning of the documentary this witnessing is laid bare as a product of
Sound and Voice 141
filming. Nostalgia opens with the director voicing his motivations for
filmmaking over a still image of a newspaper article reporting the news
of Dazhongli’s purchase and impending destruction; the image fades
into an overhead shot that pans over the area, tilting upwards to cap-
ture the skyscrapers encroaching on it. Immediately after the film’s title,
however, the camera cuts to an interior location. An old woman – Shu’s
grandmother – stands facing the camera, in medium close-up. She has
her back to a white wall, and is holding a small piece of white paper in
front of her. A kettle sits on a stove to her left, a small kitchen table to
her right. As she engages in conversation with a male voice emanating
from out of field, it emerges that she is helping the cameraman to check
lighting levels.
The camera then cuts to a medium shot of the same interior, taken
perpendicular to the previous shot. The old woman, framed in profile, is
still standing in front of the wall. Now, though, we can also see the cam-
era operator, who continues to film the woman as she engages him in
conversation. It is clear that this man is Shu Haolun, and that, through
a second camera, we are watching him film his grandmother. Then we
cut to a long shot. Shu and his grandmother are sitting in the far cor-
ner of the room. She is facing the camera, he is not. Although they are
clearly engaged in conversation – we can see his grandmother moving
her head, animatedly, as she speaks – we cannot hear what she says.
Instead, in voiceover, the director describes how, in 1936, his grandpar-
ents moved to Shanghai from the Ningbo countryside, and rented two
rooms in the Dazhongli shikumen that has remained the family home
ever since. Finally, we cut to a medium close-up of Shu’s grandmother,
shot slightly from below, sitting behind the kitchen table we originally
saw her standing next to. Her head and shoulders are framed against
the wall: a perfect talking head. We hear the director’s voice, off screen,
asking his grandmother questions, to which she responds. All of these
enquiries concern his grandparents’ move to Dazhongli: the informa-
tion conveyed in the previous voiceover. As she continues to talk, we
fade to a shot, taken from the second camera, in which we see Shu’s
grandmother, sitting on her chair, facing the director. He sits opposite
her, with a camera balanced on his knee, pointed at his subject. This
is clearly the original camera that provided us with the slightly angled
talking head we saw in the previous shot.
This sequence lays bare the mediated mechanics of the documentary
film. First, it demonstrates how the apparently objective authority of
the voiceover is always hollow. The information such a voice conveys
is usually sourced elsewhere, often, as in this instance, from those who
have lived the history, but do not always get to speak of it. But at the
same time, it also demonstrates how the talking head – the voice of the
survivor – is itself a mediated construct, partly produced through the
active intervention of the documentary director. In employing a second
camera to record himself at work, Shu Haolun consciously demystifies
his filming practice. In the process, he shows how the talking head
is not a simple, spontaneous pouring forth of repressed emotion, but
the result of particular filmic conventions, carefully executed. Aurally,
this is achieved through the kinds of conversational exchanges that
Wu Wenguang employs in Bumming in Beijing. This makes the presence
of the director felt, and suggests how the nature of questioning may
indeed shape the narrative that emerges from the talking head. But as
a consequence of the second camera, Shu inserts himself more explic-
itly into the shot than Wu. The sense of directorial labour is therefore
much stronger. The checking of light levels, the careful placement of
his grandmother in a particular corner of the room, the way in which
the selected camera angles project a particular impression of the talking
head for the viewer: all of these make clear that the technique is not a
natural phenomenon, but the product of explicit decisions taken by the
director of the documentary.
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir: performing the talking head
Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir appears at first to be a classic

piece of observational cinema. Like Nostalgia, the documentary makes a
feature of historical memory, in this case the story of its protagonist, He
Fengming. Unlike Nostalgia, however, the documentary is constructed in
a very simple manner. It is composed predominantly of medium shots
of He, sitting on a chair in her living room, directly facing an unmoving
camera. As she sits, she recounts the story of her and her family’s perse-
cution during the Anti-Rightist Campaigns and the Cultural Revolution.
Much of the film is thus, in effect, an extended talking head. Although
He never collapses or breaks down, her voice is still freighted with emo-
tion. Indeed, at several points in her narrative she appears on the edge
of tears. Wang Bing’s presence, however, is minimized; he makes almost
no attempt either to engage his subject in conversation, or to enter the
frame. Visually, the film is similarly minimalist. With the exception of
the opening sequence, a tracking shot that follows He inside her build-
ing and up into her flat, there is negligible camera movement. Editing
consists of simple fades to black that appear to bring different episodes
of the subject’s story to a close. Although the documentary was in fact
filmed over several days (Koehler, 2007), the effect is to suggest one long,
Sound and Voice 143
continuous narrative, delivered by He Fengming over the course of a

single evening in the space of her home.
Given the similarities in subject matter between Fengming: A Chinese
Memoir and certain activist documentaries, it is perhaps unsurprising
that Wang Bing has suggested that his cinematic style was intended to
convey ‘a direct feeling of [He Fengming’s] actual existence in this flat’
(Koehler, 2007). Yet there is one exception to this controlled, almost
spartan aesthetic that immediately throws this statement into direct
relief. This exception is a brief sequence that occurs an hour into the
film. He Fengming is talking. Suddenly, the camera cuts away from her
face. Her voice does not stop, but continues over the next shot. This
is taken from inside the flat, though from a new angle. A window is
framed centre, opening out onto the wall of the next building. While
hardly a view in the traditional sense, this sudden glimpse of the outside
world accentuates how dark it now is inside the room. After 30 seconds,
we cut back to He in her chair, facing the camera, still talking. A cou-
ple of minutes later, however, comes the only point in the film where
Wang Bing breaks with observational convention. As his subject pauses
briefly in her narrative, we hear his voice interjecting from off camera,
‘Would you mind turning the light on?’ He Fengming acquiesces. She
gets up, switches on the light, shuffles back to her seat, and sits down
in her chair in exactly the same position as before. The camera remains
static throughout. A few seconds of silence occur, while He composes
herself – adjusting her glasses – and then she draws breath and resumes
her story.
On one level, this sequence is similar to those discussed in both
Bumming in Beijing and Nostalgia. It functions to highlight the embed-
ded presence of the director, and therefore both the liveness of the
film and its constructed nature as a document. Wang’s interjection,
and the brief cut-away to the apartment window that precedes it, not
only self-reflexively draw attention to both camera and director, but also
emphasize the actual spatiotemporal dimensions of the mediating pro-
cess. As a viewer, one becomes suddenly aware both of the confined
space in which the film is being shot and of how much time has clearly
elapsed since He Fengming embarked on her tale. But there is also an
obvious difference. Both Wu and Shu interject to encourage their sub-
jects to continue speaking: Wang Bing does the opposite. In asking her
to turn on the light, he forces He Fengming to interrupt her narrative,
and then pick up from where she left off. In doing so, Wang both explic-
itly breaks with what Yomi Braester (2010a, p. 201) has described as the
‘flow’ of ‘the scene’, and subtly highlights his subject’s own agency in
the act of mediation.
As Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker (2010, p. 10) have noted, the talk-
ing head ‘is performative with regard to the truths and memories of
testifying and witnessing’. It is not, in other words, simply the conse-
quence of conscious intervention on the part of the filmmaker, but also
enacted by those who are telling their stories. Even before it falls to the
director to set the scene or edit the material, the testimony produced by
the talking head is thus already mediated. The subject has usually had
to order and make sense of it before he or she can present it on camera.
By interrupting He Fengming’s flow, Wang makes us aware, however
unintentionally, that this is probably not the first time she has related
her life story. The woman speaks too fluently; despite the moments of
emotion, the impression is of material that has been formalized through
telling and retelling over time. This recalls the premeditated nature
of Goffman’s ‘given’: the sense that words are not necessarily sponta-
neous, but often contrived. But the brief pause after Fengming sits down,
during which she visibly pulls herself together before relaunching her
narrative, reveals the degree of physical performance entailed in telling
this story for the camera – even when the directorial presence is some-
thing that both she and the viewer have apparently forgotten. Neither
what she says, then, nor how she says it may in fact be spontaneous.
Those moments when her voice implies that she may be on the edge
of tears – when she comes close to flooding out – may be as much of a
performance as the actual story she is recounting.
Direct feelings of actual existence notwithstanding, the implications
of this particular sequence seem clear. The subtly practised nature of He’s
narrative suggests we should not view the human voice as the locus of
pure, unmediated presence. This cannot be the case if both the ‘given’
and the ‘given off’ are, to some degree, performed. But neither does this
mean that He’s narrative is fictional; at no point does Wang Bing imply
that what his subject says is untrue. Rather, the truth of her story is,
in its own way, constructed. Nick Couldry (2003, p. 126), comment-
ing on the act of mediated self-disclosure, has argued that it is a highly
ritualized performance. The extent to which the instants of intense emo-
tion that accompany such disclosure are actually false – internalized by
the subject for performance to an audience – is impossible to gauge,
but also, perhaps, not overly significant. Instead, such moments may
be both true and false: constructed from the point of view of everyday
experience, but ritual markers of ‘realness’ for the viewer. I would suggest
that this is precisely what this sequence in Fengming: A Chinese Memoir
achieves. By subtly signposting the ways in which He Fengming per-
forms for a prospective audience the role of internal witness to her own
Sound and Voice 145
life, the film indicates how the sound of the human voice cannot pro-
vide us with unmediated access to reality. Instead, during filmmaking
even vocal timbre may be a reality effect, produced semiconsciously for
the camera.
Digital video and the (re)production of liveness
In Nostalgia and Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, ambivalence towards docu-

mentary as a mediated product is less obvious than in early independent
Chinese documentary. This is revealed through the use of the human
voice in these films. Not only is there deliberate, strategic inclusion
of the director’s voice off screen, but the significance of the documen-
tary subject’s voice on screen has also shifted. No longer does the latter
promise potentially unmediated access to profilmic reality. Instead, as
manifested in the talking head, it is presented as a consequence of the
act of filming, produced either as a result of directorial intervention
during or after shooting, or in response to the presence of the direc-
tor by those being shot. The voice of the documentary subject in these
films cannot lead us to an already existing liveness, waiting ‘out there’
to be captured by the camera. Instead, it hints at a liveness that emerges
through the interaction of director and subject on location, a quality
produced through the ‘here and now’ of filming, and the inevitable
incommensurability of profilmic reality and filmic representation.
The most obvious explanation for this more catholic approach to
the talking head is that of a new sociopolitical context. As China has
slowly liberalized, and the shadow of Tiananmen receded, so the urgent
desire to testify against the official narrative of 1989 has dissipated.
At the same time, filmmakers have been exposed to a growing vari-
ety of documentary modes, including more reflexive and experimental
models of filmmaking that diverge quite radically from the observa-
tional style dominant in Chinese documentary during the mid-1990s.
Indeed, Shu Haolun has described how his understanding of documen-
tary was affected by viewing the work of Alain Resnais and Chris Marker
while a graduate student in the United States (C. Cui, 2006). Nostalgia’s
studied reflexivity betrays the influence of these directors, and suggests
how the film might therefore also be considered a product of the move-
ment of people and ideas across national borders that followed reform
and opening. Finally, the liberalization of the mainstream media in
the 1990s resulted in the adoption of xianchang by television stations,
meaning the practice no longer adequately marks work as ‘marginal’ or
distinct from state media production (J. Dai, 1999, p. 230; Z. Zhang,
2010, p. 108). Reflexive consideration of being ‘on the scene’, however,

is obviously less of a mainstream media concern, and may thus func-
tion to signify the distance between official and unofficial documentary
production.
And yet, none of these factors quite explains the kind of use to which
the talking head is put in these films, nor the type of liveness that
I am arguing it signifies. First, the stubborn persistence in independent
Chinese documentary both of the internal witness and of xianchang
as presence belies the argument that such forms of testimony carry
little appeal in contemporary China. The more distanced approach
demonstrated in both Nostalgia and Fengming: A Chinese Memoir cannot
therefore be explained solely through reference to a lack of interest or
loss of faith in this tradition. Second, while interventionism and reflex-
ivity highlight authorial involvement, mediation in Wang Bing’s film
is not the director’s responsibility alone: it results from the encounter
between those both behind and in front of the camera. Though not
exactly participatory, the agency of the documentary subject during
filmmaking is thus at least acknowledged. Questions of sociopolitical
context cannot by themselves explain liveness in this particular man-
ifestation. Instead, I think one has to return to the question of digital
video, as raised in the previous chapter, and consider once again the
way in which it has complicated the relationship between director and
subject in independent Chinese documentary production.
As discussed in Chapter 1, the earliest debates around digital video
focused on its democratizing potential: how it might enable amateurs
and previously marginalized social groups to produce, post-produce and
circulate fiction and non-fiction media in a manner that was previously
extremely difficult. The consequence of this capability, as explored in
the previous chapter, was the emergence of documentaries that repre-
sented such communities from the inside. As acts of self-representation,
these films tackled new themes, or used a different visual language, from
those that sought to enter such communities from the outside, thus pre-
senting a slightly different perspective on their subjects. The emergence
of such filmmakers has not, however, prevented already established
documentary filmmakers from continuing to seek out subject matter
beyond their immediate safety zone: a key theme in contemporary
independent Chinese documentary remains the lives of the socially
disenfranchised. How the documentary practice of established profes-
sionals has responded to this increased agency on the part of their
subject is therefore a distinct, if related, question. It is one, though,
that I think is directly relevant to the way in which the talking head is
Sound and Voice 147
presented in Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, for it touches on the question

