The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement For

The Public Record Illustrated Chris Berry

download

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-new-chinese-documentary-film-
movement-for-the-public-record-illustrated-chris-berry-37150052

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

The New Chinese Dream Industrial Transition In The Postpandemic Era

1st Edition Francesca Spigarelli

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-new-chinese-dream-industrial-
transition-in-the-postpandemic-era-1st-edition-francesca-
spigarelli-47053630

The New Chinese America Class Economy And Social Hierarchy Xiaojian
Zhao

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-new-chinese-america-class-economy-
and-social-hierarchy-xiaojian-zhao-51901576

The New Chinese City Globalization And Market Reform

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-new-chinese-city-globalization-and-
market-reform-4308912

The New Chinese Economy Dynamic Transitions Into The Future 1st
Edition Elias C Grivoyannis Eds

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-new-chinese-economy-dynamic-
transitions-into-the-future-1st-edition-elias-c-grivoyannis-
eds-5334538
The New Chinese Traveler Business Opportunities From The Chinese
Travel Revolution 1st Edition Gary Bowerman Auth

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-new-chinese-traveler-business-
opportunities-from-the-chinese-travel-revolution-1st-edition-gary-
bowerman-auth-5844444

The New Chinese Medicine Handbook An Innovative Guide To Integrating

Eastern Wisdom With Western Practice For Modern Healing Paperback
Misha Ruth Cohen

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-new-chinese-medicine-handbook-an-
innovative-guide-to-integrating-eastern-wisdom-with-western-practice-
for-modern-healing-paperback-misha-ruth-cohen-7354026

The New Chinese Astrology Suzanne White

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-new-chinese-astrology-suzanne-
white-47112424

The New Chinese Empire Beijings Political Dilemma And What It Means
For The United States Ross Terrill

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-new-chinese-empire-beijings-
political-dilemma-and-what-it-means-for-the-united-states-ross-
terrill-49004692

The Labor Of Reinvention Entrepreneurship In The New Chinese Digital

Economy Lin Zhang

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-labor-of-reinvention-
entrepreneurship-in-the-new-chinese-digital-economy-lin-zhang-49895666
The New Chinese
Documentary
Film Movement
The New Chinese
Documentary
Film Movement
For the Public Record

Edited by Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel

Hong Kong University Press
14/F Hing Wai Centre
7 Tin Wan Praya Road
Aberdeen
Hong Kong

© Hong Kong University Press 2010

Hardcover ISBN 978-988-8028-51-1

Paperback ISBN 978-988-8028-52-8

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without
prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Secure On-line Ordering

http://www.hkupress.org

Printed and bound by Kings Time Printing Press Ltd., Hong Kong, China
Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

List of Contributors xi

Part I: Historical Overview 1

1. Introduction 3
Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel

2. Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement: 15

Engagement with the Social
Lu Xinyu, translated by Tan Jia and Lisa Rofel,
edited by Lisa Rofel and Chris Berry

3. DV: Individual Filmmaking 49

Wu Wenguang, translated by Cathryn Clayton

Part II: Documenting Marginalization, or Identities New and Old 55

4. West of the Tracks: History and Class-Consciousness 57

Lu Xinyu, translated by J. X. Zhang

5. Coming out of The Box, Marching as Dykes 77

Chao Shi-Yan

Part III: Publics, Counter-Publics, and Alternative Publics 97

6. Blowup Beijing: The City as a Twilight Zone 99

Paola Voci
vi Table of Contents

7. Watching Documentary: Critical Public Discourses and

Contemporary Urban Chinese Film Clubs 117
Seio Nakajima

8. Alternative Archive: China’s Independent Documentary Culture 135

Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel

Part IV: Between Filmmaker and Subject: Re-creating Realism 155

9. Translating the Unspeakable: On-Screen and Off-Screen Voices

in Wu Wenguang’s Documentary Work 157
Bérénice Reynaud

10. From “Public” to “Private”: Chinese Documentary and

the Logic of Xianchang 177
Luke Robinson

11. Excuse Me, Your Camera Is in My Face:

Auteurial Intervention in PRC New Documentary 195
Yomi Braester

12. “I Am One of Them” and “They Are My Actors”: Performing,

Witnessing, and DV Image-Making in Plebian China 217
Yiman Wang

Appendix 1: Biographies of Key Documentarians 237

Complied by Chen Ting and Chris Berry

Appendix 2: Sources of Films 251

Notes 253

List of Chinese Names 285

List of Chinese Film and Video Titles 287

Index 295
List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1. Zhang Xiaping’s nervous breakdown in Wu Wenguang’s

Bumming in Beijing. 5

Figure 2.1. American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman

in China. Squatting in the foreground left is Duan Jinchuan,
and right is Wu Wenguang. The author is the woman standing
in the middle of the picture. 26

Figure 2.2. Jiang Yue’s The Other Bank. 33

Figure 2.3. Hu Xinyu’s The Man. 35

Figure 2.4. Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s Sanyuanli. 39

Figure 2.5. Huang Weikai’s Floating. 40

Figure 2.6. Duan Jinchuan and Jiang Yue’s The Storm. 47

Figure 3.1. Jiang Hu: Life on the Road. 52

Figure 4.1. West of the Tracks. The factories. 61

Figure 4.2. West of the Tracks. The residential neighborhood. 68

Figure 5.1. Dyke March. Director Shi Tou enacts a “coming out”
before the camera, obliterating the boundary between filmmaker
and her subjects. 81
viii List of Illustrations

Figure 5.2. The Box. A and B enjoy their shared moments painting,
playing guitar, and singing. 87

Figure 5.3. Dyke March. The split-screen device, with captions

“Our family” and “I love my two moms” in a rainbow pattern,
punctuates the very doubleness and equality of the core members
of the same-sex families in the dyke march. 91

Figure 6.1. Swing in Beijing. “Then, let me blow myself up completely.” 103

Figure 6.2. Night Scene. “We have nothing.” 108

Figure 6.3. Paper Airplane. “So, do you have a name for your film yet?” 109

Figure 7.1. A post-screening Q & A organized by a film club

(November 2003). 121

Figure 7.2. A screening room at a film club (August 2003). 128

Figure 8.1. Out of Phoenix Bridge. Xiazi returns to the village. 139

Figure 8.2. Nostalgia. Shu Haolun videos in his childhood neighborhood. 140

Figure 8.3. Meishi Street. A local policeman responds to being videoed by

Zhang Jinli. 147

Figure 9.1. Bumming in Beijing. “This isn’t my voice now, it’s God’s
voice … Is it a man or a woman?” 166

Figure 9.2. Jiang Hu: Life on the Road. “Fuck, I don’t care if you
laugh. I just have one yuan twenty cents in my pocket.” 170

Figure 9.3. Fuck Cinema. “I studied performing arts. I took piano

lessons for seven years when I was younger.” 172

Figure 9.4. Fuck Cinema. “The next bit is a bit negative about you.” 174

Figure 10.1. The Square. Close-up of Mao’s portrait. 185

 List of Illustrations ix

Figure 10.2. The Square. Carpenters working, with Mao’s portrait

framed through a wall in the background. 185

Figure 10.3. The Square. Close-up of carpenter’s hands, planing wood. 186

Figure 10.4. The Square. Full shot of carpenters working, with Mao’s
portrait in the background. 186

Figure 11.1. The Square. Two camera crews, two approaches to

interviewing. 203

Figure 11.2. Home Video. Encroaching on the filmed subject’s space. 209

Figure 11.3. Home Video. Pushing the filmed subject to cooperate. 210

Figure 11.4. Railroad of Hope. Asking the filmed subject a question

beyond his ability to answer. 211

Figure 12.1. Shao Yuzhen carries her “prosthetic” DV camera around

the village while participating in communal activities, or in this case,
provoking villagers’ suspicion and consequently documenting the
technological encounter. 225

Figure 12.2. The camera stained with the father’s blood (foreground)
coldly keeps on witnessing the domestic violence while the
documentary maker, Zhang Hua (at frame left), intervenes and
becomes one of the “subjects.” 233
Contributors

Chris Berry is professor of film and television studies in the Department of

Media and Communication, Goldsmiths, University of London. His research
is focused on Chinese cinemas and other Chinese screen-based media. His
publications include (with Mary Farquhar) Cinema and the National: China
on Screen (2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural
Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (2004); (edited with Ying Zhu) TV
China (2008); (editor) Chinese Films in Focus II (2008); (edited with Feiyi Lu)
Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (2005); (edited with Fran
Martin and Audrey Yue) Mobile Cultures: New Media and Queer Asia (2003);
and (translator and editor) Ni Zhen, Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy:
The Origins of China’s Fifth Generation Filmmakers (2002).

Yomi Braester is professor of comparative literature at the University of

Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Witness against History: Literature,
Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (2003) and Painting the
City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (2010).

Chao Shi-Yan is a doctoral candidate in cinema studies at New York University.

Having published various articles in Chinese, Chao is currently completing a
dissertation on Chinese tongzhi/queer media representation. His recent article,
“Performing Gender, Performing Documentary in Postsocialist China” is in Yau
Ching, ed., As Normal As Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in China
and Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 2010).

Cathryn Clayton is assistant professor in Asian studies at the University of

Hawai’i at Manoa. Her recently published monograph, Sovereignty at the
Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness (2009) is an ethnography of the
intersections between sovereignty and Chineseness in Macau during its transition
from Portuguese to Chinese rule. Her recent translations include a number of
xii Contributors

Chinese stage plays and opera librettos, including “Under the Eaves of Shanghai,”
“Cheng Ying Rescues the Orphan,” “The Jade Hairpin,” and “The Fan Family Library.”