of how the documentary subject is given voice by the director.
One way in which professionals have responded to the challenge and
the promise of this new technology is participatory video. Programmes
have begun to emerge, such as Wu Wenguang’s Village Video Project, in
which non-professionals are given the opportunity to work as filmmak-
ers within the framework of projects managed by professionals. Wang
Yiman (2010) has described such projects as the consequence of a new
ethical perspective among Chinese documentary directors. They rep-
resent a shift from the belief that filmmakers are as one with their
subjects; through the troubled recognition that this is never entirely
possible; and, finally, to a new stage, in which the filmmaker is ‘an
agent who not only works with his or her subjects as agents, but also
helps to produce more agents’ (p. 223). At this point, the act of film-
ing has therefore become a coproduction between both parties, one in
which ‘the process of documenting reality merges with the process of
creating and performing a situation into being’ (p. 227). The recalibra-
tion of the relationship between director and subject effected by digital
video has therefore forced professional filmmakers to reconceptualize
their documentary practice, and in particular their own role within it.
The other way in which filmmakers have responded, however, is by
producing work that, though not programmatically participatory in this
manner, explicitly incorporates material that has already been shot by
the documentary subject. Examples here would include Ai Xiaoming’s
Our Children, which makes use of citizen journalist footage of the 2008
Sichuan earthquake while investigating the causes and consequences
of said earthquake; and the pseudonymously authored University City
Savages [Diaomin] (2009), which remediates film and photographs shot
by farmers fighting eviction from their village, located on the edge of
Guangzhou’s expanding ‘university city’, even as the film itself doc-
uments this fight. In both types of project, one can see an explicit
acknowledgment, however potentially problematic, of the documentary
subject’s ability to represent himself or herself, rather than simply be
represented by the person behind the camera. Nevertheless, it is these
latter films in particular that acknowledge how the gradual trickle down
of digital technology has provided China’s ‘working-class network soci-
ety’ (J. Qiu, 2009) with the ability, however unevenly distributed, to
produce its own mediated record of social and political change entirely
independently of established documentary film directors.
The point I am making is that narratives of participatory documen-
tary’s ethical evolution are still largely posited on the agency of the
professional filmmaker. The latter recognizes the limits to his or her

practice; implements changes accordingly; and, in the process, pro-
duces more agents of change, by training his or her subjects. In fact,
as I hope my previous chapter made clear, the formation of such agents
is not nearly so straightforward. Digital technology in its many forms is
now so effectively dispersed that the means of production has arguably
moved well beyond the essentially middle-class minority filmmakers
outlined in Chapter 4. The creation of a new stratum of mediators
is therefore no longer solely the responsibility of professionals such
as Wu Wenguang; it is happening outside their purview, and without
their direct intervention.9 The result has been the formation of a grass
roots media culture that generates documentary footage without refer-
ence to the established independent film scene, even when this material
may then be reincorporated into projects, like University City Savages,
which clearly fall within the broader rubric of independent Chinese
documentary.
There have been two obvious responses to this situation. The first is
an attempt to police the ontological boundaries of documentary, and
is identifiable in debates about the relationship of the genre to art.
These implicitly privilege an auteur-driven understanding of the genre,
in which a documentary is only really a documentary if produced by,
and in effect for, professionals.10 The second, however, has been to rec-
ognize what the dispersal of production following the popularization of
digital video has rendered impossible to ignore: the ability of the docu-
mentary subject to self-mediate. In a sense, this was already implicit in
early independent documentary’s interest in performance and theatri-
cality. As Bérénice Reynaud (2010b, p. 167) says of the individuals who
feature in Wu Wenguang’s films,
It is not because people are speaking ‘with their own voices’ that
they are telling ‘the truth.’ In Wu’s films, they are perfectly capable
of producing an elaborate mise-en-scène, of lying, of manufacturing
complex statements in bad faith, of evading their true feelings, hiding
behind embarrassed laughter.
In other words, one does not need a video camera to engage in medi-
ation. I would argue that it is the growing recognition of this fact, and
the problems it poses for the documentary filmmaker, that underpins
the use of voice in Fengming: A Chinese Memoir. While the performa-
tive quality of He Fengming’s narrative is subtly illuminated in the
sequence previously discussed, this question of self-representation is
Sound and Voice 149
brought dramatically to the fore at the end of the film. As she brings
her narrative to a close, He reveals that she has in fact already published
a memoir of her experiences: ‘It was my own story. Who better to tell
it than me?’ Her tale, carefully recounted to Wang Bing’s camera, has in
fact already been multiply mediated, and through more than just perfor-
mance. During the documentary’s final sequence, in which He receives a
phone call from another camp survivor, the question of authorship thus
hangs intriguingly in the air. Both parties to the documentary clearly
wish to document the memory of a particular historical moment. But if
Wang Bing is using He Fengming’s life story as material for his film, it
appears that He Fengming in turn is also using Wang Bing to promote,
in part, her already public life history. Here, coauthorship is not a gift
the director may choose to bestow upon his subject through a video
camera; it is already out of his hands. In selecting as his talking head a
former journalist, with all that this implies, Wang Bing has made explicit
questions about voice, self-narrativization and the redistribution of the
means of production, that are increasingly relevant to other, more obvi-
ously socially marginal subjects of contemporary Chinese documentary.
In the process, however, he demonstrates why these questions were
always relevant, even in the pre-digital era.
And yet, recognition of the performative agency of their subjects
has not led Wang Bing and Shu Haolun to abandon the principles of
xianchang in their work. Instead, they seem to suggest that the relation-
ship between different elements of this practice has been reconfigured.
In their films, liveness cannot be accessed outside of mediation, but
is rather intimately connected to it, and particularly to the nature of
location shooting. In constantly tracking his own filmmaking from the
outside, for example, Shu emphasizes his physical presence ‘on the
scene’ of the documentary. The sequences he is shown filming are there-
fore authenticated as a product of live shooting, even as they are also
revealed to be the product of mediation. There is no need to include one
of these phenomena at the expense of the other, for the two qualities
are, in fact, inseparable. In consequence, liveness in Nostalgia appears
not as something to be merely captured on film as a result of the direc-
tor’s proximity to the profilmic. It is instead an outcome of the act of
filming, an act which inevitably structures the way Shu engages both
with his subjects and with his environment. I would suggest that this is
reinforced by the stylistic differences between the sequences shot from
Shu’s perspective, and those of Shu shot by his cameraman. While the
former are obviously more reflexive, with director and subject engag-
ing one another even across the barrier of the camera, the latter are
cooler and more self-consciously objective – characterized, for exam-

ple, by long shots rather than close-ups – and the second cameraman,
unlike Shu, never registers his presence on screen. In revealing these
moments of reflexive liveness as the products of mediation, the second
camera thus does so from a distance, both literally and aesthetically.
Nostalgia does not therefore deny the significance of xianchang as a
phenomenon: the film simply suggests that this quality emerges not
from the overcoming of mediated distance, but rather through its very
generation.
If Nostalgia suggests this principle through visual doubling, Fengming:
A Chinese Memoir captures it through use of the human voice. Unlike
the ‘noises off’ identified by Voci in Tiananmen, both He Fengming’s on-
screen narrative and Wang Bing’s off-screen intervention are in some
sense performed. While neither can therefore be considered truly con-
tingent, the encounter between these two voices can produce something
that is. When Wang interrupts his subject, we are faced, briefly, with
an instant of genuine contingency: an unexpected and open-ended
moment, the outcome of which cannot be immediately predicted. How
will Fengming respond? What will she do? Ignore Wang and continue
with her story? Or acknowledge his presence and respond to his request?
Trivial though this scene, and these questions, may be, they touch on
far more complex problems. By apparently going against the grain of
xianchang, Wang in fact reintroduces one of its critical qualities back into
‘the scene’ of filming. At this moment, we can see how the contingent
is located not in the voice of the subject, but through the intersubjective
encounter of two different voices; how it is effected through the process
of mediation, rather than via mediation’s effacement; and how, once
again, it is being on location that enables all this to take place. We have
in a sense come full circle, back to the unexpected event of Chapter 2;
in the process, however, the place of xianchang – the where of here – has
been recalibrated in subtle but significant ways.
Conclusion
Sound practice was a central part of the xianchang aesthetic, and as such
intimately connected to questions of liveness and contingency in inde-
pendent Chinese documentary. What I have tried to illustrate here is the
significance of particular instantiations of voice to these relationships.
While early independent documentary experimented with the use of
sound off screen, and a consequent level of mediated self-reflexivity,
directors also demonstrated a degree of ambivalence about the nature
Sound and Voice 151
of such sound. I have suggested that the retention of the talking head
in Bumming in Beijing and I Graduated! reflected this ambivalence, which
was driven in part by a desire to generate a sense of liveness as presence.
This was crucial to the act of standing witness, however tangentially,
in the immediate post-Tiananmen period, but also to the verification of
such witnessing, through the marking of these works as independent of
the state media system. Flooding out – the voice as the location of the
uncontrollable – was central to this process.
Not all contemporary documentaries, however, replicate either this
use of sound, or this sense of xianchang. Nostalgia and Fengming:
A Chinese Memoir view liveness as a product of mediated distance: a
consequence both of the director’s intervention into any given docu-
mentary ‘scene’ and of the documentary subject’s response to such an
intervention. It is here, rather than in the voice per se, that the con-
tingent is located. Witnessing, in the form of the talking head, is thus
both part of and produced by such dialogical encounters and interven-
tions. And, while this development may be related to the increasing
imbrication of official and unofficial media, and to changes in China’s
sociopolitical climate since 1989, I have tried to suggest how it may
also have resulted from the popularization of digital video as a means
of production. By complicating in unavoidable ways the relationship
between documentary director and documentary subject, the medium
has encouraged further consideration of the role played by mediation in
non-fiction filmmaking. Reflection on how the subject is ‘given voice’
on screen, and thus how the talking head is used, may be considered
part of this process.
The feeling of xianchang as a performative practice that floats so close
to the surface of Fengming: A Chinese Memoir recalls my discussion in
Chapter 4 of embodied performance in New Beijing, New Marriage. In a
sense, this chapter thus forms a companion piece to the one preceding
it, touching on similar issues, but through a glass darkly. Its perspective
is not that of the newly empowered subaltern with a movie camera,
but of those directors continuing to confront the question of how
to give voice to one’s subject in an increasingly complex production
ecology. I am not attempting to assert a form of technological deter-
minism here: that digital video may impact on documentary practice
in this manner does not mean that it must; the continued articulation
of liveness as presence through the activist talking head should sug-
gest this much. Nevertheless, it is a comment on the implications of
grass roots media for established forms of non-fiction practice in China.
As relations of image production have been unevenly but undeniably
reshaped across Chinese society, so professional filmmakers have begun

to reflect more carefully on what that act of mediation implies, digitally
and otherwise. The result, in the films by Wang Bing and Shu Haolun
addressed here, is a reformulation of xianchang that still invokes the con-
tingency with which the practice is associated, while acknowledging the
inevitable implication of this quality with the act of filmmaking itself.
Conclusion
The woman is sitting slightly to the left of shot. She does not face the
camera directly, but at an angle, as if looking at someone off screen,
out of sight. Dressed carefully, she has her hair up and a silk scarf tied
around her neck, in the manner of a particular generation of middle-
aged Chinese women. Her surroundings suggest a barber’s shop of the
kind common throughout China; as she perches on a black reclining
chair, framed from the waist upwards in three-quarter length, the mir-
ror on the wall behind her reflects not only the back of her head, but
also the view of the street outside. Though the space is clearly small,
it therefore seems bigger, airier. She starts to speak; she gesticulates fre-
quently, but afterwards often brings her hands together in front of her,
on the arm of the chair, and rubs them gently, in a slightly affected man-
ner. Shanghainese, she came to Chengdu in 1978; when all her brothers
and sisters began to return from the countryside, the parental home
was no longer big enough to hold a family of seven. She describes how
people reacted to her when she first arrived, and then how she came
by her nickname: ‘Little Flower’ (‘Xiao Hua’). Initially a man christened
her ‘Standard Component’, or ‘Flower of the Factory’. Then, the fac-
tory screened the film Little Flower [Xiao Hua] (1980) for a week. People
started to say she looked like Joan Chen (Chen Chong), who played the
film’s heroine, also called Xiao Hua. Soon, they simply called her Xiao
Hua to her face: ‘After a while, my real name was known to very few peo-
ple.’ From off screen, we hear the voice of the director, cameraman or
interviewer interject ‘What is your real name?’ ‘Gu Minhua,’ the woman
replies, sketching the characters in the air as she does so. The ‘hua’, here
meaning ‘China’, is a homonym of ‘hua’, or ‘flower’.
This scene is from Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008). Not unlike West of
the Tracks, Jia’s film deals with the decommissioning of an old industrial
153
plant – Factory 420, an aeronautical parts facility in Chengdu, Sichuan

Province – and its conversion into a luxury housing development: the
‘24 City’ of the title. Unlike West of the Tracks, yet not dissimilar to the
documentaries touched on in Chapter 5, Jia uses talking heads to recon-
struct an oral history of the factory from its first to its final days. But in
a quite distinct departure, the director takes the unusual step of inter-
spersing real employees at 420, past and present, with actors performing
as employees. Of the nine talking heads that feature in 24 City, only
five are former factory workers; the other four – played by Lu Liping,
Chen Jianbin, Zhao Tao and Joan Chen herself – are all fictional charac-
ters, presented either as genuine labourers or, in the case of Zhao, their
family members. Cinematographically, no distinction is made between
actors and non-actors. All are presented in exactly the same manner,
including the use of subtitles or intertitles for their names, dates and
places of birth, and positions held at the factory; a documentary-style
mise-en-scène (sitting or standing inside, facing the camera); brief fades
to black that internally subdivide individual narratives; and the occa-
sional interjection from behind the camera, which occurs in both types
of sequence. The irony of the exchange detailed above, of course, is that
the woman Gu Minhua, called Xiao Hua because she supposedly resem-
bles Joan Chen, is in fact Joan Chen, the actress, playing a woman called
Gu Minhua. This is only apparent, however, if the audience is familiar
with Chen and her oeuvre; the scene relies on this extratextual knowl-
edge for its effect. If the viewer is unfamiliar with the actress, there are no
intratextual stylistic cues to suggest that this sequence is in fact entirely
staged, rather than a straightforward act of documentation.
These fictional interludes serve a quite specific purpose: to inject a
sense of individual subjectivity into Jia’s history of 420. When the
director came to interview actual factory workers for the film, he dis-
covered that they were resistant to discussing their own experiences of
the workplace. Instead, they proved happiest talking about other peo-
ple, a consequence, the director has argued, of the lingering influence
of the collectivist mentality, in which the individual was only signif-
icant as a tiny part of a much larger whole (Z. Jia, 2010, p. 57). The
scripted sequences thus present the viewer with personal perspectives
on the factory’s history that the labourers themselves were unwilling to
provide. This is reflected in the kinds of narratives that the actors tell:
stories of children lost, of marriages never made and businesses failed,
and of a younger generation estranged from parents who were raised
in the socialist tradition. And yet, this mingling of fact and fiction is
also a logical extension of the performativity captured in Wang Bing’s
Conclusion 155
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir. In Wang’s documentary, ordinary people

are, on some level, actors, and performance becomes a way of articu-
lating hidden histories. However, performative irruptions, such as the
director’s off-screen interruption, also highlight the nature and limits
of mediation within the film. In 24 City, actors are ordinary people,
and history itself appears almost as a form of performance. Off-camera
interjections are thus one of a panoply of techniques used to blur the
boundaries between reality and fiction, with the consequence that only
a contextual understanding can help even an engaged viewer distin-
guish between the two. It should perhaps be unsurprising, then, that
in discussion of 24 City, Jia has argued that ‘feature film and fiction are
also bridges to reality’ (Veg, 2010, p. 63), even though the kind of reality
suggested here – internal, psychological, even symbolic – is slightly dif-
ferent from the material reality to which documentary cinema is usually
understood to be tied.
For those who still see Jia Zhangke as the high priest of neorealism,
such self-conscious boundary crossing may seem bewildering. In fact,
it arguably forms an important theme in his later work, in which the
interface between the real and the imagined, the documented and the
represented, is constantly mined for cinematic effect. This is most appar-
ent in a feature film like Still Life, where astronauts walk the Three
Gorges and newly demolished buildings metamorphose into spaceships,
but it is still clearly identifiable in the director’s documentaries: Dong
and Useless [Wuyong] (2007) both make use of staging, for example,
while I Wish I Knew [Haishang chuanqi] (2010) oscillates between being
a film about Shanghai, and being about Shanghai and film. At the same
time, however, this intermediality is not unique to Jia Zhangke. It points
to an alternative genealogy of independent Chinese documentary, one
in which the subjective and objective, spontaneous and staged, fictional
and non-fictional are closely intertwined. Although this trend is more
obviously identifiable in contemporary work, it has its roots in the very
beginnings of the ‘New Documentary Movement’; in the interest in per-
formance and mediation apparent in Bumming in Beijing and Jiang Yue’s
The Other Shore [Bi’an] (1995), which focuses on a theatre production;
but also in Zhang Yuan’s debut feature Mama [Mama] (1990), which
cuts actual interviews with parents of autistic children into its story of a
mother struggling to raise her handicapped child.
That narrative is not the one presented in this book. Here, I have
chosen instead to focus on a certain kind of vérité realism. I have
tried to demonstrate how this new aesthetic, promulgated by inde-
pendent Chinese documentary filmmakers, should be understood as a
product of particular ways of filming and editing – specifically, of loca-

tion shooting – which were in turn theorized through the concept of
xianchang, or liveness. I have attempted to show how this provided a
common focus for documentary films from the late 1980s through to
the present day, such that, despite their many differences, the question
of how to mediate liveness is one that all of the documentaries refer-
enced in this book have sought to address. Finally, I have tried to locate
these changes in relation to the grand panorama of China’s postsocial-
ist transformation. How these documentaries developed what might be
described as an ‘aesthetic of transition’ is thus an element of my argu-
ment. I mean this less in the sense of a technological transition and
more in recognition of how these films depart from the visual practices
of post-1949 Chinese documentary, while simultaneously seeking to
represent broad processes of social change. Key here is the contingency
of xianchang, the quality that, in its many manifestations, distinguished
this new aesthetic from the pedagogical discipline required of Maoist-
era documentary, while also aligning it with a more general trend in
Chinese society towards polyvocality, and a less prescriptive production
of social meaning. And yet, the very presence of a counter- or alterna-
tive narrative, embedded in Joan Chen’s performance of Gu Minhua,
poses a challenge to this argument. If there are so many ways to concep-
tualize the growth of independent Chinese documentary as a cultural
phenomenon, what advantage is to be gained in approaching it from
the perspective of xianchang as liveness, rather than from any other?
I hope that, from a local angle, the importance of these issues is
already apparent. Setting aside the question of postsocialist transition,
the fact that liveness always emerges from a field of production shaped
by particular social, technological and industrial forces enables us to
reflect on how these pressures have helped shape the practice of inde-
pendent Chinese documentary. Conceptualizing xianchang in this way
thus allows certain developments – the growth of digital video as a
documentary medium, for example – to be deliberated in relation to
the geographically particular nature of their impact: the China-specific
consequences of such developments. But given the complexity of con-
ditions in the PRC, it should be equally apparent that these films
cannot be approached from this perspective alone. Despite the unusual
circumstances surrounding the emergence of the earliest directors, inde-
pendent documentary in China grew out of, and is still located in,
a network of ideas and practices that circulated between people and
events in different countries, on different continents. If such circu-
lation was, initially, somewhat restricted, this is certainly no longer
Conclusion 157
the case. As the PRC is woven ever more tightly into the international
financial and political system, so it becomes increasingly difficult to talk
of Chinese documentary culture as separate from global and regional
film cultures. This is reflected in the diffusion of independent Chinese
documentary films – and, increasingly, their directors – through the
major international film festivals in Asia, Europe, North America and
beyond.
Returning to questions of liveness and location shooting provides a
framework for comparison between the local and transnational dimen-
sions of this question. By focusing on the relationship between indepen-
dent Chinese documentary and the theory and practice of xianchang,
one can reinsert the ‘movement’ into a global history of the docu-
mentary image without overly distorting the particularities of local
conditions. The issues critical to the mediation of liveness are, as I hope
I have illustrated, ones faced at different points in time by filmmakers
everywhere. This is precisely why early western film history and theory
present an interesting parallel with Chinese documentary practice from
the early 1990s, for the question of how to represent the contingent
was one faced by film directors in both locations, at both moments in
time. The solutions to these problems, however, were usually particular
to their geographical and temporal specificity. Thus, considering indi-
vidual film practices, traditions or approaches adapted from abroad –
for example, Wiseman’s highly refined version of direct film – in rela-
tion to the pressures of the immediate Chinese context, obviously helps
illuminate much about the nature and significance of independent doc-
umentary in the PRC. Just as importantly, however, it also provides us
with the opportunity to reconsider the significance of these practices
in the work of the filmmakers who originally developed them. Dave
Saunders (2007, p. 189) has claimed that
Had reactive observationalism come to fruition outside the United

States, it would have been quite different in intention and scope;
indeed, it is possible that the direct cinema movement could not have
sprung from any other time and place than the American Sixties.
If this is true, what does it mean for precisely this form of practice to
have been adopted in mid-1990s China? And what does this imply not
simply for our understanding of Chinese documentary, but for the way
in which we approach its American ‘original’? A history of observational
film that explored the genre from this standpoint would be interesting
indeed.
What the question of liveness also allows us to develop, however, is a

comparative cultural framework drawing on common experiences from
different historical periods. To theorize shooting live in terms of the
contingent, as with xianchang, suggests parallels with the experience of
modernization captured in the European, American and extra-European
modernisms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is
now accepted wisdom that the capitalist industrialization integral to this
process resulted in a reorganization of spatiotemporal experience. This,
in turn, was reflected in the cultural products of the period, whether
high modernist or examples of ‘vernacular’ modernism: popular cul-
tural forms that allowed their audience to explore the quotidian, sensory
experience of modernization (Hansen, 2000, pp. 10–11). Classically, the
representation of this reorganization has been understood in terms of a
shift away from traditionally stable models of time and space, towards
ones in which fragmentation, instability and constant change were the
common element. This process was as germane to China – particularly
Shanghai, with its multiple foreign concessions – as to Europe or the
United States.
Focusing on xianchang, and the contingency that saturates it, thus
potentially allows us to locate independent Chinese documentary in
relation not simply to the problem of postsocialism, but also to the
more general process of capitalist modernization. It helps us understand
how these films were both a product of and a response to this expe-
rience, while opening up the possibility of comparative historical and
geographical research. Finally, such a focus allows for a clearer sense of
what postsocialism implies at the level of the everyday. Postsocialism
is a transition not just away from a particular state but also towards
one. To live within it entails mourning the passing of old solidarities,
but also participating in the production of new subjectivities, while
attempting to make sense of an increasingly fragmented lebenswelt.
As the Chinese historian Wang Hui (2003, pp. 43–4) has pointed out,
‘transition’ as a metaphor has acquired a determining position within
discourses about the contemporary PRC, allowing current policy to be
rationalized through reference to an ideal, if hazily defined, future.
Unravelling the unstable lived experience of this transition, however,
goes some way towards illuminating the politics of this narrative, and
the vested interests that lie behind it.
My desire, then, is that this book has served a dual purpose. On the
one hand, I hope it has suggested how particular elements of indepen-
dent Chinese documentary practice can be connected to questions of
history, and to the myriad social and political changes that China as
Conclusion 159
a whole has undergone since the 1980s. On the other hand, I hope it
has opened up a comparative perspective from which to examine the
blooming of independent documentary film in the contemporary PRC,
not as a unique event, but as an integral part of a global history of the
documentary image, and of film’s relationship to capitalist modernity.
Considering the relationship between xianchang and contingency will
hardly answer all these questions. It may, however, provide a fruitful
point from which to start contemplating them.
Notes
Introduction
1. I recognize that this term is conceptually ambiguous, occupying a somewhat
vexed position in the history of documentary due to its association with
cinéma vérité. Brian Winston (2007, p. 298) has pointed out that initially
cinéma vérité referred not to observational documentary – or cinéma direct
in French, the ‘fly on the wall’ format in which the director scrupulously
erases his or her presence from the cinematic image – but to the particular
form of French filmmaking pioneered by Jean Rouch, in which the docu-
mentary director consistently inserts him or herself into the frame. However,
the anglophone documentary tradition has, over time, tended to confuse
the terms, attributing the central principle of cinéma direct to cinéma vérité.
In consequence, the latter term is not applied with particular consistency to
any single group of films, further dividing scholars over what distinguishes
the two approaches. It is for this reason that Bill Nichols (1991, p. 38) has
advocated doing away with the term altogether, and replacing it with the
concepts of ‘observational’ and ‘interactive’ filmmaking. The situation is com-
plicated still further in China, where different kinds of film practice have
their own history and vocabulary, sometimes distinct from, sometimes inex-
tricably bound up with, those we are more familiar with in Europe and the
Americas. Nevertheless, the term vérité has acquired a less specialist currency
associated precisely with the type of realism displayed in these films, a point
often acknowledged by foreign critics of contemporary Chinese documentary.
For this reason, I shall be using it as a general (non-Chinese) shorthand for the
aesthetic that is the focus of this book.
1 Mapping Independent Chinese Documentary