Lu Xinyu is professor in the School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai.

A prolific author on media topics, she is best known for her groundbreaking book
Documenting China (2003), on the New Documentary Movement. With a Ph.D.
in Western aesthetics from Fudan University, she is also the author of Mythology
• Tragedy • Aristotle’s Art of Poetry: A New Concept in the Poetics Tradition of
the Ancient Greeks (1995).

Seio Nakajima is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hawai’i at

Manoa. His research has appeared in From Underground to Independent, edited
by Paul G. Pickowicz and Zhang Yingjin (2006) and Reclaiming Chinese Society,
edited by Ching Kwan Lee and You-tien Hsing (2009).

Bérénice Reynaud teaches film theory, history, and criticism in the School of
Critical Studies and the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the
Arts and is co-curator of the Film/Video series at the Roy and Edna Disney/
CalArts Theater (REDCAT). She is the author of Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux
cinémas (1999) and Hou Hsiao Hsien’s “A City of Sadness” (2002). Her work
has been published in periodicals such as Sight & Sound, Screen, Film Comment,
Afterimage, The Independent, CinemaScope, Senses of Cinema, Cahiers du
Cinéma, Libération, Le Monde diplomatique, and CinémAction. She is currently
working on a book on the Chinese martial arts film.

Luke Robinson is a lecturer in film and TV studies at the Institute of Film and
TV Studies, University of Nottingham, UK. He is currently working on a book
manuscript about “liveness” and independent Chinese documentary.

Lisa Rofel is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa

Cruz. She has written two books and co-edited several volumes on a range
of topics about China, including Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in
China after Socialism (1999), Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism,
Sexuality and Public Culture (2007), and co-edited with Petrus Liu a special
issue of the journal positions: east asia cultures critique, Beyond the Strai(gh)ts:
Transnational Chinese Queer Politics (2010).

Jia Tan is a Ph.D. candidate in critical studies at the School of Cinematic Arts,
University of Southern California. She is also a research assistant in the Getty
Research Institute.
 Contributors xiii

Paola Voci teaches at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is the author
of China on Video: Smaller-Screen Realities (2010), a book that analyzes movies
made and viewed on smaller screens (i.e. the DV camera, the computer monitor
— and, within it, the internet window — and the cell phone display). Her work
also appears in several edited collections of essays and she has published in
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Senses of Cinema, New Zealand Journal
of Asian Studies, and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Chinese Cinema.

Yiman Wang is assistant professor of film and digital media at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. She has published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video,
Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Journal of Film and Video, Literature/Film
Quarterly, positions: east asia cultures critique, Journal of Chinese Cinemas,
Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes, edited by Chris Berry (2003), Cultural
Identity, Gender, Everyday Life Practice and Hong Kong Cinema of the 1970s,
edited by Lo Kwai-cheung and Eva Man (2005), and Stardom and Celebrity: A
Reader, edited by Sean Redmond et al. (2007).

Wu Wenguang was a primary school teacher and then a journalist for Kumming
Television and China Central Television (CCTV), before making his first
independent documentary, Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990),
which is widely seen as inaugurating China’s New Documentary Movement.
In 1991, he founded the Wu Documentary Studio and in 1994 he co-founded
The Living Dance Studio with his partner, the dancer and choreographer Wen
Hui, with whom he often collaborates. Between 1996 and 1997, he published a
desktop magazine, Documentary Scene, then founded and edited the independent
monthly art magazine New Wave (2001). He has written three books inspired by
his videos, and edited a three-part collection of critical texts entitled Document.
In 2005, Wu and Wen established the Caochangdi Workstation, where Wu co-
ordinated the China Village Self-Governance Film Project, a collection of ten
documentaries in which villagers record the introduction of grassroots democracy
in China. He continues to train young filmmakers at Caochangdi and has recently
completed a second installment of the China Village Self-Governance Film
Project.

J. X. Zhang is a painter-etcher, freelance art critic and translator.

1 Introduction
Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel

If you turn on Chinese television today, you may be surprised. News reporting
outside China often gives the impression that the country is still a tightly
controlled propaganda culture. Yet, you will find dozens if not hundreds of
different television channels, with a spontaneous, free-flowing style of reporting.
Ordinary citizens are interviewed on the street and express their opinions in a
sometimes stumbling and therefore clearly unrehearsed manner. Reporters do
not speak as representatives of the Communist Party and government line, but as
independent journalists. With hand-held cameras, they breathlessly investigate
social issues and follow stories. While certainly monitored by the state and at
no time oppositional, China’s most popular medium adopts a more spur-of-the-
moment style than many foreigners would expect. And if China’s reputation
for a rigorously policed internet limits your expectations, the local equivalent
of YouTube — Tudou.com — may surprise you, too. Here a vibrant amateur
version of the same on-the-spot style found in television reporting also dominates
the scene. All kinds of videos stream off the screen, from personal videos and
reflections on home life to oral history and recordings of local events — some of
them contentious.1
However, this wholesale transformation of public culture has been relatively
ignored by academic work to date. Outside China, that may be because these
kinds of materials do not circulate internationally as readily as blockbuster
feature films or contemporary art. Inside China, that neglect began to change
in 1997, with the publication of our co-editor Lu Xinyu’s article on the
“Contemporary Television Documentary Movement,” followed by her 2003 book
on the “New Documentary Movement” in general.2 This work traced the major
transformations that had occurred in all kinds of actuality-based visual culture —
from television news to the internet — back to the beginning of the 1990s, and
in particular to documentary film and video production. Not only had the topics,
style, and production circumstances of documentary changed in China, but also
the new documentary aesthetic has been at the cutting edge of changes elsewhere
4 Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel

in Chinese film, television, and video production. What you see today on Chinese
television and at Tudou.com was pioneered by the New Documentary Movement
from the early 1990s on.
Therefore, any attempt to understand China’s visual culture today must start
from an understanding of the New Documentary Movement. With this anthology,
we attempt to follow Lu Xinyu’s lead into the world of English-language
Chinese film studies. So far, significant discussion of China’s New Documentary
Movement in English has been largely confined to articles and book chapters.3
Here, we bring together work by some of the main scholars writing on the topic
to create a sustained focus on Chinese independent documentary in English
for the first time. In this introduction, we will discuss the significance of the
New Documentary Movement in two ways. First, we will try to indicate why
it has taken such a central role in Chinese audio-visual culture over the last
two decades. Second, we will consider it in its more recent digital form as a
contribution to the debates about what cinema is in the digital era, and argue that
this new Chinese digital cinema treasures immediacy, spontaneity, and contact
with lived experience over the high levels of manipulability associated with the
special effects culture of mainstream cinema. The history of the movement is
outlined and analyzed in Lu Xinyu’s first chapter for this volume, which follows
on from this introduction. Looking back from today, she not only traces the
development of the movement but also questions many of the assumptions that
have been made about it so far. This introductory chapter, along with Lu Xinyu’s
historical overview and a chapter by Wu Wenguang, considered by many as the
initiator of the New Documentary Movement, comprise Part I of this volume,
which is meant to offer a broad introduction to the movement.
What is the New Documentary Movement and why has it been so important
in China’s visual culture? Before 1990 all documentary was state-produced,
and took the form of illustrated lectures. Television news was delivered by
newsreaders who spoke as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party and the
government. There were no spontaneous interviews with the man (or woman)
on the street, and no investigative reporting shows. Independent film production
was impossible in an era where all the studios were nationally owned and
controlled. The internet did not exist, and even the constitutional right to put up
“big character posters” (dazibao) had been abrogated in 1978 in response to the
Democracy Wall movement.4 However, the 1980s had witnessed a flourishing
of independent thought and questioning of the status quo in response to both
the disillusion with Maoism following the debacle of the Cultural Revolution
(1966–1976) and the changing nature of relationships with the West that had
followed.5 In 1990, former television station employee Wu Wenguang produced
a no-budget independent documentary using borrowed equipment. Called
 Introduction 5

Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers, it is analyzed in detail in Bérénice

Reynaud’s chapter in this volume, and noted in nearly all the others. Bumming
in Beijing is a video film about artists who, like Wu, were struggling to survive
independently outside the state system. This is now frequently cited as the first
independent documentary to be made in China. Not only was the topic one
unlikely to be covered by the relentlessly optimistic state studios and television
stations. Furthermore, Wu used a hand-held camera, no artificial lighting, synch
sound that was often unclear, and shot things as they happened. This spontaneous
style was so unprecedented that it came to have a name of its own: jishi zhuyi,
or on-the-spot realism, not to be confused with xianshi zhuyi, the type of highly
orchestrated realism associated with socialist realism.

Figure 1.1. Zhang Xiaping’s nervous breakdown in Wu Wenguang’s

Bumming in Beijing.