1. In fact, the SWYC apparently composed a ‘Manifesto of the new documen-
tary movement’ (‘Xin jilupian yundong xuanyan’), which was read out at the
Beijing symposium. Both Shi Jian and Kuang Yang, another member of the
group, maintain that the original was never consigned to paper. It was, how-
ever, recorded, and a blander version later published by the Broadcasting
Institute (Li, Liu and Wang, 2006, pp. 250, 277).
2. Much of the literature on independent Chinese documentary takes the film
as a critical point of reference. For example, Lin Xudong (2005) has remarked
that ‘Bumming in Beijing [ . . . ] has long been considered the pioneer of the
Chinese independent documentary movement’; Dai Jinhua (cited in F. Fang,
2003, p. 348) has argued that the film was seminal, and thus the point of
origin for independent documentary as a genre in China; Chu Yingchi (2007,
p. 91) has described the film as ‘a pioneering success’; and Lü Xinyu (2003a,
p. 5) has credited the film with having an unprecedented impact on the
traditional documentary scene in China.
160
Notes 161
3. The subjects of Bumming in Beijing were marginal in that they had delib-
erately opted to work outside the state-run employment system, having
neither danwei (‘work unit’) nor hukou (‘household residency’), much like
the early independent documentary makers themselves.
4. In addition to Larsen, on viewing Bumming in Beijing for the first time at
the 1991 Vancouver International Film Festival, Bérénice Reynaud (1996,
p. 235) remarked that ‘the real subject of the tape was the struggle of an
artist with the documentary form, his (re)discovery of cinema verité and
“camera-stylo”.’ Later commentators have tended to replicate this discursive
framework.
5. Following its initial screenings in 1973, Antonioni’s documentary was the
subject of a public criticism in the People’s Daily, with the director accused of
being overtly anti-China (H. Sun, 2009, p. 56). Ivens, despite being invited to
film in the PRC by Zhou Enlai himself, saw only certain episodes of his multi-
part documentary broadcast in the country, due to the change in political
conditions following the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976 (J.-P. Sergent, 2009,
pp. 65–6; T. Zhang, 2009, p. 41).
6. The NHK-CCTV coproduction The Silk Road [Sichou zhi lu], which started
broadcasting in 1980; the Sino-British coproduction Heart of the Dragon
[Long zhi xin] (1984); and The Great Wall [Wang Changcheng], shot by TBS
and CCTV, and broadcast in the autumn of 1991, are the three television
documentaries consistently cited as the most influential foreign coproduc-
tions in China during the late 1980s and early 1990s (c.f. F. Fang, 2003,
pp. 311–26). Wu Wenguang and Duan Jinchuan have also both commented
on how their shooting practices evolved through encounters with these
foreign television crews in the 1980s (Berry, 2007, p. 125).
7. This latter characteristic is less obvious in the films of Wu Wenguang,
who, despite acknowledging the influence of Wiseman, never translated this
influence quite as directly into his filmmaking practice.
8. Gonggong may literally be translated as ‘public’. An equivalent term is hong-
guan, which means ‘macro’, or perhaps more colloquially ‘large scale’. This
lends itself to further variations: hongpian juzhi, literally ‘a monumental
work’, is one example. These terms have subtly different connotations, but
are generally applied to similar works. For a brief discussion of gonggong
and its significance in relation to these documentaries, see Zhu and Mei
(2004, p. 7). For an example of the usage of hongguan and hongpian juzhi,
see discussion of Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks in Zhang and Zhang
(2003, p. 154).
9. A sustained discussion of one minority group that has been the focus of
attention in these documentaries – the Chinese queer community – can be
found in Chapter 4. Hu Jie and Ai Xiaoming’s work touches on highly sen-
sitive topics ranging from the Cultural Revolution (In Search of Lin Zhao’s
Soul [Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun] (2004); Though I am Gone [Wo sui si
qu] (2006)), to village land seizures (Taishi Village [Taishicun] (2005)), the
acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis in China (The Epic of the
Central Plains [Zhongyuan jishi] (2006)), and the aftereffects of the Sichuan
earthquake of 2008 (Our Children [Women de wawa] (2009)).
10. Examples of such films include Wang Fen’s Unhappiness Does Not Stop At One
[Bukauile de bu zhi yige] (2001), about her parent’s relationship; Yang Lina’s
162 Notes
Home Video [Jiating luxiangdai] (2001), also about her family; Zuo Yixiao’s
Losing [Shisan] (2004), which is focused on his divorce; and Hu Xinyu’s The
Man [Nanren] (2005), which takes place almost entirely inside the director’s
one-bedroom flat in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, rarely straying outside the
room, let alone the apartment block. Zhang Ming’s Springtime in Wushan
[Wushan zhi chun] (2003) includes a scene of full frontal nudity, while Hu
Shu’s Leave Me Alone [Wo bu yao ni guan] (1999) features one in which a
prostitute stubs out a cigarette on her arm. More recent films follow this
trend to its logical conclusion, with Tape featuring a scene of the director
masturbating in bed.
11. The only woman attached to the first group of directors was Li Hong.
In contrast, one of the first full-length DV documentaries, Old Men [Lao tou]
(1999), was shot by a woman, Yang Lina, and, while women directors remain
under-represented on the Chinese documentary scene, they are now more
prominent than was the case in the 1990s.
12. Duan Jinchuan, for example, has argued that the more amateur and less
professional documentary film becomes, the weaker its artistic power, and
the less significant its impact (X. Lü, 2003b, p. 99). This problem he has in
part ascribed to the lack of appropriate training programmes in China’s film
schools and universities (J. Duan, 2005).
13. See, for example, X. Lü (2005a, p. 168). For further discussion of the violence
of the digital, see Y. Wang (2005).
14. In reviews of Chinese independent film festivals, for example, both Chris
Berry (2009c) and Markus Nornes (2009) have commented on the con-
tinued influence of direct cinema on independent Chinese documentary.
This influence is identifiable in recent films such as Xu Xin’s Karamay
[Kelamayi] (2010), Ji Dan’s When the Bow Breaks [Wei chao] (2010) and
He Yuan’s Apuda [Apuda de shouhou] (2010). The latter won top prize in
competition at the 2011 Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest), a
major independent documentary film festival located in Kunming, Yunnan
Province.
15. Jishizhuyi is also problematic as a way of assessing what was distinct about
the new documentary because it was not a discourse unique to the 1990s.
Including variants such as jishi meixue, it had been in use since at least the
early 1980s, arising amid discussions among cinema directors about how to
move beyond socialist realism, the dominant representational mode in fea-
ture film after 1949 (Berry, 2002; Lagesse, 2011, pp. 317–18). Arguably, the
term’s re-emergence in the early 1990s was an attempt to clear a discursive
space within which the documentary directors could operate in the immedi-
ate post-Tiananmen period. Lin Xudong (2005) makes this point implicitly
when he states that ‘Although film insiders spoke tactfully when debating
the true nature of the new style documentaries – referring to the use of
“true, on-the-spot” [zhenshi, jishi] filming as a means of subverting the slip-
shod, grandiose narrative structures of 1980s documentary – it was tacitly
understood that the new documentary movement was directed at certain
conservative political dogmas threatening to stage a comeback in post-1989
China.’ In other words, both jishi and zhenshi – a term for ‘real’ or ‘authentic’
also in circulation during this period – were used to provide rhetorical cover
for the early independent documentary directors, cloaking the innovations
Notes 163
of their practice in the language of an established theoretical debate ongoing

since the death of Mao.
16. Chu Yingchi (2007, pp. 84–5) has argued that a poetic mode has
existed as an alternative to Leninist-influenced documentary in China
since the 1950s, although only barely. Nevertheless, although this mode
departed from the dogmatic formula aesthetically, Chu gives little indi-
cation that it relied primarily on anything but a studio-based production
practice.
17. The old documentary newsreels, for example, were rendered redundant
by the speed and reach of new television news programmes such as Net-
work News [Xinwen lianbo], which started broadcasting in 1978 (X. Lin,
2005).
18. Fang Fang (2003, p. 321) has noted that the use of long takes in the
series shattered the traditional televisual representational convention of long
shot-medium shot-close up. The two longest takes in The Great Wall were,
apparently, 5 minutes 10 seconds and 3 minutes 40 seconds.
19. Wu Wenguang and Duan Jinchuan have both commented on how watch-
ing these same films helped to broaden their understanding of documentary
practice (Zhu and Mei, 2004, pp. 63, 103). Other figures less closely asso-
ciated with independent documentary, but nevertheless central to CCTV’s
experiments with the zhuantipian, have made the same points. See, for exam-
ple, the producer Chen Zhen’s discussion of these films (Li, Liu and Wang,
2006, pp. 10–15).
20. Zhang Zhen (2002, p. 116) has translated ‘xianzai shi’ he ‘zai chang’ as ‘a cin-
ematic operation in the “present tense” by virtue of “being present on the
scene” ’, using the same terms that Bill Nichols (1991, p. 40) employs to
describe observational documentary filmmaking.
21. For example, Malcolm Le Grice (2001, p. 155) has categorized the shoot-
ing of film as an act conducted in ‘ “real” TIME/SPACE’, or ‘now and here’,
while Steve Wurtzler (1992, p. 89) has defined live performance as requiring
the ‘spatial co-presence and temporal simultaneity of audience and posited
event’. Whether the emphasis is on the relationship of director and event,
or viewer and event, depends on whether the act is one of documentation
or of performance.
22. Tina Chen (2003) has written about the film units sent down to the
countryside after 1949, in order to bring cinema to the rural population.
When screening films, these units would usually circulate handbooks that
instructed the audience how to respond to key dialogue and scenes (p. 178).
This was all part of the process of educating the people in the ways of social-
ism, but also indicates a deep-seated unease on the part of the establishment
that films might actually be open-ended texts, and a concomitant desire to
pre-empt any audience interpretation other than that authorized by the CCP.
23. Shi Jian, for example, has suggested that one of the reasons documentary
filmmaking became so popular in the wake of 1989 was precisely because
its multiple layers of meaning facilitated a more indirect form of personal
expression (X. Lü, 2003b, p. 152). The implication appears to be that a plau-
sible degree of deniability was useful during a period of intense political
surveillance.
164 Notes
2 Metaphor and Event

1. These two terms are often used interchangeably, and the distinction between
them is sometimes hard to grasp. Lü Xinyu (2005b) has suggested that geren
should be more specifically associated with an individual mode of produc-
tion, while siren is related to subject matter and outlook. Nevertheless, geren
is also used to convey a sense of the latter, as in the term geren lichang, or
‘individual/personal outlook’. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use
the term siren, while acknowledging that geren could, in many instances,
be substituted.
2. The concept of the personal film or documentary incorporates a number of
different genres of non-fiction film, ranging from the video diary to the essay
film. Michael Renov (2004, pp. xviii–xix) has traced its roots back to Joris
Ivens’ experiments with the ‘I’ film in the early decades of the twentieth
century, although in the form of what Laura Rascaroli (2009, p. 107) has
defined as ‘first-person documentary’ it is also strongly associated with the
post-World War Two American avant garde.
3. For a cogent overview of these developments, see Evans (1997, pp. 1–32),
J. Dai (1999, pp. 259–83) and J. Wang (2001). Such a transformation is, of
course, partly related to the events of 1989, and the question of what consti-
tutes the public in China is not unconnected to the academic debates about
civil society and the public sphere that emerged in the wake of Tiananmen
Square. For a brief overview of the problems involved in translating public
and associated terminology into Chinese, see Wang, Lee and Fischer (1994).
For references to the academic debates, see Davis et al. (1995) and P. Huang
(1993).
4. The archetypal qualities of socialist culture in the PRC are perhaps best cap-
tured in socialist realism’s use of models, the most famous of which were the
model characters who peopled revolutionary operas. Derived from the con-
cept of dianxing, or the ‘typical’, outlined by Mao in his Talks at the Yan’an
conference on literature and art (1942), such characters were broadly imitative
in that they were intended for emulation: they were a key way in which
individuals could be instructed in the basic categories of Maoist political
thought. But in consequence they were also archetypes, images fashioned
from material that was already understood as present within the body politic,
but presented in an idealized form. It was through such images that broader
social and political issues could be articulated. At their most extreme, social-
ist realist characters could therefore become stock figures in an allegorization
of social processes, the outcome of which was predetermined. Hu Xinyu’s
rejection of the metaphorical quality of documentary could therefore be
understood in light of this history.
5. In her discussion of similar issues surrounding early film and photography,
this is precisely how Mary Ann Doane (1997, p. 142) defines the contin-
gent. She draws implicitly on French poststructuralist theories of the event
per se, most notably those of Jean-François Lyotard, who, in his exposi-
tion of the concept in relation to the death of the Renault worker Pierre
Overney (Lyotard, 1980, pp. 151–86), has ultimately appeared to suggest
that – to quote Geoffrey Bennington (2005, p. 109) – ‘Overney’s death is an
“event” not because of its causes and effects, but because of its senselessness
Notes 165
or inanity.’ Of course, the logical conclusion of this train of thought is that an

event is only an event when it is absolutely contingent, and that the concept
of the ‘contingent event’ is therefore technically an oxymoron. This hints
precisely at the issue I wish to address in this chapter – namely, the prob-
lems posed by standardizing the unexpected so that it can actually become
meaningful.
6. These tensions are perhaps best captured in discussions of early actualité
films, the dominant genre of early cinema, and how they dealt with the
process of shooting on location. See, for example, Gunning (1990), Vaughan
(1999, pp. 1–8) and Doane (2002).
7. This reflects the fact that The Square was of course shot over a period of
considerably more than 24 hours, and that the activities we see are effectively
selected highlights of this longer footage.
8. Mao’s Tiananmen portrait recurs as the dominant focus of at least six shots
over the course of the film, and appears in the background of countless more.
In addition, the film includes footage of the police chief discussing his time
as a Maoist red guard with the CCTV crew outside in the square.
9. Nichols (1981, p. 38) has argued that the expository mode takes as its for-
mal premise the posing of a problem followed by its solution. However,
he has also suggested that this presents parallels with the ‘classic unity of
time’ in narrative, where events occur within a fixed time period, and move
towards a conclusion under the pressure of temporal urgency. While the
resolution of a problem is sometimes used as a structure within individual
scenes in No. 16 Barkhor South Street, as previously suggested, it is never used
to link sequences, and cannot be said to form a compelling structure for the
documentary as a whole.
10. The titles of many of Wiseman’s films – for example, Hospital (1970), High
School (1968), Central Park (1989) – give a clear indication of the director’s
preferred subjects and modus operandi, while arguably his most famous, and
controversial, film, Titicut Follies (1967), is literally about the workings of a
(mental) institution.
11. The possibility of such speculation, as suggested by Duan Jinchuan, seems
in practice to be tied to this metaphorical structure. For example, with ref-
erence to Wiseman’s Basic Training (1971), Thomas Benson and Carolyn
Anderson (2002, p. 179) have suggested that the film’s structure is as much
retrospective as consecutive, ‘each scene helping us to make sense of what
we have seen before, but not seeming to obligate the filmmaker to any par-
ticular scene in what follows.’ The lack of a linear causality thus makes
us think harder about the relationship between different sequences in the
film, a mode that Nichols (1981, p. 234) has described as ‘supplemental and
associative’.
12. This point is neatly made by the director himself, who recalls screening The
Square to an audience of people in the Beijing arts scene, only to be asked
what it meant (Li, Liu and Wang, 2006, pp. 213–14). This I think encapsu-
lates the differences between the documentaries of the pre-1989 period and
those of the 1990s, a difference that I am in no way trying to minimize.
13. As Zhang says of his subjects, ‘in all the scenes, I was simply one of them.
They never saw me as a filmmaker [paishezhe]’ (Zhu and Wan, 2005, p. 176).
This is presumably why they also allowed Zhang to record the explicit
166 Notes
images and behaviour that have earned the film the label of private, and
have also placed it outside wide public circulation (Springtime in Wushan is
not commercially available). And yet, as his friend Zheng jokes at the very
beginning of the documentary, ‘We return to our home town as tourists.’
Although the individuals at the centre of the documentary are all close
friends and family, the fact that both men have long been resident outside
Wushan, and that their former hometown has now mostly been torn down,
also places them slightly outside the community of their childhood.
14. For a concise discussion of the Sun Zhigang case, its implications and its
coverage in the Chinese media, see Y. Zhao (2008, pp. 246–70).
15. This is not the only way in which one could consider how Wang Bing gen-
erates emotional identification with his subjects. Li Jie (2008) has suggested
that the use of the composed close-up in Rails introduces a degree of emo-
tional charge less immediately obvious in the rest of the film. Of course, this
is not incompatible with the contingent as a conveyor of intense personal
emotion, as the scene in which Lao Du’s son breaks down suddenly while
looking at the family photo albums makes abundantly clear.
16. With Fuck Cinema, this was actually the case. The subject of the documen-
tary originally approached Wu to help him find a director or producer
for a screenplay he had written. Wu agreed, and ended up shooting a
documentary about the process.
17. This is illustrated by the harassment that activist filmmakers such as Ai
Xiaoming, Hu Jie or Hu Jia consistently face for their documentaries on
social and political inequality, and by the treatment meted out to as high
profile an individual as Ai Weiwei following his attempts to document the
death of children in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008. This harassment is
often extended to organizations that seek to screen films by these individu-
als. In 2007, for example, Yunfest was forced to relocate from Kunming to
Dali by the local authorities for including Hu Jie’s Though I am Gone, which
deals directly with the consequences of the Cultural Revolution, in their
programme line up (Y. Zhang, 2010, p. 138).
3 Time, Space and Movement

1. Early silent cinema, particularly the physical burlesque of, for example,
Buster Keaton, exemplifies this system most completely. D. N. Rodowick,
in his study of Deleuze’s writing on cinema, uses Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. as an
example of the movement-image. In this film, released in 1924, Keaton plays
a young projectionist who enters the space of his own dream: the rectangle
of the cinema screen. In the series of shots that follows, ‘Keaton’s moving
figure provides a stable foreground against a shifting background of increas-
ingly unlikely and dangerous locations: a garden, a busy street, a cliff side, a
jungle with lions, train tracks in a desert. When Keaton finds himself on a
rock by the ocean, he dives, only to land headfirst in a snowbank’ (Rodowick,
1997, p. 3). Thus, the logic of the film’s progression across a range of eclectic
places is maintained by the constant physical presence of the protagonist on
the move.
2. Hence Deleuze’s association (1989, p. xi) of the time-image with the ‘tired-
nesses and waitings’ of the human body, rather than its incessant activity.
Notes 167
3. Although it is its most accessible manifestation, the action-image is in fact

only one of several forms of the movement-image described by Deleuze.
Others include the relation- or mental-image and the affection-image, as
well as the more intermediate forms of the impulse- and reflection-images.
Deleuze reads these different manifestations through Charles Sanders Peirce’s
semiological categories: firstness, secondness and thirdness. Secondness is
related to the action-image, while thirdness is connected to the relation-
image. According to Deleuze (1992, p. 197), ‘thirdness gives birth not to
actions but to “acts” which necessarily contain the symbolic element of a
law (giving, exchanging); not to perceptions, but to interpretations which
refer to the element of sense; not to affections, but to intellectual feelings
of relations, such as the feelings that accompany the use of the logical con-
junctions “because”, “although”, “so that”, “therefore”, “now”, etc.’. Hence
the relationship of the relation-image to the act of symbolizing.
4. I would therefore argue that the temporality of River Elegy is different from
that of, for example, No. 16 Barkhor South Street. While the zhuantipian’s
symbolic qualities are clearly related to the metaphorical mode, Duan is
not overtly invested in temporal teleology, and No. 16 Barkhor South Street
proposes no theory of historical development. Furthermore, because the
documentary was shot live and on location, it articulates the relationship
between time and space in a far more concrete manner, through specific
people and places. Its time is that of the everyday: River Elegy’s is arguably
that of myth.
5. For example, in the initial journey down the hutong to the front door of
the house, the cut from shot one to shot two clearly skips a segment of the
journey. Nonetheless, continuity is maintained by the focus on the couple.
By matching their activity from shot to shot, it is clear that the second is an
extension of the first, in terms of both time and space: thus, the two shots
are chronologically positioned via the physical movement of the couple.
Similarly, in the series of shots that capture the protagonists washing their
clothes, Wu cuts from an outside shot of the doorway, an image that we
have in effect seen before when Mou and Du entered the courtyard from the
hutong, to a second exterior space that is not immediately recognizable. But
by following Mou round a corner to the doorway, where he starts to hang the
clothes up to dry, the camera makes apparent the relationship between this
new space – clearly a corner of the courtyard that was previously hidden –
and the other outside space with which we are already familiar. Thus, the
viewer’s sense of these spaces, their size, function and inter-relationship, is
formed in no small part through observation of the couple’s activities within
them.
6. Defining the precise meaning of the term ‘long take’ is fraught with compli-
cations, not least of which is that determining what constitutes ‘long’, and in
what cultural or industrial context, is an extremely complex process. In rela-
tion to my analyses in this chapter, I have, for the sake of simplicity, followed
Donato Totaro’s (2001, p. 4) suggestion that ‘the lowest numerical duration
at which a shot [can be] referred to as a long take is in the twenty-five to
forty second range.’
7. In 1980, for example, the scholars Li Tuo and Zhou Chuanji published an
article on ‘long take theory’ (chang jingtou lilun) in the journal Film Culture
[Dianying Wenhua] (Lagesse, 2011, pp. 316–17), while the technique featured
168 Notes
centrally in Li and Zhang Nuanxin’s (1990) famous call for Chinese film
language to be modernized, published a year earlier.
8. For example, Dudley Andrew (1976, p. 138) has argued that, to Bazin, cinema
operated as an extension of the real because it registered ‘the spatiality of
objects and the space they inhabit’.
9. Wu (2001b, p. 218) makes this clear in his description of the previously
mentioned four-minute take in Ogawa’s film, which he argues captures ‘the
confrontation of flesh and steel, warmheartedness and iciness, language
and silence, hope and hopelessness: from this one can tease out so, so
much meaning.’ Meaning emerges through tensions captured within a single
extended shot, rather than between multiple shots.
10. Chinese critic Li Tuo and the historian Wang Hui, for example, have argued
that Jia’s cinema represents a combination of the aesthetic traditions of Hou
and Ozu Yasujiro with the social conscience of what they too term the ‘New
Documentary Movement’ (J. Ouyang, 2007, pp. 263–8).
4 Ethics, the Body and Digital Video

1. For a discussion of examples of both types of work, see Z. Zhang (2010,
pp. 97–112).
2. Hu Shu’s response, ironically, is that he was too busy trying to prevent the
camera from moving to be truly aware of what his subject was doing to
herself (Zhu and Mei, 2004, p. 391).
3. See, for example, Vaughan (1999, pp. 181–92) for an exemplary discussion
of these worries.
4. At a Beijing Film Academy screening of Leave Me Alone, for example, it was
suggested that that the film was morally problematic because it ‘exposed
some shameful secrets’ (Zhu and Mei, 2004, p. 391) about its subjects, thus
raising questions of informed consent and directorial responsibility regard-
ing the public revelation of the girls’ occupation and lifestyle. This could
only have been underlined by the fact that Hu Shu uploaded Leave Me Alone
to his personal website (Voci, 2010, p. 33). More recently, similar issues
have been raised about Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest [Maishou] (2008), another
documentary focused on a prostitute (Nornes, 2009, p. 52). This suggests
precisely how the dynamics of gender and class surrounding these films
seem to provoke a very similar sense of unease across diverse audiences. In a
separate discussion of the digital and its impact on Chinese documentary
practice, Wang Yiman (2010, p. 219) points out that, in Mei Bing and Zhu
Jinjiang’s 2004 collection Profile of independent Chinese documentary [Zhongguo
duli jilupian dang’an], all the directors asked to comment on ethical questions
broadly agreed that the critical issue was whether access to one’s subjects’
private space resulted in images that were voyeuristic and objectifying, or
genuinely humanistic.
5. In English, the term ‘queer’ has particular theoretical associations. However,
when I use ‘queer’ in this chapter, I am not necessarily invoking this theoret-
ical category. I use the word because it is often the preferred self-description
of many of the directors discussed here, even when in English the terms ‘gay’
or ‘homosexual’ might be more standardly substituted.
Notes 169
6. The term fanchuan derives from the theatrical practice of male and female
impersonation in Chinese opera, and literally indicates the performance of
gender role reversal.
7. Examples here would include Miss Jin Xing, Michelle Chen’s The Snake Boy
[Shanghai nanhai] (2002), Zhang Hanzi’s Tangtang [Tangtang] (2004), Han
Tao’s Baobao [Baobao] (2004), Gao Tian’s Meimei [Meimei] (2005), Jiang Zhi’s
Xiang Pingli (a.k.a Our Love) [Xiang Pingli] (2005) and Du Haibin’s Beautiful
Men [Renmian taohua] (2005). Interestingly, this emphasis on performance
does not extend to representations of lesbianism. For discussion of lesbian
representation in independent Chinese documentary, see S. Chao (2010a).
8. For example, in a question and answer session at the Third Beijing Queer
Film Festival (or Queer Film Forum) – captured in Cui Zi’en’s Queer China,
‘Comrade’ China – Gao Tian, director of Meimei, suggested that it was his
subject who contacted him to initiate filming, rather than vice versa. While
I cannot verify this claim, it does put the complicated power dynamics of
documentary filmmaking into perspective, and should caution us against
necessarily casting the subjects of these films as victims of the camera.
9. Tangtang, Xiang Pingli and Cui Zi’en’s Night Scene [Yejing] (2004) are examples
of documentaries on queer subjects that all make use of these techniques.
10. Zhang Yuan and Jiang Zhi were both established professionals in their fields
when they made Miss Jin Xing and Xiang Pingli; Zhang Hanzi trained as a
sculptor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing; Gao Tian gradu-
ated from the Directing Department of the Beijing Film Academy; and Han
Tao was educated at the Lu Xun Fine Arts Academy in Shenyang (the alma
mater of Wang Bing, among others). Only Du Haibin was a professional
documentary filmmaker, and even he trained at the Film Academy.
11. This is further underlined by Du’s frequent use of the split screen to simulta-
neously juxtapose the public and private lives of his subjects over the course
of the film. Again, this seems to reproduce in screen space the ability of the
camera to move seamlessly between different kinds of physical space.
12. This is not to say that heterosexual directors have stopped making films
about the queer community. Madame would be an example of this. How-
ever, my focus here is not on these films, precisely because in some respects
they remain ethnographic experiments that replicate some of the problems
of the earlier documentaries.
13. In 2007, for example, Cui released a feature-length documentary, We Are
the . . . of Communism [Women shi gongchanzhuyi shenglüehao].
14. This is particularly true of a regular webcast such as Queer Comrades, although
less of documentaries such as Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China, Chinese Closet or
New Beijing, New Marriage. Wei Jiangang (2010) has maintained that one of
the reasons for the longevity of Queer Comrades is its calculated refusal to
directly criticize the government. Nonetheless, the webcast has faced disrup-
tion from internet service providers, who have deleted past episodes from
various websites, due to concerns about the sensitivity of the subject matter.
The strong emphasis the series also places on health and education, which
feature prominently in its online rationale (‘Guanyu women’, no date), also
reflects its need to self-present in terms that are acceptable to the govern-
ment, and also likely to earn it financial support from local and international
NGOs. In contrast, Fan and Cui’s documentaries, which are simultaneously
170 Notes
too sensitive and too uncommercial for domestic cinematic release, have far
less to lose by being more explicitly political in tone.
5 Sound and Voice

1. I borrow the term ‘ambient sound’ from Michel Chion (1994, p. 75), who
describes it as ‘sound that envelops a scene and inhabits its space [ . . . ] birds
singing, church bells ringing. We might call them [these sounds] territory
sounds, because they serve to identify a particular locale through their per-
vasive and continuous presence.’ In addition to these sounds, Tiananmen
features a zhuantipian-style voiceover and extradiegetic music, which Voci
has also pinpointed as a further way in which the documentary extends the
scope of its soundtrack beyond speech.
2. One of the sequences removed features Zhang discussing her breakdown.
3. I am not suggesting here that the category ‘ordinary’ is absolute, or indeed
that the artists and students featured in Bumming in Beijing and I Gradu-
ated! were anything less than elite by the standards of their contemporaries.
Nevertheless, as Laura Grindstaff (2002, p. 71) has suggested, in media pro-
duction, ‘ordinariness’ frequently accrues to those who come from outside
the professional media apparatus. This holds true for all of the subjects
of these early Chinese documentaries, regardless of their class status or
professional background.
4. The obvious exception to these examples would be 1966: My Time in the
Red Guards, which uses a far more traditional style of talking head to elicit
memories of the Cultural Revolution from its subjects.
5. In a similar manner, Reynaud (2010b, p. 168) has located the moments of
truth in Bumming in Beijing at those points when the film’s subjects are either
silent or engaged in non-normative use of language.
6. Smith (2008, p. 15) discusses these qualities with reference to laughter and
early phonograph recordings, where the flooding out of both performers and
the audience ‘was an important index of authentic presence used to bridge
the gap between recorded sound and the listener’. The same, however, could
easily be claimed of documentary, where such moments frequently signify a
similar experience.
7. This is formulated most directly by Ai Xiaoming, who has simply stated
that ‘Documentaries are about memory – the importance of memory for
individuals and for social change’ (Thornham, 2008, p. 183).
8. For discussion of the use of interviews in recent Chinese documentary in
relation to oral history, see S. Cui (2010, pp. 10–13).
9. For example, in 2005, the year when the Village Video Project was initiated,
a villager in Shengyou, Hebei Province, recorded a murderous attack on
fellow villagers protesting the building of a power plant, and passed the dig-
ital footage to the Washington Post (Y. Zhao, 2007, p. 108). This agent was
clearly produced less through the intervention of a media professional than
through the interconnection of a number of other socioeconomic factors,
one of which was obviously access to digital recording equipment. An inter-
esting point of comparison can also be found in the records of the rural
participatory documentary projects initiated by the Yunnan Academy of
Notes 171
Social Sciences (Zhang and Zeng, 2009). In describing how they first came
to pick up a camera, project participants stressed how members of their fam-
ily had DV cameras that they had borrowed; how they saved up for a small
camera themselves; or how their village invested in a camera for the pur-
pose of particular communal projects, usually environmental. Again, these
agents were only partly created through the intervention of professionals,
being in most cases already partially pre-formed before such programmes
were implemented: many of these participants traced their initial exposure
to DV cameras back to the late 1990s, for example. In Yunnan, this picture
is complicated by the fact that the first participatory video project was initi-
ated in 1991, as part of the Ford Foundation’s women’s reproductive health
programme (J. Guo, 2009, p. 6). Nevertheless, I would argue that the rela-
tionship between amateurs and professionals is still less top down than is
sometimes implied.
10. This was illustrated during public discussions I attended at the 2011 Yunfest,
at which tensions consistently arose between audience members and film-
makers. The former questioned the length of the documentaries screened, as
well as their reliance on extended takes, muted rhythm and general lack of
storyline; the latter often defended these features in terms of the necessarily
artistic attributes of documentary, and their own right to experiment with
these qualities. As documentary culture has become more broadly based,
the question of what makes a good documentary has become more com-
pelling, particularly for those traditionally responsible for such definitions.
See S. Yi (2011) for the festival director’s own attempt to balance these
competing demands while outlining a critical programme for contemporary
independent Chinese documentary.
Glossary of Key and Recurring
Chinese Terms
Pinyin romanization Chinese characters
danwei
duoyuanhua
duli
duli sixiang
fanchuan
gaige kaifang
geren
geren lichang
gonggong
hongguan
hongpian juzhi (sometimes )
hukou
hutong
jilupian
jishi
jishi meixue
jishizhuyi
juweihui
laobaixing
minzhuhua
paichusuo
siren
su ku
xianchang
xin jilu yundong
zhenshi
zhuantipian
172
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Films and Television Programmes
Referenced
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by Duan Jinchuan/ . Lhasa: Tibetan Culture Communication Company.
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East Palace, West Palace/ /Donggong xigong (1996). Directed by Zhang