This nitty-gritty and low-budget jishi zhuyi style of realism became the
hallmark of independent documentary in China, which took off rapidly through
the 1990s. In her historical analysis of China’s New Documentary Movement
in this volume, Lu Xinyu notes that most scholars writing on the topic have
only included independent films like Wu’s in the New Documentary Movement.
However, she questions this, noting that many of Wu’s friends and former
colleagues working inside the state-owned television system were also beginning
to experiment with a more spontaneous mode of documentary at around the same
time. In other words, strikingly original though it was, Bumming in Beijing did
not come out of nowhere. In her chapter, she locates its emergence in a larger
6 Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel

cultural context that also encompasses documentary photography and the new
“Sixth Generation” of feature filmmakers, some of whom also took part in the
New Documentary Movement.
Lu also notes that the term “New Documentary Movement” first appeared
in 1992, a little while after the first films began to appear. This places the origins
of the movement between two crucial dates in Chinese history: 1989 and 1992.
Nineteen eighty-nine is the year of the Tiananmen Democracy Movement and its
suppression. Nineteen ninety-two is the year that Premier Deng Xiaoping made
his famous “Tour to the South,” in the course of which he called for increased
development of the market economy. As we argue in our chapter in this volume,
the 1989/1992 conjuncture shapes the cultural and artistic practices that have
developed outside the new state-corporate hegemonic culture of China today. The
former date signaled the suppression of a public oppositional movement while
the latter presaged the commercialization of culture.
Maoist socialism had ended with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but until
the early 1990s, some still believed in the basic tenets of socialism — the official
phrase was “socialism with Chinese characteristics”; meanwhile intellectuals
analyzed forms of socialist alienation without rejecting socialism in its entirety.
But many were disillusioned by the destruction they experienced through class
struggle and continuous revolution, two basic tenets of Maoist socialism. After
the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese state introduced reforms, hoping to stave off
a potential crisis of legitimacy posed by this disillusionment. Economic reform
eventually entailed a rejection of collective enterprise, the gradual promotion of a
market economy, and the steady move toward privatization. These reforms were
and are built on the premise of a continuity in the political system of governance
coupled with a discontinuity in the state’s promotion of radical marketization and
privatization.6 It would be misleading then to characterize the market economy in
China as in opposition to the state.
Economic reform in the rural areas was somewhat distinct from urban
reform. Rural reform, which occurred first between 1978 and 1984, entailed
de-collectivization of communes, the partial decentralization of power to
local governments, and the development of rural markets. Rural reform
had certain unanticipated results: widespread corruption in the transfer of
resources and an enormous tide of rural migrants who swept into the cities
in search of work. Urban reforms entailed an analogous devolution of power
to local governments and managers of state-run enterprises. As in the rural
areas, the transfer of resources reorganized social relations, advantages, and
interests. The small minority who benefited most visibly, including some
managers but also diverse government cadres, eventually formed a new
capitalist class.7
 Introduction 7

These reforms created new historical conditions: the marketization of power,

inequalities in distribution and rent-seeking behavior, increasingly polarized
income levels, the abolition of security in employment, and lack of reforms in
social benefits. The reforms had contradictory effects: they enhanced ordinary
people’s sense of new possibilities but also increased frustrations with the new
social inequalities that soon emerged. The Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989
were a response to these contradictions. The state’s violent suppression of the
1989 protests led, paradoxically, to a widening of the reforms. For the first time,
the state began to encourage foreign direct investment in China. By 2002, China
had surpassed the United States as the favored destination for foreign direct
investment. In turn, China began to invest in other countries, as both government
and private entrepreneurs searched for the natural resources that China’s growing
economy demanded. An emphasis on consumer and mass culture began to
dominate urban life. Over the next decade, a majority of state-run enterprises
were allowed to go bankrupt and massive numbers of urban workers, who
thought they had garnered the “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment, found
themselves permanently unemployed.8
This rapidly changing historical context, with its stark contrasts, provides
the impetus and the rationale for the New Documentary Movement, in the
political, social, and technical senses of the term “movement.” It addressed
new political themes, filmed social subjects marginalized by mainstream and
official media, and transformed audio-visual culture in China, including not only
independent documentary and amateur work on the internet but also broadcast
television and fiction feature film production.
The people making independent documentaries were friendly with former
colleagues in television stations, and in many cases they themselves were
continuing to work in those stations. New TV series such as Oriental Horizon,
a Chinese news magazine show in the mode of the famous American CBS show
60 Minutes, pursued many elements of on-the-spot realism. Combined with
investigative tendencies, the results were immediate hits with audiences.
Other independent documentarians had friends who were young filmmakers,
some of whom were also striking out on their own outside the state-owned
industry. For them, on-the-spot realism also provided a signature style different
from what had gone before. They felt a need to mark themselves out from two
earlier tendencies. On the one hand, there was the socialist realist tradition, which
had the glossy aspirational look of Hollywood but narratives driven by class
struggle rather than individualized psychology. On the other hand, there were
the highly stylized works of the Fifth Generation, which had marked themselves
out from socialist realism by use of unusual angles, virtuoso visual design, and
settings in the exotic border areas or the past. The so-called Sixth Generation,
8 Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel

who started working in the 1990s, used on-the-spot realism to create their own
signature style, along with contemporary urban settings. Even Zhang Yimou
himself picked up the observational documentary trend in the opening sequence
of The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), placing a heavily disguised Gong Li among the
rural crowds and filming her with hidden cameras.9
Zhang Yimou’s adoption of the New Documentary Movement style in
The Story of Qiu Ju is early evidence of its wide impact. If you ask the average
Chinese citizen about Wu Wenguang and Bumming in Beijing, or indeed
most of the other films and filmmakers discussed in this volume, they will
probably have no idea what you are talking about. But they certainly will know
Oriental Horizon, and the makers of Oriental Horizon know Wu and the other
documentary independents. In other words, the core films and filmmakers of the
New Documentary Movement are an avant-garde. Like avant-gardes all over the
world, they often set the pace and are best known in their field; while the general
public might well recognize the innovations they have introduced, they would
less likely be able to name artists and works.
In China, the public’s knowledge of these works is further complicated
by their unofficial nature and resulting difficulties of access. China’s system of
cultural production continues to bear the traces of its Maoist heritage in certain
ways. In the Maoist era, the Communist Party and the state not only controlled
cultural production but also set the agenda. Just as entrepreneurship has been
encouraged in the wider economy now, so too, cultural producers initiate their
projects rather than waiting for instructions from the state. However, it remains
the case that nothing can be broadcast without approval from the censorship
apparatus, and no film can be shown commercially in movie theaters without
similar censorship approval. As a result, these works circulate through other
channels. As well as pirate DVDs, legal ones exist of some films, because
the DVD censorship authority is separate from that for films or broadcasting.
Screenings occur in art galleries, university classrooms, and at other informal
venues, as discussed further in our chapter and in Seio Nakajima’s chapter in this
volume. And, of course, many films can be downloaded. This means that while
they may not be reaching a general public, they may be more easily found and
seen in China than outsiders might expect. This cirulation also helps to explain
the ongoing wide cultural impact of the movement.
When the mini DV camera was introduced in about 1997, both the New
Documentary Movement and its low-cost style received a further boost. The
impact of the mini DV was remarkable. First, it changed the mode of filmmaking.
The small camera made one-person filmmaking possible. In his chapter
translated for this volume, Wu Wenguang himself celebrates his experience of
the DV camera as a personal transformation and even a salvation. This is not
 Introduction 9

because of the technical properties of DV, but because he feels it enables him to
break through the barrier between the filmmaker and their subjects, creating a
communal experience rather than a hierarchical one.
Another important transformation enabled by DV was the proliferation of
the movement. Affordable to most middle-class people, relatively easy to use,
and easy to edit for anyone with a home computer, the DV camera could be taken
up by people with no professional training or experience. In the early days, it
was possible for a visitor to know all the Chinese independent filmmakers and
see their films. After the introduction of DV, even the leading filmmakers had
difficulty keeping track of the scope and range of production. Jia Zhangke, who
has continued to make independent documentaries at the same time as his feature
films have won awards at festivals like Venice (Still Life, 2006), hailed the post-
DV era in China as the “age of the amateur.”10
This intersection of on-the-spot realism in its various guises and the digital
age makes China’s independent documentary movement more than the key force
in China’s visual culture. It also makes it an important and different contribution
to the international debate about digital culture and its impact upon what we
call “cinema” today. In the People’s Republic of China, there was no earlier
development of independent or amateur film culture with either 16mm or 8mm
film. Therefore, when DV arrived in China soon after the upsurge of independent
production, it not only enabled the growth of independent production, but also
led to the identification of DV with the independent and amateur movement in
its on-the-spot realism form. Around the turn of the century, China’s bookshops
featured various titles on what was called the DV aesthetic, all of which also
emphasized the idea of independent filmmaking and on-the-spot realism.11
This Chinese understanding of the essence of DV stands in stark contrast
to the common understanding in the United States and elsewhere in the West.
This distinction can be exemplified by the contentions put forward by Lev
Manovich in The Language of New Media. Here, Manovich notes that DV
introduces the ability to manipulate the image at the level of the pixel. Whereas
Chinese filmmakers and commentators valued DV’s ability to capture what was
happening around them in a direct and unmediated way, Manovich emphasizes
the ability to manipulate what is recorded in an almost equally direct manner.
On this basis, he argues for a reconsideration of the history of cinema. Instead
of the indexical or direct recording of reality as a watershed moment in which
cinema marks itself out from painting, the digital and the possibility for the artist
to manipulate every pixel provides cinema with a new lineage that once again
places it within the long history of painting.12
Given Hollywood’s embrace of digital’s ability to be used for spectacular
special effects, it is hardly surprising that many other authors have also focused
10 Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel

on similar aspects in their writings on DV.13 But this alternative appropriation

of DV in the People’s Republic should alert us to the fact that DV has no single
essence, but already means different things in different places according to local
circumstances.
Of course, the local significance of the New Documentary Movement
in China goes beyond filmmaking, and is more fundamentally rooted in its
commitment to record contemporary life in China outside any direct control of
the state. That is, the New Documentary Movement filmmakers self-consciously
fashion themselves as committed to a social practice that they hope will open up
new public spaces for discussion of social problems and dilemmas in the post-
socialist era. They have forged a novel space of social commentary and critique,
not simply in the reception of the films by audiences but much more in the actual
process of producing the documentaries. Most notably, this production process
includes long-term relationships developed between filmmakers and subjects, in
which the filmmaker might spend several years living with those being filmed,
more in the manner of an anthropologist than of an investigative journalist.
The social and political commentary of the film develops organically out of
this relationship. These independent documentaries have the potential to craft a
unique public space.
This striking manner of crafting documentary builds from a set of
assumptions distinct from common understandings of documentary film in
English-language academic writing. Film and video in general are considered
to be a “representation” of reality. In consequence, many discussions of
documentary ethics proceed from the assumption that the key issue for
documentary is how to represent reality as accurately as possible. They ask how
to minimize the impact of the documentary-making process on the reality that
it is meant to represent. In the case of studies of activist documentary, the focus
is on reception after the production of the film rather than its social engagement
during production.
However, the independent documentary practice that has developed in
China works from completely contrary assumptions. It understands documentary
making as a part of life, not a representation separate from it. Furthermore, the
documentarians see their work as part of the lives of their subjects, and they are
concerned that their documentary making should be a social practice that helps
those people.
Thus, many of the chapters in this volume join the move beyond the purely
textual focus that continues to dominate mainstream film studies to address the
social practices embedded in the films. The questions these chapters address
include: Given the difficulties with independent filmmaking in China, can
this practice provide an unexpected opportunity for ordinary citizens to make
 Introduction 11

themselves heard? How do these documentarians as well as their subjects

grapple with the way power is at once open to contest and resistant to change?
How do they articulate in the film- or video-making the production of politics,
inequality, difference, and community? To what extent can we say that these
documentarians are oppositional activists? How do they operate within specific
institutional, historical, sociological, and ideological constraints? And how do the
documentarians as well as the subjects within the documentary produce specific
identities (national, regional and trans-regional, class, gender), cultural and
ideological perspectives, and aesthetic values?
The chapters in Part II of the book, “Documenting Marginalization, or
Identities New and Old,” address one of the most important features of the
movement: attention to those hitherto neglected in China’s media. This aspect
of the movement cannot be over-stressed. The suppression of public dissent
after Tiananmen did not lead to a withering away of critical voices and the New
Documentary Movement is a central place where they can be found. Due to the
nature of these documentaries — the lack of voiceover and thus the seeming
absence of ideological framing, coupled with the fact that the “common folk”
speak in their own voices — the state has found it difficult to respond with direct
intervention. Thus, the movement presents both implicit and explicit social and
political critique. It also offers a sense of the contradictory emergence of new
subjectivities as a result of the market economy and its transnational imbrications.
In her magisterial chapter on Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks, Lu Xinyu examines
the significance of his decision to look at the death of a heavy industry district
that once symbolized the triumph of socialism. She argues that the film demands
attention to the price being paid for marketization, in terms of both personal
upheaval and the abandonment of socialist ideals. The film stands as a monument
to the otherwise undocumented destruction that accompanies the more frequently
celebrated construction that is going on in other parts of China. On the other
hand, Chao Shi-Yan’s chapter focuses on social identities that have emerged with
marketization, namely gay and lesbian sexual identities. He compares two films
about lesbians, one produced by a self-proclaimed heterosexual woman, the other
by a lesbian. Chao argues that while observational documentaries have addressed
certain important political questions of representation in China, they raise other
sorts of contradictions when questions of identity come into the picture. By
identifying with lesbians, the filmmaker Shi Tou is able to experiment with styles
of filmmaking that do not concern themselves with observational distance or
objectification.
In the third part of the book, “Publics, Counter-Publics, and Alternative
Publics,” we turn to the spaces the films circulate in, the spaces documented by
the films, and the spaces they create. Independent films in China are shown in a
12 Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel

wide variety of spaces, including film clubs, university classrooms, and private
homes. Seio Nakajima answers the often-raised question of whether and where
these “independent” and therefore “underground” productions are screened in
China, by conducting an ethnographic investigation of the film clubs of Beijing
and their role in the circulation and discussion of the new documentary films.
In his study he found at least four different types of film clubs in Beijing: (1)
“politically oriented film clubs,” (2) “commercially oriented film clubs,” (3) “‘art
for art’s sake’ film clubs,” and (4) “artistic, commercial film clubs.” Nakajima
goes on to analyze the kinds of debates that occur in these spaces about the
films that are screened. These debates address not only the distinctions between
documentary and fiction film but also the influence of the West on Chinese
filmmaking practices. Paola Voci examines the Beijing of the New Documentary
Movement in “Blowup Beijing: The City as a Twilight Zone.” With allusions
to Michelangelo Antonioni and the eponymous television series of the 1960s,
Voci examines what she argues is a central feature of Chinese documentaries:
their tendency to highlight the barely visible locations of Beijing’s marginal
inhabitants. Unlike the conventional images of Beijing, these films make
accessible an unofficial, unconventional, and unlikely Beijing. Finally, Berry and
Rofel turn to the complicated question of the social and political status of these
films. Rather than label them as “oppositional,” “underground,” or “resistance”
films, we argue that “alternative,” understood in a specifically Chinese context, is
the most appropriate nomination of the movement.
The chapters collected in the final section of the book, “Between Filmmaker
and Subject: Re-creating Realism,” return to investigate in more detail some
of the formal features of documentary film discussed at the beginning of this
introduction. While many have noted the distinctive visual quality of the new
documentary films, their aural qualities have been less frequently examined.
Bérénice Reynaud rectifies this lacuna with detailed analysis of the voice and
its complex deployments in Bumming in Beijing. In his chapter, Luke Robinson
interrogates the often-noted turn to “private” filmmaking with the arrival of the
DV camera, and, through analysis of key works, asks if this turn really means
a retreat from the social or another way of approaching it. Finally, both Yomi
Braester and Yiman Wang are interested in the ethical issues that have been
coming to the fore with the development of the New Documentary Movement.
Braester challenges the presumption of cinematic objectivity in the movement.
He focuses on the many instances of intrusion by the filmmaker into the scene,
including prodding subjects into action. Analyzing four films in detail, Braester
not only raises questions about intrusions into others’ seemingly private lives
but also demonstrates how these intrusive films rely on a notion of auteurship
that implicitly highlights the inherent theatricality behind the supposedly
 Introduction 13

spontaneous interactions in other documentary films. Wang examines “personal”

documentaries made with the benefit of DV technology and the redefinition of
documentary ethics that proceeds from them by configuring new relationships
between the documentary maker and the subjects. She addresses two apparently
contradictory statements by personal documentarians — an identificatory “I am
one of them” and a theatrical “they are my actors” — to analyze the relations
between experiencing, witnessing, and performance.
We hope that the chapters here will begin to draw the attention that China’s
New Documentary Movement deserves in the international English-speaking
world. Furthermore, we hope and believe that this volume will stimulate further
debate, not only on the movement itself, but also on the wider culture that it has
pioneered. There is an even more notable lack of work on the protean textual
output of internet and amateur visual culture in China today, especially work
that goes beyond issues of ownership and control to actually engage with the
texts themselves. We hope this anthology will help to provide a springboard for
more work of that nature. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the
filmmakers and the authors of the volume, as well as our editors and readers at
Hong Kong University Press. We also thank the Pacific Rim Research Program
of the University of California for funding that enabled our research for this
volume.
2 Rethinking China’s New Documentary
Movement: Engagement with the Social
Lu Xinyu, translated by Tan Jia and Lisa Rofel, edited by Lisa Rofel
and Chris Berry

The rise of the New Documentary Movement is one of the most important
cultural phenomena in contemporary China. The definition of this contemporary
film movement has not reached a consensus, as the movement itself is
heterogeneous. However, it is clear that the movement arose in the historical,
political, and social context of the 1980s and 1990s and must be understood
within that context. One common characteristic of the New Documentary
Movement filmmakers is their rebellion against the old, rigid aspects of Maoist
utopianism and established political ideologies in China. They presented a
challenge especially to the hegemonic notion of “reality” and how it should be
represented in film. One can discern this challenge even across the differences
between the two distinct phases of the movement; the first phase from the 1980s
to the mid-1990s and the second phase roughly from the mid-1990s onward.
Second, it cannot be so easily asserted that the movement was wholly separate
from official sites of media production. Finally, while the content of New
Documentary Movement films is diverse, they tend to focus on marginalized
subjects. They highlight the experiences of marginalization within a market
economy. Thus, the power of the New Documentary Movement is to reveal new,
and often painful, forms of reality.
In 2003, I published Documenting China, which described the main
characteristics of the New Documentary Movement. In this chapter, I would
like to rethink several commonly held assumptions about the New Documentary
Movement that have become pervasive since I published that book.
First, there is the assumption that a clear line can be drawn between
“independent” documentary films that comprise the New Documentary
Movement and television programs. Against this assumption, I argue that
some television programs should be included in the New Documentary
Movement. Second, against the assumption that individualization (gerenhua) in
documentaries appeared with the use of digital video (DV), I argue that although
the appearance of DV facilitated individualization in documentaries, it was part
16 Lu Xinyu

of the New Documentary Movement before the widespread use of DV. Finally, I
question the common assumption that there has been a retreat from engagement
with social and political issues since DV and individualization. Rather, the form
of engagement has changed.

What’s New about the New Documentary Movement?