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186 Films and Television Programmes Referenced
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We Are the . . . of Communism/ /Women shi gongchanzhuyi
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West of the Tracks/ /Tiexi qu (2002). Part One: Rust/ /Gongchang. Part
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Index
accidental, the, 7, 32, 36, 37, 42, Beijing Cotton Fluffer [Beijing tanjiang],
67, 71 21, 23
See also unexpected, the; event, the, Beijing Film Academy, 57, 118, 120,
unexpected 168 n.4, 169 n.10
Agamben, Giorgio, 137 Beijing Queer Film Festival, 119, 169
Ai, Xiaoming, 18, 119, 139, 147, n.8
161 n.9, 166 n.17, 170 n.7 Beijing Television, 26
Ai, Weiwei, 166 n.17 Beijing University, 15
Akomfrah, John, 100 Benjamin, Walter, 110
All About Gay Sex [Gay na huar], 117 Bennington, Geoffrey, 164 n.5
Along the Railroad [Tielu yanxian], Benson, Thomas, 165 n.11
21, 68 Berry, Chris, 21, 25, 33, 52, 75, 76, 77,
analogue video, 4, 19–20, 21, 24, 79, 136, 162 n.14
87–8, 91, 96, 102, 110 Berry, Michael, 108
Betacam, 20 Black Audio Film Collective, 100
and camera mobility, 87–8, 91, 96, Bodman, Richard, 81
102 Box, The [Hezi], 112, 139
Hi8, 21 Braester, Yomi, 143
relationship to professional
Brault, Michel, 26
production, 19–20
Bumming in Beijing: Last of the
Anderson, Carolyn, 165 n.11
Dreamers [Liulang Beijing: zuihou de
Andrew, Dudley, 168 n.8
mengxingzhe], 1–2, 5, 10, 12, 14,
Anstey, Edgar, 135
15, 16, 24, 28, 29, 32, 61, 71, 84,
Antelope Productions, 15
89, 132, 133, 134, 136, 138, 140,
Anti-Rightist Campaigns, 142
142, 143, 151, 155, 160 n.2, 161
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 15, 26, 28,
n.3, 161 n.4, 170 n.3, 170 n.5
161 n.5
Apuda [Apuda de shouhou], 162 n.14
At Home in the World [Sihai weijia], 8, Cao, Fei, 23
20, 61, 74, 80, 84–8, 89, 91, 95, Central News Documentary Film
96, 99, 100, 101 Studio, 26
Auslander, Philip, 31 Central Park, 55, 165 n.10
Chao, Shi-yan, 114, 115
Baobao [Baobao], 169 n.7 Chen, Joan, 153–4, 156
Basic Training, 165 n.11 Chen, Jue, 12
Baudelaire, Charles, 31 Chen, Michelle, 169 n.7
Bazin, André, 88, 89, 90, 99, 168 n.8 Chen, Tina, 163 n.22
Beautiful Men [Renmian taohua], 116–7, Chen, Zhen, 89, 163 n.19
120, 124, 125, 128, 169 n.7 Cheng, David, 9, 112, 123–7,
Before the Flood [Yanmo], 96 128
Beijing Broadcasting Institute, 12, 13, China Central Television (CCTV), 1, 8,
27, 160 Ch. 1 n.1 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28,
188
Index 189
45, 49, 53, 80, 135, 145, 161 n.6, and mediation, 6, 32, 43, 70, 131,
163 n.19, 165 n.8 152, 157
Bureau of Foreign Affairs, 13, 27 and the particular or specific, 32, 36,
Bureau of Military Affairs, 27 37, 38, 41, 42, 66, 164–5 n.5
Bureau of Society and Education, 13 and postsocialism, 6, 7, 34–5, 156
foreign coproductions with, 15, power dynamics of, 9, 10, 104, 112,
26–8, 161 n.6 113, 123, 127, 129
producer responsibility system, 21 profilmic, 6, 42, 44, 48, 53, 54, 55,
reforms of, 26–8, 45, 145–6 56, 60, 63, 67, 70
China Queer Film Festival Tour, 119 and realism, 5
China Village Self-Governance Film semiotic, 7, 35, 42, 44, 54, 56
Project [Zhongguo cunmin zizhi and social space, 103, 109
yingxiang chuanbo jihua]. see and the spontaneous or unexpected,
Village Video Project [Zhongguo 42, 55, 60, 62, 66, 67, 73, 138,
cunmin zizhi yingxiang chuanbo 150, 164–5 n.5
jihua] temporal, 8, 32, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77,
Chinese, The [Zhongguoren], 13, 28 78, 80, 101, 102
Chinese Closet [Guizu], 117, 119, 169 and the voice, 10, 130, 133, 134,
n.14 137, 150, 151
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 21, See also xianchang
33, 35, 39, 79, 98, 163 n.22 corporeal image, the, 9, 104–8, 111,
Chion, Michel, 132, 170 n.1 112, 117, 122, 127, 128
Chu, Yingchi, 25, 27, 34, 160 n.2, 163 Couldry, Nick, 31, 138, 144
n.16 Cui, Weiping, 18
Chung Kuo [Cina], 15, 26, 28 Cui, Zi’en, 9, 112, 114, 117, 118,
cinema 120–3, 139, 169 n.8, 169 n.9, 169
art, 75, 81, 97, 99, 100 n.13, 169 n.14
early, 5, 32, 164–5 n.5, 165 n.6, Cultural Revolution, the, 15, 26, 64,
166 n.1 81, 135, 142, 161 n.9, 166 n.17,
independent, 39 170 n.4
feature, 14, 25, 57, 68, 76, 80, 88–9, Culture Fever, 39, 79, 85
92, 99, 120, 121, 155, 162 n.15,
163 n.22 Dai, Jinhua, 29, 135, 138, 160 n.2
Maoist, 89 danwei. see work unit (danwei)
‘underground’, 71 Davis, Wendy, 31
Urban Generation, 75, 80 Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 74, 77–8, 79, 80, 81,
‘world’, 23 87, 96, 101, 102, 166 n.1, 166 n.2,
cinéma direct, 160 n.1 167 n.3
cinéma vérité, 2, 15, 160 n.1, 161 n.4 Deng, Xiaoping, 21, 33, 45
commercialization, 19, 39, 58, 98, 101 De Sica, Vittorio, 80
Connerton, Paul, 126 dianxing. see typical, the (dianxing)
contingency digital video technology, 3, 4, 9, 19,
and the accidental, 32, 34, 53 21–4, 36, 68, 92, 95, 96, 102, 103,
and the corporeal, 32 104, 109–12, 113, 114, 117, 118,
and emotional expression, 166 n.15 119, 125, 126, 129, 130, 134,
and liveness, 6, 7, 10, 11, 31, 35, 42, 145–50, 151, 156, 162 n.13, 168
72, 80, 104, 130, 137, 150, 151, n.4, 170–1 n.9
158, 159 and activism, 119
190 Index
digital video technology – continued Drew, Robert, 51

impact on director-subject Du, Haibin, 21, 68, 116–17, 169 n.7,
relationship, 146–7 169 n.10
impact on independent Chinese Duan, Jinchuan, 7, 12, 16, 17, 18, 20,
documentary, 21–4 21, 27, 28, 35, 37, 43–51, 52, 53,
‘lightness’ of, 9, 24, 109–12, 113, 54–6, 59, 60, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69,
117, 126, 129 70, 72, 94, 112, 135, 161 n.6, 162
and personal or private filmmaking, n.12, 163 n.19, 165 n.11, 165
22, 24 n.12, 167 n.4
‘violence’ of, 24, 109–10, 162 n.13 duoyuanhua. see independent Chinese
direct cinema, 11, 16, 17, 19, 51, 52, documentary, diversification
56, 104, 138, 157, 162 n.14 (duoyuanhua) of
Dirlik, Arif, 33
Disorder [Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai], East Palace, West Palace [Donggong
18 xigong], 121
Doane, Mary Ann, 54, 66, 164 n.5 Elton, Arthur, 135
documentary genres embodiment
compilation, 5, 25–6, 81, 84 and documentary representation by
jilupian, 15, 16, 77, 84 queer filmmakers, 117–27
newsreel, 25–6, 163 n.17 and documentary representation of
scripted, 5, 14, 25–6, 28, 30, 35, 42, queer subjects, 112–17
114, 154 and ethical representation, 106–7,
special topic film (zhuantipian), 14, 108–9, 168 n.4
16, 27, 28, 29, 42, 44, 54, 56, and intersubjectivity, 9, 105–6
74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, and spectacle, 104, 107, 108, 112,
135, 163 n.19, 167 n.4, 170 n.1 115, 120, 126, 128
See also private documentary; public and voyeurism, 104, 107, 111, 112,
documentary 115, 117, 122, 124, 126, 129
documentary modes and xianchang, 9, 29, 105, 114–15,
dogmatic, 26, 34, 163 n.16 129, 137
expository, 14, 26, 51, 52, 165 n.9 See also queer identity
Maoist-era, 5, 14, 15, 25–6, 27–8, 34, Enter the Clowns [Choujue deng chang],
131, 156 121
metaphorical, 7, 40, 44, 45, 51–6, Epic of the Central Plains, The
66, 68, 69, 70, 164 n.4, 165 [Zhongyuan jishi], 161 n.9
n.11, 167 n.4 event, the
observational, 16, 18, 40, 54, 63, 65, diegetic, 43, 45, 55, 56
94, 104, 120, 125, 139, 142, profilmic, 5, 42–3, 46, 54, 55, 56,
143, 145, 157, 160 n.1, 163 n.20 60, 61, 63, 65, 67
participatory, 10, 23–4, 113, 125, theories of, 53, 164–5 n.5
146, 147, 170–1 n.9 unexpected, 7, 42, 44, 46, 61, 62,
pedagogical, 5, 26, 35, 56, 156 63, 66–7, 150
performative, 18, 19, 40, 114, 125
poetic, 163 n.16 Fabian, Johannes, 76
post-Mao, 34 Fan, Popo, 9, 112, 117, 118, 119,
reflexive, 18, 40, 63, 104, 114, 145 123–7, 128
See also performance; reflexivity fanchuan, 9, 111, 112–14, 115, 116,
Dong [Dong], 92, 155 117, 120, 122, 124, 128, 169 n.6
Drew Associates, 26 Fang, Fang, 163 n.18
Index 191
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 23 Hu, Jie, 18, 119, 139, 161 n.9, 166
feature film. see cinema, feature n.17
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir [He Hu, Shu, 103, 104–7, 162 n.10, 168
Fengming], 10, 133, 140, 142–5, n.2, 168 n.4
146, 147, 148–9, 150, 151, 155 Hu, Xinyu, 38–9, 41, 42, 68, 162 n.10,
Fifth Generation directors, 14, 88, 89 164 n.4
Floating [Piao], 60–3, 66, 68 Huang, Weikai, 7, 18, 23, 44, 60–3, 67,
Fuck Cinema [Cao tama de dianying], 70
68, 166 n.16 hukou. see residency permit (hukou)
gaige kaifang. see reform and opening I Graduated! [Wo biye le!], 15, 28, 75,
(gaige kaifang) 132, 133, 134, 136, 140, 151,
Gamson, Joshua, 31 170 n.3
Gang of Four, 161 n.5 independent Chinese documentary
Gao, Tian, 169 n.7, 169 n.8, 169 n.10 and activism, 18, 117–27, 133, 143,
globalization, 36, 100 151, 161 n.9, 166 n.17
Godard, Jean-Luc, 23, 80 and amateurism, 20, 22, 68, 111,
146, 147
Goffman, Erving, 137, 144
and audience reception, 11, 35, 38,
Grindstaff, Laura, 31, 170 n.3
52, 56, 65, 165 n.12, 168 n.4,
Groulx, Gilles, 26
171 n.10
Great Wall, The [Wang Changcheng],
definition of ‘independence’ in, 12,
27, 84, 161 n.6, 163 n.18
21
and dissent, 39–40, 52, 71, 119–20,
Hallas, Roger, 137 137, 139, 162–3 n.15, 163 n.23,
Han, Tao, 169 n.7, 169 n.10 166 n.17, 169–70 n.14
handheld camerawork, 3, 4, 14, 29, distribution and exhibition of, 11,
86, 95, 96, 99, 100 16, 22, 119
Hansen, Miriam, 32 diversification (duoyuanhua) of, 6,
Harbord, Janet, 32 18–25, 36, 118
Hatherley, Owen, 63 emergence of, 6, 12–18, 26–9, 36,
He, Yuan, 162 n.14 163 n.19
Heart of the Dragon [Long zhi xin], 28, ethical concerns surrounding, 24,
161 n.6 104–9, 162 n.13, 168 n.4
High School, 165 n.10 financing for, 20, 45, 100, 169 n.14
Home Video [Jiating luxiangdai], 162 relationship with official media, 14,
n.10 20–2, 26–9, 45, 98, 135, 145–6,
Hong Kong Independent Short Film 161 n.6, 163 n.19
and Video Awards, 100 See also documentary genres;
Hong Kong International Film documentary modes
Festival, 13, 16 In Public [Gonggong changsuo], 8–9, 74,
Hospital, 165 n.10 81, 92–7, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102
Hou, Hsiao-hsien, 97, 98, 99, 168 n.10 In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul [Xunzhao
Houjie Township [Hou Jie], 96–7 Lin Zhao de linghun], 161 n.9
Housing Problems, 135 intersubjectivity, 23, 103, 105–6, 108,
How Yukong Moved the Mountains 112, 115, 117, 118, 127, 128, 129
[Comment Yukong deplaça les Ivens, Joris, 15, 26, 27, 161 n.5, 164
montagnes], 15, 26 n.2
Hu, Jia, 166 n.17 I Wish I Knew [Haishang chuanqi], 155
192 Index
Japan Broadcasting Corporation 151, 156, 157, 158, 163 n.21,