During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, documentary filmmaking
in China was in a continuous state of development. The New Documentary
Movement as a concept was first brought up in a casual meeting, attended
by about a dozen people, at the then independent feature and documentary
filmmaker Zhang Yuan’s home in 1992. Zhang Yuan is one of China’s Sixth
Generation filmmakers. His major works include Beijing Bastards (1993)
and East Palace, West Palace (1996). According to those in attendance, the
meeting focused on the independence of documentary, at both a practical and
conceptual level. No manifesto or schema was proposed at this meeting (though
the participants were encouraged to keep in touch with and support each other).
Yet the idea of a New Documentary Movement began with rebellions both inside
and outside the dominant media system, especially against the “special topic
program” (zhuantipian), the model of traditional Chinese television propaganda
program. This is why the movement is labeled as “new.”
The special topic program is a product of the Chinese television industry,
but its history dates back to the heyday of cinema in socialist China. Before the
general adoption of television, newsreels under the series title News Highlights
were projected right before feature movies. These started with News Clips (Xinwen
jianbo) in the 1950s, and were later turned into a series named New Look of
the Motherland (Zuguo xinmao). They were produced by Central Newsreel
and Documentary Film Studio. These and other scientific or educational films
produced by other domestic film studios were generally called documentaries.
Guided by the aesthetic of “socialist realism,” the social function of these
documentaries was to inspire socialist consciousness in the people and to serve
the mainstream political ideology of the state using the Leninist method of
“political visualization.”
The influence of these journalistic films spread to television during the
1980s. Today, the highest rated program on China Central Television 1 (CCTV1)
is still News Headlines (Xinwen lianbo), which grew out of News Clips and New
Look of the Motherland. The most important divisions in China’s television
industry during the early 1980s were the News Division and the Special Topic
Division. While News Headlines was produced by the News Division, other news
programs regarding specific issues were produced by the Special Topic Division.
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 17

The model of producing film documentaries was followed not only by

special topic programs on television but also by several special topic television
series that offered political commentary. Both of these genres appeared during the
mid-1980s. In these two genres, explanation was more important than image, and
voiceover narration guided the interpretation of the images. One famous example
is River Elegy (1988). This six-part documentary series offered a negative
portrayal of Chinese culture, arguing that China was a land-based civilization
that had been defeated by maritime civilizations.1 Certain Chinese Communist
Party leaders supported the airing of this documentary, to lend ideological
support to the rapid development of an export-oriented market economy. But the
series became controversial once other party leaders accused it of being one of
the primary elements triggering the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989.
Beginning in the early 1980s, television sets became more popular in the
home. Therefore, going to the movies went into decline, leading to decreased
production of film newsreels and documentaries.2 As I explain below, this
coincided with the beginnings of the turn away from Maoist socialism, a period
known as “economic reform” (1984–1991) that gradually introduced a market
economy into China. Television programs consciously tried to distance themselves
from the kinds of film documentaries previously shown in movie theaters, because
of their association with a certain kind of socialist propaganda linked to Maoism.
Hence, the term “special topics” was used to refer to programming that resembled
documentaries. The term “documentary,” however, fell into disuse because of its
association with socialist realist ideology and politics.
Thus, by the time Wu Wenguang, known as one of the founders of the
New Documentary Movement, began shooting Bumming in Beijing: The Last
Dreamers (1990), he claimed that he had no concept of documentary.3 Gradually,
however, following Wu’s lead, the shared pursuit of a new kind of documentary
emerged. These new documentarians created a vision of “reality” in contrast
to what they viewed as the fake, exaggerated, and empty characteristics of not
only the old socialist realist documentaries but also the more recent special topic
programs. They viewed their documentaries as a challenge to, and a rebellion
against, the officially sanctioned special topic programs. Therefore, in this
rebellion, the term “documentary” was rediscovered in opposition to the special
topic programs. New Documentary Movement filmmakers had a common
object of opposition. As a result, in the search for a new documentary form,
groundbreaking documentarians such as Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, Jiang
Yue, Zhang Yuan, and others began to perceive the need for new representations
of reality. The rebellion became collective and the movement took shape. The
filmmakers who began to forge what became known as the New Documentary
Movement were very idealistic about their work, especially in the 1980s and
18 Lu Xinyu

1990s. They believed that the search for a new kind of reality in their films would
generate new social meanings and therefore new ways of dealing with social
problems. This profound transformation can only be understood in the context of
the social, economic, political, and ideological changes that started in China in
the 1980s.
Most important, a sense of disillusion had followed the aftermath of the
Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). When it was launched, the Cultural Revolution
addressed class antagonisms. Mao’s desire to challenge a new and privileged
social elite of political cadres who had emerged under socialism drove his early
calls for youth to experience revolution by overthrowing this elite. But the
Cultural Revolution quickly devolved into violent struggles, including the use of
class warfare tactics to pursue personal antagonisms. To end this urban warfare,
Mao ordered urban youth, the main protagonists of the Cultural Revolution,
to go to the countryside and learn from the farmers. Some went idealistically,
not realizing how difficult official policy would make it for them to return to
their homes in the city. As the Cultural Revolution wound down, many of these
youth lost their idealism to a new view of the Cultural Revolution: that it was
the result of power struggles among top leaders who had merely used them in
their schemes. Corruption — using unofficial means to gain privileges that were
otherwise hard to obtain — also became endemic and obvious. Thus, the end of
the Cultural Revolution, which essentially ended with Mao’s death in 1976, left
Maoist socialism in tatters.
Those who eventually became part of the New Documentary Movement
were therefore part of a larger search for new ideals and meaningful goals. This
search began in the early 1980s and, one could argue, continues to this day.
During the early 1980s, official policy promoted economic reform, a rejection
of Maoist socialism, and the gradual promotion of a market economy. The new
leader, Deng Xiaoping, advocated “seek truth from facts” to impart the sense that
ideology would not be used to mask reality, whether that reality be the economic
need for development or the need for scientific expertise not driven by socialist
ideals. Both official and popular practices groped their way toward building a
strong China, even as new forms of inequality emerged as a result.4
In the first years after the Cultural Revolution, cultural producers were
encouraged to continue working with a sense of social responsibility, something
that had been emphasized under socialism. Many intellectuals and other cultural
producers embraced this sense of responsibility, even when they did not always
agree with official ideology. Today, some members of the younger generation
of directors tend to interpret this sense of social responsibility as an oppressive
concept. But in my understanding, it means that directors use their own style to
maintain a dialogue with society. This dialogue includes investigation of social
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 19

problems, interpretation of the reality of those problems, and intervention through

public exposure in documentaries. In a transitional society such as China’s, which
is developing a market economy while trying to maintain a socialist government,
if one makes a conscious effort not to blindfold oneself, one will discern how
social changes enter people’s consciousness. In fact, for many of us who are
intellectuals and cultural producers, it is difficult to cut ourselves off from these
social transformations. They force us to re-examine our own social role. For
Chinese documentary directors, sensitivity toward the enormous social changes
taking place in China is virtually unavoidable, for they live in the same society.
The first creative works to appear in the New Documentary Movement
spanned the 1989 Tiananmen Incident.5 The Tiananmen events in 1989 were
crucial as they made certain Chinese filmmakers begin to realize the necessity
of understanding social reality from the bottom up. The Tiananmen Incident
shocked them. How could such a thing occur? What was its significance for
China’s past, present, and future? They discovered that they understood little
about what China actually was. They felt the need to begin a new understanding
of Chinese society. During the 1980s, they had examined China from on high.
Now they felt the need to go to the grassroots, and to understand China’s changes
and their causes from this other vantage point.
As a result, the New Documentary Movement reflected the weight of
that historical moment, with a distinctive and shared mode of thinking and
expression. In its earliest phase, the first group to use independent modes of
production was Wu Wenguang, Wen Pulin, Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue, Zhang
Yuan, Bi Jianfeng, Lu Wangping, Lin Xudong, Shi Jian, Hao Zhiqiang, Wang
Zijun, Chen Zhen, and Fu Hongxing. They went on to have a major influence
on the movement. Most of them were located in Beijing; one could say Beijing
was the “headquarters” of independent documentary production. This group of
Beijing documentarians shared collective aims and influenced and encouraged
one another. The most influential works by this first group include Bumming in
Beijing: The Last Dreamers (Wu Wenguang, 1990), Tiananmen (Shi Jian and
Chen Jue at CCTV, 1991), I Graduated! (SWYC Group, 1992), Catholics in
Tibet (Jiang Yue, 1992), The Sacred Site of Asceticism (Wen Pulin and Duan
Jinchuan, 1993), Tibetan Theater Troupe (Fu Hongxing, 1993), 1996, My Time in
the Red Guards (Wu Wenguang, 1993), Big Tree County (Hao Zhiqiang, 1993),
The Square (Duan Jinchuan and Zhang Yuan, 1994), At Home in the World (Wu
Wenguang, 1995), The Other Bank (Jiang Yue, 1995), and No. 16 Barkhor South
Street (Duan Jinchuan, 1996). These works were not only shown at international
film festivals but also in unofficial venues in China. They mainly used television
equipment as the medium for documenting realities that were being left out of
mainstream media. The subject matter they addressed was very broad. If one
20 Lu Xinyu

were to summarize, one could say that they were efforts to establish a new self-
awareness and a different societal awareness at a distinctive historical moment.
The funds for making these films derived largely from the directors’ own
resources, but many of them were also able to find ways to borrow equipment
from television stations.
During this period, they had various private and formal relationships with
the television stations. Many were actually working within the television system.
Chinese television is state-owned and controlled, although then it was still largely
state-funded whereas today it is funded by advertising and driven by ratings.
Today, there is a plethora of stations run by provincial, municipal, and township
governments as well as the central government. But at that time, the pre-eminent
station was China Central Television (CCTV), and it was undergoing thorough
reform. It was the golden era of television development in China, and this group
of documentary filmmakers had a profound influence on documentary within
the television system. Therefore, the roots of the New Documentary Movement
can be found both inside and outside the system. On the one hand, this was
because television workers had more direct contact with society than feature
filmmakers, and so they were more sensitive to social change. On the other hand,
television production cost much less than filmmaking. Documentary is not a
form that belongs in the ivory tower or among elites, and so the emergent New
Documentary Movement benefited from this affordability.
Many people contributed to the development of television documentary at
this time. Among them was Chen Meng, who launched China’s first daily short
documentary television program, Life Space (Shenghuo kongjian), in 1993. The
program focused on “the people’s own stories,” an approach that influenced and
even defined television documentary at the time. The group, who in 1993 created
Shanghai Television’s first program to use the term “documentary,” Documentary
Editing Room, focused on the fate and circumstances of ordinary people in the
midst of Shanghai’s momentous transformations. Kang Jianning, then at Ningxia
Television Station, made a long documentary entitled Yinyang (1994).6 This
documentary, about a geomancer in an impoverished and remote village, made
evident the immense labor that goes into documenting China’s reality from the
perspective of those in the lower social strata. In the first period of the New
Documentary Movement, there was plenty of interaction between the inside
and outside of the system. But after the commercialization of Chinese television
in the 1990s with television’s rising dependency on advertising revenue, this
situation gradually dissipated.
However, the tidal wave of documenting realism did not recede in the
1990s. In the second period of the New Documentary Movement (as detailed
further below), the so-called Sixth Generation of Chinese feature filmmakers
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 21

began to adopt the new realist style of the New Documentary Movement. At
the same time, DV became accessible, thus making possible a different mode
of “individualization” (gerenhua) of filmmaking practice, which had already
begun in the first phase of the documentary movement but, as I discuss below,
continues in a different form in the second phase. In this second period, many
young students studying in film schools started joining the creative community
of documentarians with their own digital videos. By this time, it was almost the
beginning of the twenty-first century.
The New Documentary Movement was thus part of social developments
in China. But it was also part of a historical movement. The mass mourning for
Zhou Enlai in Tiananmen Square in the late 1970s and the Tiananmen Incident
in the late 1980s marked the beginning of documentary photography and
documentary television in China respectively.7 At the end of the 1970s, Chinese
citizens only had still photography cameras. When faced with these momentous
social transformations, they used these still cameras to witness them. By the
end of the 1980s, China had entered the television era. Filmmakers could use
television equipment to focus on society. By the late 1990s, the Sixth Generation
feature filmmakers had emerged with clear realist aesthetics. 8 Thus, from a
broader point of view, these three events in different historical periods should
be related together for further discussion, as they constitute part of the historical
context of the Chinese New Documentary Movement. As I detail below, the
new crop of documentaries was dramatically different from the old special topic
programs in terms of topics, concepts, aesthetics, and style. Their perspective
on contemporary society was unofficial and their interpretation distinctive.
Independent productions gained a higher reputation while informal productions
such as home-made videos also exploded in number because of the widespread
adoption of DV. Therefore, almost ten years after I had started researching the
movement, I formally named it the New Documentary Movement in my book
Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement in China.
In the following sections, I detail the relationship between the New
Documentary Movement and film theory; the television industry; the different
phases of documentary filmmaking in contemporary China; and the specific
themes of geographic difference, humanism, and the relationship between the
market and the state. Throughout, I emphasize the focus of the New Documentary
Movement on the marginalized social strata of contemporary China. In the first
section, “The New Documentary Movement and Film Theory,” I argue that
while various film theories have influenced the New Documentary Movement,
the movement used these theories in order to resolve certain practical as well as
ideological questions filmmakers faced in their commitment to a new version of
reality that would enable them to film society from the bottom up. In the next
22 Lu Xinyu

section, “The Rise of the New Documentary Movement Outside (and Inside) the
Official System,” I argue that while the common emphasis has been on how the
New Documentary Movement developed outside the mainstream system, I want
to emphasize overlooked links and connections with documentaries made inside
the state-owned television system. Rather than portraying a strict opposition
between the New Documentary Movement and the official television system,
I propose it might be better to perceive the relationship as a series of overlaps
and interactions. “The Late 1990s: A New Phase of the New Documentary
Movement” describes the distinctive characteristics of the second phase of the
movement. In terms of subject matter, the second phase is an extension of the
first phase. However, the documentarians use such techniques as performative
and reflexive filmmaking in which they eschew the purely observational stance
prevalent in the first phase. The last two sections, “Documentary China: Dual
Perspectives from the City and the Countryside” and “The Rise of Humanistic
Documentaries: Narratives of the Market and the State” address the various
themes of recent documentaries. I end with a warning about the recuperation of
nostalgic views of Chinese culture and the fetishization of Chinese culture that
stultify our understanding of the complexities of modern Chinese history.

The New Documentary Movement and Film Theory

The New Documentary Movement began with no effective theoretical
background except its own practices. Significantly, Western film theories
were first introduced to academic film studies in China in the early 1980s.
These included the theories of André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, as well
as the Italian neo-realists.9 They were popular among the Fourth Generation
filmmakers, such as Wu Yigong, Xie Fei, Zheng Dongtian, Zhang Nuanxin,
and Wu Tianming, because the theorists’ emphasis on “reality” extended and
stretched traditional socialist realism. The legacy of socialist realism meant
that realism was the only officially acceptable aesthetic form in China at that
time. Therefore, these neo-realist theories, as a branch of humanism, assisted
filmmakers of the Fourth Generation in their legitimate break with the model of
filmmaking that had been practiced throughout the Cultural Revolution (1966–
1976). However, the whole aesthetic of realism was abandoned in the mid-
1980s as the ideology it was based on was also abandoned. One might say that
Fourth Generation filmmakers deconstructed socialism in the name of realism
while Fifth Generation filmmakers deconstructed and emptied the revolutionary
narrative model in the name of revolutionary romanticism. For instance, movies
made by the Fifth Generation such as Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984) and One
and Eight (Zhang Junzhao, 1983) reworked revolutionary themes. Yellow Earth
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 23

tells the story of a cultural worker from the Yan’an-based Eighth Route Army,
prior to the socialist revolution, and his interaction with a local farming family.
The film is a searing critique of the way Communist Party cultural workers,
instead of fully working with the farmers, opportunistically used local cultural
knowledge for their own revolutionary ends while ignoring the pressing needs of
the suffering farmers. One and Eight tells the story of how a political instructor
of the Eighth Route Army is unjustly accused of being a traitor. Subsequently, he
inspires the criminals he is imprisoned with to sacrifice themselves for the cause
of national liberation in the Anti-Japanese War.
By the time the Fifth Generation filmmakers appeared, the theories of
Bazin and Kracauer were much criticized in the field of film studies. It was no
longer felt that the achievements of the Fifth Generation had to be explained
theoretically through realism, even though their use of the camera was in
accordance with Bazin’s theories emphasizing the long take and the long shot.
This forgotten legacy of realism was made explicit after the emergence of the
Sixth Generation led to Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (2001), which paid
homage to the classic Italian neo-realist movie Bicycle Thief (1948).
The New Documentary Movement arose, developed, and thrived during
the evolution from the Fourth to the Sixth Generations. The documentarians
unconsciously inherited the Fourth Generation directors’ narrative search for
ethics and values. They were also inspired by the Fifth Generation’s cinematic
aesthetics. But even more important were their own explorations in response
to certain problems. While the Fifth Generation directors abandoned realism,
the New Documentary Movement started to redefine what realism meant. And
this was passed on to the Sixth Generation. While Bazin’s theory of realism
was criticized in film studies,10 it was nevertheless appreciated in the television
industry.11 However, when the New Documentary Movement started, it was not
theoretically driven but rather interested in rethinking television documentary
practices. Most discussion among the first group of New Documentary
Movement filmmakers back then was restricted to the establishment of technical
methods, such as choosing the point of view and camera position. The use of
on-camera, in-person interviews, synchronized sound, and long takes became
symbols of truth in documentary. Naturally, these documentary methods were
defined as “realist.”
Yet by the mid-1990s, marking the beginning of the second phase of the
movement, these filmmakers challenged the relationship between reality and
representational realism again. This was because the realist techniques they had
been using were being appropriated by television genres other than documentary.
Therefore, they no longer sufficed to define truth in documentary. The question
went back to the ontology of documentary, and New Documentary filmmakers
24 Lu Xinyu