(NHK), 15, 27, 100, 161 n.6 167 n.4
Jeonju International Film Festival, 100 and mediation, 6, 31, 149, 150
Ji, Dan, 162 n.14 See also contingency; xianchang
Ji, Jianghong, 96 Living Elsewhere [Shenghuo zai bie chu],
Jia, Zhangke, 8, 11, 22, 23, 24, 30, 42, 112
74, 76, 79, 81, 92–101, 102, Living Space [Shenghuo kongjian], 21
153–5, 168 n.10 location filmmaking, 1, 5, 6, 25–9, 30,
Jiang, Yue, 12, 16, 17, 21, 53, 155 31, 35, 37, 41, 42, 44, 54, 55, 56,
Jiang, Zhi, 114–15, 169 n.7, 169 n.10 67, 69, 70, 80, 86, 89, 90, 91, 101,
Jianghu: Life on the Road [Jianghu], 40, 102, 109, 113, 127, 128, 129, 132,
41, 42, 112, 139 133, 145, 149, 150, 156, 157, 158,
jilupian. see documentary genres 165 n.6, 167 n.4
jishi meixue, 162 n.15 long take, the, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 15, 26, 27,
jishizhuyi. see realism, reportage 29, 41, 51, 59, 74, 80, 81, 88–92,
(jishizhuyi) 95–101, 102, 104, 131, 163 n.18,
juweihui. see residents’ committee 167 n.6, 167–8 n.7
(juweihui) Losing [Shisan], 162 n.10
Lu, Sheldon, 33
Karamay [Kelamayi], 162 n.14 Lu, Xun, 107–8, 111
Kracauer, Siegfried, 32 Lü, Xinyu, 3, 4, 13, 15, 16, 17,
Kuang, Yang, 160 Ch. 1 n.1 18, 19, 23, 38, 63, 66, 160 n.2,
164 n.1
Laclau, Ernesto, 76 Lyotard, Jean-François, 33,
Lagesse, Cecile, 89 164 n.5
Larsen, Ernest, 1, 2, 4, 14, 15, 161 n.4
late socialism. see postsocialism
Leave Me Alone [Wo bu yao ni guan], MacDougall, David, 109
103, 104–7, 109, 111, 162 n.10, Madame [Gu nainai], 117, 169 n.12
168 n.4 Mama [Mama], 155
Le Grice, Malcolm, 163 n.21 Man, The [Nanren], 38–9, 41, 68,
Leacock, Richard, 51 162 n.10
Lenin, Vladimir, 26 Mao, Zedong, 5, 50, 163 n.15, 164 n.4,
Li, Hong, 17, 23, 139, 162 n.11 165 n.8
Li, Jie, 166 n.15 marginal subjects. see minority
Li, Ning, 18 subjects
Li, Tuo, 167 n.7, 168 n.10 Marker, Chris, 15, 145
Li, Xiaoshan, 12 Maysles Brothers, the, 51
Lin, Xudong, 13, 18, 25, 26, 30, 160 McGrath, Jason, 99, 100
n.2, 162 n.15 mediation, 6, 10, 30, 31, 32, 43, 56,
Little Flower [Xiao Hua], 153 66, 75, 103, 104, 114, 119, 120,
Liu, Xiaoli, 27 123, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 137,
Liu, Xin, 7, 33, 34 143, 146, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152,
live filmmaking. see location 155, 157
filmmaking Mei, Bing, 106, 168 n.4
liveness, 6, 7, 10, 11, 30–1, 34, 35, 36, Meimei [Meimei], 115–6, 117, 118, 123,
42, 63, 66, 67, 70, 72, 80, 91, 104, 124, 125, 128, 169 n.7, 169 n.8
129, 130, 131, 133–4, 137, 138, Meishi Street [Meishi Jie], 24
139, 140, 143, 145, 146, 149, 150, metaphor. see documentary modes
Index 193
minority subjects 1966: My Time in the Red Guards [1966:

representation by, 104, 117–27, 128, Wo de hongweibing shidai], 14, 20,
129, 146, 151 134–5, 170 n.4
representation of, 9, 14, 23, 103, No.16 Barkhor South Street [Bakuo
107, 108, 110, 111, 112–17, Nanjie shiliu hao], 17, 20, 45–8, 53,
136, 149, 161 n.3 54, 55, 60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69,
Miss Jin Xing [Jin Xing xiaojie], 112, 73, 165 n.9, 167 n.4
121, 169 n.7, 169 n.10 Nornes, Markus, 162 n.14
Model, 16 Nostalgia [Xiangchou], 10, 133, 140–2,
modernization, 3, 19, 58, 79, 81, 82, 143, 145, 146, 149–50, 151
83, 105, 140, 158
movement Ogawa, Shinsuke, 16, 17, 90, 98, 168
of argument. see movement-image n.9
of the body on camera, 8, 74, 77, Old Men [Lao tou], 112, 162 n.11
79, 83, 84, 86–7, 90–1, 95, 96, Once Upon the Grand Canal [Huashuo
101, 102, 166 n.1, 167 n.5 Yunhe], 27
of the camera through space, 8, 74, Once Upon the Yangtze River [Huashuo
87–8, 95–6, 98, 99, 100, 101, Changjiang], 27
102, 110, 117, 125, 142, Oriental Moment [Dongfang shikong], 21
169 n.11 Other Shore, The [Bi’an], 155
movement-image, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, Ou, Ning, 23, 24
84, 166 n.1, 166 n.3 Our Children [Women de wawa], 147,
MTV, 97, 98 161 n.9
Muñoz, José Esteban, 127, 128, Out of Phoenixbridge [Huidao
129 Fenghuangqiao], 17, 23, 61, 139
Ozu, Yasujiro, 98, 168 n.10
Narrow Path, The [Wu yu], 121 paichusuo. see police station
Network News [Xinwen lianbo], 163 (paichusuo)
n.17 Painlevé, Jean, 15
New Beijing, New Marriage [Xin particular, the. see specific, the
Qianmen Dajie], 9, 112, 117, 118, Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 23
120, 123–7, 128, 129, 151, 169 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 167 n.3
n.14 Pennebaker, Don, 51
‘New Documentary Movement’ (xin People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 136
jilupian yundong), 1, 5, 13, 14, 15, performance
17, 18, 20, 24, 155, 157, 160 Ch. 1 in documentary, 11, 29, 30, 96, 118,
n.1, 162 n.15, 168 n.10 123–7, 137, 142–5, 147, 148,
New Waves 149, 150, 151, 154–5, 156, 169
French, 78, 80 n.7, 170 n.6
German, 78 of identity, 9, 19, 111, 112–17,
Taiwanese, 98 123–7, 128, 169 n.6, 169 n.7,
Taiwanese post-, 100 169 n.8
Nichols, Bill, 18, 32, 51, 54, 106, 160 relationship to liveness, 31,
n.1, 163 n.20, 165 n.9, 165 n.11 163 n.21
Night Scene [Yejing], 114, 120, 121, performativity, 19, 29, 34, 110, 118,
169 n.9 126, 132
1949 revolution, 3, 5, 15, 25, 26, 35, personal films. see private
39, 140 documentary
194 Index
Petition [Shangfang], 110 impact of digital technology on