realized that the notion of “reality” actually included questions regarding ideas
and values determined by ideologies. 12 This rethinking of the relationship
between reality and representational realism began in the later part of the first
phase of the movement, thereby initiating the second phase.13 The first phase
of the movement was reacting against the special topic programs. Filmmakers
in this first phase used techniques such as synchronized sound, long shots, and
follow shots to distinguish their way of capturing reality from that of the special
topic programs. The second phase of the movement began to use performative
and reflexive techniques. In general, there was greater diversity in the techniques
used, as the filmmakers in the second phase wanted to move beyond the kind of
documentary filmmaking of the first phase, which had been more committed to
pure observation. They also wanted to distinguish themselves from the various
television programs that had adopted the techniques of synchronized sound, long
shots, and follow shots.
In less than a decade, filmmakers and critics in China went through the most
important keywords from the past one hundred years of Western documentary
— Direct Cinema, cinéma vérité, and the concepts of performative and reflexive
documentary. Direct Cinema and cinéma vérité are two types of documentary
that used lightweight equipment to go directly into the world without rehearsal
or setting up. Direct Cinema was an American form that developed in the 1960s
and was purely observational, without voiceover narration, extra-diegetic music,
or interviews. The French cinéma vérité differed by including on-the-spot
interviews. These two models were very powerful in the early days of the New
Documentary Movement in China. “Performative” and “reflexive” are two of the
modes of documentary defined by American scholar Bill Nichols in his various
writings.14 The former refers to films which foreground the subjective experience
of the filmmaker and the latter to films that acknowledge their constructedness
and the absence of any direct access to truth.
These ideas were introduced to China in the 1990s. Together with responses
to their own work, this led the filmmakers to adopt the notion of individualization.
Individualization appeared in both phases of the movement. However, in
the first phase the emphasis was on the individual position (as distinct from
official position) of the filmmaker, while in the second phase the emphasis was
on individualism as a form of expression. In other words, in the first phase
filmmakers in the movement saw themselves as taking up an “individual” position
because they were filming from the point of view of the bottom up rather than the
official perspective of looking at society from the top down. This distinction made
them view themselves as having an “individual” as opposed to official position.
Their goal was to film “others” who had not had a voice in representations of
themselves. Their approach was not to include themselves in the film but to use
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 25

a purely observational position. They nonetheless viewed their filmmaking as

“individualistic.” An example of this kind of individualization in the first phase is
Wu Wenguang’s Jiang Hu: Life on the Road (1999). Wu Wenguang used a purely
observational positioning from which to film migrant performers, allowing them
to voice their views in the film, without adding a voiceover to tell the audience
how to view these subjects. In the second phase, filmmakers used performative
and reflexive techniques to make themselves into the subjects of their own films.
An example of individualization in this second phase is Zhang Hua’s The Road to
Paradise (2006). Zhang Hua, also discussed by Yiman Wang in this volume, had
originally been the subject of Li Jinghong’s documentary on her failed attempts
to run a beauty parlor. Zhang Hua then took up a DV camera and began to film
women like herself, who try to establish their own small businesses, although their
failures mean they cannot extricate themselves from the poverty-stricken margins
of society. This not only continued the challenge to official realism but also, in
acknowledging the standpoint of the individual filmmakers, questioned the purely
observational model that had developed in the early stages of the movement.
However, the relationship between the question of reality and
individualization in documentaries requires some clarification. First, the
concept of individualization also implies that every individual being is, at the
same time, a social being surrounded by social values. An individual who can
escape the restrictions of the dominant ideology cannot necessarily give up his/
her own ideological position, or be immune to morality and self-reflection.
Specifically, Chinese new documentaries are responding to a reality they depict
in contradistinction to dominant ideological versions of reality, which means that
they are required to clarify their own ideology. This is the meaning as well as the
power of the movement. Here, the individualized standpoint is defined against
the restrictions placed on individuals by the system.
Yet, while individualization was important, it did not negate the sense of
a collective pursuit by these filmmakers. That is, these filmmakers realized that
their emphasis on individualization was something they shared across their
different films. This was the greatest strength of the movement at this time,
its key characteristic, and, as already indicated, the primary force behind the
movement’s emergence. One of the techniques they used in the first phase of the
movement to express this individualization was Direct Cinema. Looking back,
a key question is why, at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s,
China’s New Documentary Movement developed a sympathetic identification
with the concept of Direct Cinema. Duan Jinchuan’s No. 16 Barkhor South
Street is an example. This film was explicitly influenced by Frederick Wiseman,
who was welcomed in China, and his filmmaking was discussed a great deal.
Duan made his film after viewing Wiseman’s work but before he came to
26 Lu Xinyu

China in 1997. (Wu Wenguang introduced him to CCTV, who interviewed him
on the program Life Space.) In his film, Duan uses Direct Cinema techniques
to film Tibetans and government officials meeting together. He does not add
commentary, nor does he put himself into the film.

Figure 2.1. American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman in

China. Squatting in the foreground left is Duan Jinchuan, and right is Wu
Wenguang. The author is the woman standing in the middle of the picture.

The new domestic role of the New Documentary Movement also appears
in its impact on feature filmmaking. While the Fifth Generation filmmakers
were busy recreating cultural symbols of “feudalism” in China prior to the
socialist revolution, the Sixth Generation filmmakers, up to and including Jia
Zhangke, introduced a refreshing new realism.15 Like the New Documentary
Movement, they focused on contemporary Chinese reality rather than the
ancient past. Furthermore, many of them shot documentaries themselves, and
the themes, styles, and aesthetics of their features have genealogical connections
with documentary filmmaking. Jia Zhangke and Zhang Yuan are representative
examples. All of their feature films reflect the influence of documentary
filmmaking themes, style, and aesthetics. For example, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu
(1997) is a feature film that juxtaposes two young men who used to be friends
and fellow pickpockets. One of them continues in his “profession” while the
other becomes a successful, small-town capitalist by using virtually the same
techniques as a pickpocket but in a legal, capitalistic manner. In this film, which
won numerous prizes at international film festivals, Jia Zhangke uses a realist
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 27

documentary filmmaking style to show contemporary China’s social inequalities.

For example, he uses non-professional actors, his actual home town rather than
a fictional one, and even uses some real names of the non-professional actors
playing some characters. Zhang Yuan, another internationally known filmmaker,
emphasized the observational approach in his early films such as Beijing Bastards
and Sons (1996). Like Jia Zhangke, he used non-professional actors and actual
locations to reflect the vast social transformations taking place in contemporary
China.
In a discussion of the rise of the New Documentary Movement, it is
important to emphasize that this movement did not arise in isolation from other
visual art forms. I have therefore emphasized its relationship to the Fourth, Fifth,
and Sixth Generation filmmakers.
I would like to end this section with a few words about documentary
photography because it broadens our understanding of the context in which the
New Documentary Movement arose. The same questions about reality were
being raised in both photography and cinema, demonstrating that the pursuit
of a new realism had broad social roots. Thus, another place where one can
see the domestic importance of documentary filmmaking is in the broader
context in which visual documentation gained force in China. For example,
the documentary photographer Zhang Xinmin’s series shot between 1990 and
1998, Besiege the City by the Country, is based on ten years moving back and
forth between cities and the countryside. His method was no different from the
documentary filmmakers at that time. He wanted to place his photographs within
the historical context of China’s last half century. Most important was Mao’s
famous reliance for victory in the socialist revolution and the winning of national
power on farmer warfare, including the ability of the farmer-based Communist
army to descend from the Communist base areas in the countryside to surround
the cities at the end of the civil war in 1949. Zhang Xinmin’s photography series
asks the question: what is the historical logic and relationship between that
history and the waves of today’s rural residents who enter the cities? For today’s
rural migrants are much disdained by urban residents and even the government
considers them to be illegal residents of the city.
Documentary photographs such as Besiege the City by the Country and
documentary landscapes shared the same approach to representing reality
as Sixth Generation films. The underclass has borne the brunt of a painful
social transition. But the portrayal of this transition is beyond the scope of
the mainstream media, and the subjectivity and physical existence of this
underclass are only revealed by the New Documentary Movement and allied
endeavors by documentary photographers and Sixth Generation feature
filmmakers.
28 Lu Xinyu

Some photography theorists in China argue that realism in the West is

outdated, so therefore realist photography in China is also outdated.16 However,
in the history of world cinema, every crucial social transition has also sparked
new realisms. Grounded in social reality, the New Documentary Movement
filmmakers point a critical finger at reality, but also allow the power of reality
to enter into their films and thereby exceed their subjective will as filmmakers.
Objective reality exceeds any theories of modernity or postmodernity. The
New Documentary Movement breaks out of the enclosed circles of mainstream
discourse, and puts us in touch with Chinese reality.

The Rise of the New Documentary Movement Outside (and Inside)

the Official System
Most of us who have written on the New Documentary Movement have
emphasized its development outside the official system. But here I want to
emphasize overlooked links and connections with documentaries made inside
the state-owned television system. In the early 1980s, CCTV generated a craze
for big-budget “special topic” series. One prominent type featured omniscient,
humanistic commentaries that accompanied footage of natural environments. A
typical example is Yangtze River (1983). The other genre was politically oriented,
for example the famous River Elegy (1988). All of these series were first written
and then images were found to match the script. The special topic program boom
in the 1980s was part of the intellectual elite’s search for cultural roots amidst
the new era of social reform. Natural environment and folk cultures formed the
basis for the re-examination of national identity and the nation-state. Patriotism
was the main theme of such series. Geographical sites charged with ethnic
symbolism were the focus of the most influential special topic series, such as
Silk Road (1980, CCTV), Ancient Road of Tangbo (1985, CCTV), and Thousand
Miles of Coastline (1988, CCTV), all of which echoed the national economic
policy of “opening up” to the outside world (kaifang). These films about ancient
China showed different historical interactions with the West over land and sea,
revealing (and justifying) the evolution of China’s contemporary policy.
The 1980s began with praise for the “mother river” in the series Yangtze
River. But the decade ended with another river with a long history, the Yellow
River, being used to symbolize the tragic downfall of Chinese civilization in the
series River Elegy. Both series embodied the search for cultural roots, but they
led to quite different conclusions. The fact that one rejected the Yellow River
while the other embraced the Yangtze River reflected internal disputes among the
country’s intellectual elite. In the end, these disputes led to the exceptional era of
the 1990s: the era of the market economy.
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 29