Pickowicz, Paul, 71 representations of, 111–12,
Platform [Zhantai], 99, 100 113–14, 116–17, 118, 126–7,
police station (paichusuo), 47, 48, 129
49, 50 incorporation of, 126
postsocialism inscription of, 115
semiotics of, 33–4 and performance, 9, 112–14, 123–7,
and subjectivity, 33, 39, 41, 72, 169 n.7, 169 n.8
164 n.4 See also corporeal image, the;
and transition, 5, 6, 7, 11, 32, 33, embodiment
34, 43, 115, 156, 158
Pratt, Mary Louise, 109, 128 Rainclouds Over Wushan [Wushan
Primary, 51 yunyu], 57
private documentary, 7, 8, 18–19, 24, Rascaroli, Laura, 164 n.2
36, 37, 38–45, 56, 57–72, 73,
realism
164 n.1, 164 n.2, 165–6 n.13,
documentary, 11, 15, 16
166 n.15, 166 n.16
Italian Neo-, 80
and the contingent, 38–45, 57–72,
long-take, 99
166 n.16
neo-, 155
formal qualities of, 18, 24, 57–67,
postsocialist, 34
166 n.15
reportage (jishizhuyi), 15, 25, 27, 29,
politics of, 19, 71–2
162–3 n.15
relationship to emotional
socialist, 88, 90, 162 n.15,
experience, 64–7, 166 n.15
164 n.4
subject matter of, 18–19
public documentary, 7, 17, 18, 20, 36, spatial, 89
37, 38–56, 57, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, vérité, 155, 160 n.1
69–72, 73, 161 n.8, 165 n.11, 165 re-enactment, 14, 18, 114
n.12 reflexivity, 30, 117, 130, 132, 143,
and the contingent, 38–51, 56, 145, 146, 149–50
69–71, 165 n.12 reform and opening (gaige kaifang),
formal qualities of, 45–51, 55–6, 69 25, 39, 145
and the metaphorical, 7, 40–2, 44, remediation, 120, 122–3
51–6, 70, 165 n.11 Renov, Michael, 164 n.2
subject matter of, 17 residency permit (hukou), 40, 61, 62,
public sphere, 39, 164 n.3 161 n.3
residents’ committee (juweihui), 17,
Qiu, Jiongjiong, 117 45, 46, 47, 48, 55
Qiu, Zhijie, 29, 105 Resnais, Alain, 145
Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China [Zhi Reynaud, Bérénice, 19, 120, 132, 148,
tongzhi], 9, 112, 117, 118, 120–3, 161 n.4, 170 n.5
125, 127, 128, 129, 169 n.8, River Elegy [Heshang], 8, 13, 14, 28, 74,
169 n.14 80, 81–4, 85, 87, 88, 91, 101,
Queer Comrades [Tongzhi yi fanren], 167 n.4
117, 118, 119, 169 n.14 River Stilled, A [Bei jingzhi de he], 17
queer identity Rodowick, D. N., 166 n.1
and activism, 118–20 Ross, Andrew, 66
documentaries about, 112–27, 161 Rouch, Jean, 26, 160 n.1
n.9, 169–70 n.6–14 Ruttmann, Walter, 23
Index 195
Sanyuanli [Sanyuanli], 23 social, 29, 38, 53, 103, 109, 115, 129
Sarkar, Bhaskar, 134, 135, 144 subaltern, 103
Saxton, Libby, 106 and teleology, 76–7, 83, 84
‘scene, the’. see xianchang in the time-image, 77–8, 79
Sherlock Jr., 166 n.1 See also xianchang
Shi, Jian, 12, 13, 15, 28, 49, 75, 84, ‘speaking bitterness’ (su ku), 139
131, 160 Ch. 1 n.1, 163 n.23 special topic film (zhuantipian). see
Shu, Haolun, 10, 133, 140–2, 143, documentary genres
145, 149–50, 152 specific, the, 7, 29, 32, 36, 37, 40, 41,
Sidus Corporation, 100 42, 54, 60, 63, 66, 69, 70, 71,
Silk Road, The [Sichou zhi lu], 27, 72, 73
161 n.6 spontaneity, 5, 6, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32,
Sixth Generation directors, 14 42, 46, 132, 133, 138, 142,
Smith, Jacob, 137, 170 n.6 144, 155
Snake Boy, The [Shanghai nanhai], See also event, the, unexpected
169 n.7 Springtime in Wushan [Wushan zhi
Sontag, Susan, 107 chun], 57–60, 62, 63, 68, 96, 162
sound n.10, 165–6 n.13
ambient, 131, 170 n.1 Square, The [Guangchang], 45, 48–51,
direct, 132 52, 54, 55, 60, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69,
extradiegetic music, 18, 25, 29, 73, 94, 165 n.7, 165 n.12
170 n.1 Still Life [Sanxia hao ren], 92, 155
live, 10, 27, 130 Structure Wave Youth Cinema
location, 25, 28, 30 Experimental Group (SWYC), 12,
natural, 16, 26, 29, 41, 80 13, 15, 16, 28, 75, 160 Ch. 1 n.1
off-camera, 137 studio-based documentary
off-screen, 10, 130, 131, 133, 150 filmmaking, 5, 8, 25–6, 28, 29, 42,
silence, 2, 131, 137, 143, 168 n.9 132, 163 n.16
synchronous, 4, 15, 19, 27, 51 economic and ideological roots of,
See also talking head, the; voice, the; 25–6
xianchang su ku. see ‘speaking bitterness’ (su ku)
space subaltern subjects. see minority
city, 58, 98 subjects
diegetic, 54, 88 Sun, Zhigang, 62, 166 n.14
discursive, 29, 30, 39, 44, 52, 162 Sunday in Peking [Dimanche à Pekin], 15
n.15 synchronous sound. see sound,
domestic, 19, 121, 122, 143 synchronous
exterior, 19, 86, 94, 125, 167 n.5
institutional, 46, 47, 48, 53, 55 Taishi Village [Taishicun], 161 n.9
interior, 19, 72, 86, 94, 120, 125 Tale of the Wind, A [Une histoire de
liminal, 125 vent], 27
and modernization, 158 talking head, the, 1, 10, 14, 29, 120,
in the movement-image, 77, 79 122, 129, 130, 133, 134–45, 146,
physical, 5, 29, 47, 48, 49, 88, 91, 149, 151, 154, 170 n.4, 170 n.6
96, 132, 169 n.11 and ‘flooding out’, 137–8, 140, 144,
private, 24, 37, 110, 168 n.4 151, 170 n.6
public, 17, 24, 37, 92, 99, 110, 111, and immediacy (‘presence’), 130,
113, 123–7, 128 133, 134, 137–8, 139, 140,
screen, 4, 29, 44, 88, 169 n.11 146, 149
196 Index
talking head, the – continued 24 City [Ershisi cheng ji], 11, 153–5
and mediation (‘distance’), 130, typical, the (dianxing), 164 n.4
133, 134, 137, 140, 141–2,
144–5, 146, 149, 151 ultra-stability, theory of, 81–2
performance of, 142–5, 154 unexpected, the, 7, 30, 31, 37, 38, 42,
testimonial function of, 130, 134–8, 43, 44, 46, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66,
139, 140, 146 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 150, 165 n.5
Tangtang [Tangtang], 114, 118, See also accidental, the; event, the,
169 n.7, 169 n.9 unexpected
Tape [Jiaodai], 18, 162 n.10 Unhappiness Does Not Stop At One
Tarkovsky, Andrei, 23 [Bukuaile de bu zhi yige], 161 n.10
Though I Am Gone [Wo sui si qu], 161 University City Savages [Diaomin], 147
n.9, 166 n.17 Unknown Pleasures [Ren xiao yao], 92,
Tiananmen [Tiananmen], 12, 13, 28, 99
84, 131, 150, 170 n.1 Useless [Wuyong], 155
Tiananmen Square
U-thèque collective, 23
democracy movement, 2, 8, 13, 136
documentary representation of,
48–51 Vancouver International Film Festival,
massacre on 4 June 1989, 1, 4, 10, 161 n.4
13, 36, 49, 55, 79, 133, 136, vérité aesthetic, 4, 5, 6, 15, 19, 24, 35,
137, 138, 145, 163 n.23, 164 n.3 40, 41, 62, 114, 120, 125, 140,
symbolism of, 49, 55 155, 160 n.1
Tibetan Culture Communication Vertov, Dziga, 23
Company, 45 Village Video Project [Zhongguo cunmin
time zizhi yingxiang chuanbo jihua], 24,
and contingency, 8, 32, 73, 74, 75, 147, 170 n.9
76, 77, 78, 80, 101, 102 Voci, Paola, 24, 52, 87, 110, 131, 132,
‘distended form’ of, 74, 75, 80, 84, 150, 170 n.1
87, 90, 101 voice, the
‘in-the-now’ or in the present, 8, 74, direct to camera address, 10, 117,
76, 80, 81, 88, 90, 91, 97, 101 135
and liveness, 31, 80, 84, 90, 91, 101, of the documentary director, 125,
163 n.21 132, 139, 140, 141, 145, 153,
and modernization, 158 155
‘real time’, 51, 74, 91, 96, 99, 102, of the documentary subject, 10,
163 n.21 130, 131, 133, 134, 139, 145,
teleological, 8, 74, 76–7, 78, 79, 80, 148, 150, 151
83, 84, 85, 90, 91, 100, 167 n.4 failure of, 130, 136, 137
See also xianchang ‘grain’ of, 137
time-image, 8, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 87, indirect speech, 51
166 n.2 interview, the documentary, 1, 15,
Titicut Follies, 165 n.10 16, 27, 49, 50, 87, 117, 121–2,
Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), 15, 132, 135, 136, 140, 155, 170 n.8
27, 161 n.6 on-screen, 133, 138, 139, 140, 145,
Totaro, Donato, 167 n.6 151
tracking shot, 1, 3, 4, 15, 29, 48, 88, off-screen, 64, 125, 132, 138, 141,
142 145, 150, 153, 155
Tsai, Ming-liang, 99, 100 timbre of, 10, 134, 137, 145
Index 197
voiceover, the, 14, 18, 25, 28, 52, xianchang

81, 104, 131, 136, 141, 170 n.1 aesthetics of, 6, 7, 29, 41, 44, 54, 74,
See also sound; talking head, the; 80, 81, 90, 91, 95, 102, 105,
xianchang 114, 132, 138, 150, 156
and being ‘on the scene’, 5, 6, 9, 10,
Walker, Janet, 134, 135, 144 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 41, 43, 55,
Wang, Bing, 2–4, 7, 10, 22, 23, 24, 44, 56, 72, 74, 80, 88, 90, 103, 105,
63–7, 68, 69, 70, 133, 140, 142–5, 109, 111, 112, 113, 126, 128,
146, 149, 150, 152, 154, 155, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135,
161 n.8, 166 n.15, 169 n.10 138, 145, 146, 149, 163 n.20
Wang, Fen, 161 n.10 and contingency, 6, 7, 31–2, 34–5,
36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 60, 66, 152,
Wang, Guangli, 15, 28, 75, 132, 134
156, 158, 159
Wang, Hui, 158, 168 n.10
and embodiment, 9, 29, 104, 105,
Wang, Jianwei, 112
114–15, 120, 129, 137
Wang, Qi, 58, 66, 88, 96, 121
and intercultural transmission, 32
Wang, Yiman, 109, 110, 147, 168 n.4
and intersubjectivity, 103, 105–7,
We are the. . .of Communism [Women shi
112, 114–15, 128
gongchanzhuyi shenglüehao], 169
and liveness, 6, 7, 30–1, 35, 42, 66,
n.13
70, 71, 72, 80, 104, 129, 130,
Weekend Plot [Miyu shiqi xiaoshi], 57
133, 149, 150, 151, 156, 157,
Wei, Bin, 21, 25, 27 158
Wei, Jiangang, 118, 169 n.14 and mediation, 6, 10, 30, 130, 132,
Wen, Pulin, 12, 16 133, 150, 152
West of the Tracks [Tiexi qu], 2–4, 5, 7, and performance, 11, 29, 30, 114,
32, 38, 44, 63–7, 68, 69, 71, 73, 117, 151
96, 153, 154, 161 n.8 and postsocialism, 5, 6, 7, 11, 32,
Rails [Tielu], 3–4, 63, 66, 67, 166 34–5, 156, 158
n.15 and sound, 10, 30, 131–4
Remnants [Yanfen Jie], 3, 64, 67 and space, 5, 7, 8, 9, 29, 30, 74, 80,
Rust [Gongchang], 3, 63–5, 67 90, 95, 158
Wheat Harvest [Maishou], 168 n.4 and time, 29, 73, 74, 75, 80, 81, 85,
When the Bow Breaks [Wei chao], 162 88–92, 95, 97, 101, 102
n.14 and voice, 136–8, 150–1
Winston, Brian, 160 n.1 and witnessing, 135–8
Wiseman, Frederick, 7, 16, 26, 44, Xiang Pingli (a.k.a Our Love) [Xiang
51–6, 67, 70, 138, 157, 161 n.7, Pingli], 114–5, 121, 169 n.7,
165 n.10, 165 n.11 169 n.9, 169 n.10
Wong, Kar-wai, 99 Xiao Shang Going Home [Xiao Shan hui
work unit (danwei), 49, 161 n.3 jia], 97, 98, 99, 100
Wu, Wenguang, 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12, 13, Xiao Wu [Xiao Wu], 30, 99, 100
14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, Xin jilu yundong. see ‘New
28, 29, 30, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43, 52, Documentary Movement’ (xin
61, 68, 69, 74, 76, 79, 80, 81, jilupian yundong)
84–91, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, Xu, Tong, 168 n.4
102, 112, 132, 134, 139, 142, 143, Xu, Xin, 162 n.14
147, 148, 161 n.6, 161 n.7, 163
n.19, 166 n.16, 167 n.5, 168 n.9 Yamagata International Documentary
Wurtzler, Steve, 163 n.21 Film Festival, 2, 16, 52, 98, 100
198 Index
Yang, Edward, 99 Zhang, Yuan, 12, 45, 48–50, 55, 94,

Yang, Fudong, 23 112, 115, 121, 155, 169 n.10
Yang, Lina, 112, 161 n.10, 162 n.11 Zhang, Xudong, 89
Ying, Weiwei, 112, 139 Zhang, Zhen, 29, 30, 41, 163 n.20
Yunfest (Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Zhao, Liang, 21, 110, 139
Festival), 38, 162 n.14, 166 n.17, Zheng, Tiantian, 106
171 n.10 zhenshi, 162 n.15
Yurchak, Alexei, 7, 33, 34 Zhou, Chuanji, 167 n.7
Zhou, Enlai, 161 n.5
Zhang, Hanzi, 116, 169 n.7, 169 n.10
Zhang, Ming, 7, 44, 57–60, 61, 63, 65, Zhou, Hao, 96
67, 68, 70, 162 n.10, 165–6 n.13 Zhou, Ming, 117
Zhang, Nuanxin, 168 n.7 Zhu, Chuanming, 21, 23, 70
Zhang, Xiaping, 1–2, 4, 5, 71, 85, 132, Zhu, Jinjiang, 106, 168 n.4
136, 170 n.2 zhuantipian. see documentary genres
Zhang, Yaxuan, 63 Zoo, 16
Zhang, Yingjin, 13, 33 Zuo, Yixiao, 162 n.10

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Independent Chinese Documentary

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1 Mapping Independent Chinese Documentary 12

2 Metaphor and Event 37

3 Time, Space and Movement 74

4 Ethics, the Body and Digital Video 103

5 Sound and Voice 130

Glossary of Key and Recurring Chinese Terms 172

Films and Television Programmes Referenced 184

On 4 November 1997, a programme of Chinese video documentaries

commentary from friend and fellow documentary subject Mou Sen,

because Wu does not function as an objective recording eye; the sub-

But second, and consequently, because

The intimacy of Wu’s camerawork may prevent Zhang’s objectification,

Tracks charts, in extraordinary detail, the impact of China’s economic

This sudden moment of release in a film characterized by ‘strictly con-

exposing the director’s own feelings about what he has shown.

Through the unexpected emotional breakdown of this abandoned boy,

concept that I argue signifies the apparently spontaneous, open-ended

This analysis allows for an exploration of how xianchang as a poetics

complicates this picture, suggesting an acceptance of the contingent

In Public thus suggests how a thoroughly aestheticized form of xianchang

filmmaking to effect this same agency in downtown Beijing. In doing so,

the contingent in these documentaries thus differs from its position in

The rise of a movement

a consequence of ongoing theorization than through gradual, practical

middle class – to the quotidian experience of ordinary people lower

shifts in representational form. These changes have been described as,

The diversification of independent Chinese documentary

indoors in domestic spaces, as opposed to outdoors in communal ones.

From analogue to digital

[D]ocumentary filmmaking [ . . . ] was the kind of thing that entailed

As Wu’s dilemma demonstrates, one of the reasons independent docu-

therefore allowed anybody to shoot and post-produce on a shoestring

aesthetic sensibility to bear on their work that reflects their training,

documentary filmmaking projects such as Wu Wenguang’s China Vil-

are sometimes lost in the complex interplay of social, political and

From the studio to the street

became critical to these developments. Usually overseen by CCTV’s

documentary like River Elegy is arguably closer in feel to a Chinese docu-

and images – with the exception of some extradiegetic music employed

Xianchang, liveness, contingency

Three important points may be extrapolated from this description.

in associations with performance and improvisation. But also like

Postsocialism and independent Chinese documentary

What the term ‘postsocialist transition’ actually means is still a vexed

devolved more broadly to individuals and groups at large. In the former

documentary in the newly founded PRC functioned as a form of politi-

in different ways, using a variety of techniques to invoke the diverse

What is the relationship between distinct types of documentary and

such as West of the Tracks to bring together elements of the unexpected

Public, private, contingent

When Hu Xinyu’s documentary The Man was screened at the 2005

The exposure, depth and coldness towards morality in this type of

Documentary, in this formulation, is a film form uninterested

necessarily dissident. Nevertheless, acknowledging that the public and

irreducible specificity, one resisting it – should encourage us to look

the film itself presented a conundrum. Was it possible to incorporate

As far as documentary filmmakers are concerned, you must also have

In other words, however unpredictable profilmic reality, the impact of

of the political, but as a reflection on its gradual rearticulation in post-

Form and event in No. 16 Barkhor South Street

by the director, much of it is closely monitored by the members of the