When production started for the television series Odyssey of the Great Wall
(CCTV/Tokyo Broadcasting System) in January 1990, the television industry
had not yet been fully subsumed into the market economy. This interim period
facilitated a short but golden age of television documentaries that lasted for
less than a decade but produced numerous new concepts, programs, and series.
For example, Odyssey of the Great Wall had first been in production earlier,
in late 1988. In 1989, the primary production team decided unanimously to
reject the script that had been commissioned with a lot of investment from the
government.17 This was a risky and provocative move. But in the end, the team
was authorized to establish the themes by themselves. The final version was
not shown until after the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. It was aired at virtually the
same time that Wu Wenguang made his Bumming in Beijing. Every individual
production sub-group established a realist style of filming: the use of interviews,
synchronous sound, long shots, and so on. This opened up the state-run media
system to a realist aesthetic. Within the context of the television programs of that
time, even the most basic realist methods were very new and fresh. With the old
special topics documentaries, there was no synchronous sound, and the main
subjects were all leaders or heroes. But in these new documentaries, ordinary
people became the main interviewees.
When the censors passed and legitimated such programs, it was a breakthrough
related to the larger social context. First, in accordance with the policy of “opening
up” to the outside world, television production methods were adopted from abroad.
Documentaries on China by filmmakers such as Joris Ivens and Michelangelo
Antonioni were shown and discussed in public and private. Second, Odyssey of the
Great Wall was a co-production with Japan’s Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS). The
Japanese production crew so impressed their Chinese colleagues that they became
models for them. After extensive discussion, the main producers of the series started
to take up the outdated notion of “documentary” once again, and used it to replace
the then popular term “special topic programs.” In this way, Odyssey of the Great
Wall was labeled as a new genre of television programming, and documentary was
rediscovered within the mainstream system.
In addition, a set of documentaries from Japan was highly influential at
the Shanghai International Television Festival (established in 1989). Again,
this was virtually at the same time that Wu Wenguang began making his
Bumming in Beijing, though he did not finish it until after the 1989 Tiananmen
Incident. In other words, both those we think of as the founding filmmakers of
the New Documentary Movement and some of those making related kinds of
documentaries for television began exploring these techniques at the same time in
the late 1980s. The makers of these documentaries followed the main characters
and lived their everyday lives with them. The popularity of the films eventually
30 Lu Xinyu

led to the establishment in 1993 of a television program called Documentary

Editing Room in Shanghai, which achieved an audience share of 36 percent at its
peak.18 Various programs focusing on the daily lives of ordinary Shanghainese
were produced. In them, the everyday was made to echo the changing times and
speak to the larger historical context.
Also in 1993, institutional reforms at CCTV led to the creation of Life Space
as a segment of Oriental Horizon. This was also a so-called producer-centered
program. In other words, it was the era when CCTV instituted the producer
system, in which the producer was the main decision maker in the creation of a
program. On air eight minutes a day, its slogan “telling common people’s own
stories” (jiangshu laobaixing zijide gushi) was extremely popular among Chinese
audiences because it purported to show an unmediated view of people’s everyday
lives.
Since the mid-1990s, an increasing number of similar programs have been
created at local television stations. Focusing on the socially marginalized has
become a trend, and “humanistic concern” has since become the most popular
term in the realm of documentary theory.19 Here, one of the most important
effects of the New Documentary Movement is the legitimacy conferred on
the development of documentary programs on television. This legitimacy has
ensured the survival of documentaries in the official media system, facilitated
their connections with the most overlooked groups in society, and established
the foundation for reaching a broader audience. The two programs that started
in 1993 — CCTV’s Life Space, which “told ordinary people’s stories” and
Shanghai’s Documentary Editing Room — both focused on ordinary people and
won good ratings in the 1990s. In fact, in China, a lot of excellent documentary
makers have been working inside the system all over the country, but they also
use every opportunity to produce their own documentaries outside the official
media system. Their hard work consolidated the development and success of the
New Documentary Movement.
Much of the New Documentary Movement has had strong connections
to television. This is a very important phenomenon. Shooting on video makes
the movement mobile, convenient, and cheap compared to the previous
documentaries shown in movie theaters. This allows it to have greater democratic
significance: as television employees, the documentary makers can also make
more direct and sensitive contact with Chinese society.
Early independent documentary makers denied the label of “underground,”
which implied opposition to the official media system. Furthermore, since the
1990s, documentary production within the system has become more diverse and
less constrained. Moreover, some independent producers have been willing to
cooperate with the system in the drive to give themselves more opportunities,
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 31

so long as they do not have to sacrifice their fundamental principles. For

instance, the main funding for one of the best known works by Duan Jinchuan,
No. 16 Barkhor South Street, came from CCTV.20 Since there were no private
foundations funding cultural activities in China in the early 1990s, independent
documentary makers usually made their living by working for television stations.
Therefore, they were employees of the state, even as they took advantage of their
positions to make independent documentaries not necessarily aired on television.
The system has also benefited from the presence of these filmmakers.
For example, independent filmmaker Jiang Yue played an important role in
the initiation of Life Space, by creating the first documentary for the program.
CCTV’s earliest documentary producer, Shi Jian, is now a powerful figure in
the CCTV system. In the early days he took advantage of his position inside
CCTV to make the independent documentaries for which he is well known. Even
those special topic programs and historical documentaries made from an official
perspective about figures who were leaders nonetheless absorbed other new
documentary elements to the extent that they could. Furthermore, if a television
documentary won a prize at international film or television festivals, it affirmed
the station’s professionalism and world standards. This motivated the provision
of funds for documentaries on topics suited to festivals, regardless of profit.
In the 1980s, special topic programs were not well received by foreign
audiences. Therefore, the producers in the international divisions at the television
stations were forced to experiment with new genres inside the official system. For
example, Documentary Editing Room, the program from Shanghai, was produced
by the International Division at Shanghai Television Station. Interestingly, most
of the earliest documentary makers worked in the international divisions of
various television stations.
Without government funding, resources for independent production were
very limited. Nevertheless, besides self-funding, all kinds of collaborations with
television stations were possible. Television stations provided the major resources
for most documentaries in China back then. As mentioned, filmmakers within the
system used the funding and equipment to produce their own independent films
while working simultaneously on official programs. From the very beginning,
there was less of an opposition between the New Documentary Movement and
the official television system and more a series of overlaps and interactions,
where the liveliest and most creative documentary making happened alongside
experiments within the television system.
As already mentioned, commercialization and reliance on ratings constricted
this experimental space within television from the mid-1990s, but even today,
television continues to find room for more challenging documentaries. For
example, Factory Director Zhang Liming was directed by Li Xiao in 2000 for
32 Lu Xinyu

Shanghai Television’s Documentary Editing Room series. It portrays a factory

director’s efforts to save a state-owned company from bankruptcy and his
eventual failure to do so. This film has a quality of black humor to it. Factory
director Zhang’s character has comic elements, but comedy has tragedy as its
underside. A good person wants to do a good deed. As a result, his life becomes
entangled with a state enterprise and its workers. But the situation of a state
enterprise in today’s society dooms Zhang Liming to failure, for the state is
actually shutting down most state enterprises, forcing them to privatize or declare
bankruptcy. But Zhang Liming still wants to gamble with his destiny and that
of this era. The more he is unwilling to admit defeat, the more we find the final
failure deeply moving. In the end the factory is demolished by explosion. Zhang
Liming’s motivations and behavior are righteous and proper. What then does this
failure signify exactly? This is no longer Zhang Liming’s tragedy alone.
In sum, the significance of the emergence of the New Documentary
Movement lies in its perspective from the bottom up on the status of different
social classes under current political, economic, and social transformations in
China. The movement was a supplement and correction to the dominant ideology
and it opened up opportunities for ordinary people to be included in the writing
of history. The convenience, mobility of television crews and camera and editing
equipment, and accessibility of television make the medium a more democratic
one. The production crew in the television industry is directly and sensitively
connected to Chinese society, providing a democratic base. It therefore represents
a social democracy.

The Late 1990s: A New Phase of the New Documentary Movement

Jiang Yue’s work The Other Bank (1993) is a watershed moment in the
transformation of the positions, perspectives, and methods of the New
Documentary Movement. It presages the second phase of this movement. The
Other Bank follows the production of an avant-garde play. But its focus moves
from the play itself to the young actors. They have come from faraway provinces
to Beijing to pursue their dreams. But when the play’s run is over, their dreams
are extinguished. They have to face cruel reality and start all over again. In this
sense, Jiang Yue sympathetically depicts those who will comprise some of the
second phase filmmakers, that is, those who come to Beijing but who are not
accepted as filmmakers through the conventional routes and therefore must rely
on other means. The documentary communicates the director’s reassessment of
the utopianism of the 1980s.21 There were several utopian trends in the 1980s.
One was to take the West as a utopian model of what China could strive for. The
other, in reaction to modernization and urbanization, was to search for utopianism
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 33

in the countryside or among minorities, with their presumably simpler, more

natural and untouched way of life. These utopian trends were torn down in this
work, showing how the 1980s search for utopia had failed. However, the counter-
impulse — the search for a new utopia — is also embedded in the film in the final
scenes: one of the migrant performers returns to his home village with a group of
actors to put on one of their plays. The villagers watch without understanding all
the postmodern references in the play. However, at the very end, the actors invite
the villagers to participate in pushing an old tractor forward. This final action
signifies a possible utopia of collective action toward a better future.

Figure 2.2. Jiang Yue’s The Other Bank.

By the mid-1990s, Chinese society had gone through tremendous changes.

Compared to the previous decade, the idealism that grew from challenging
authoritarianism was encountering its major enemy: commercialism. Both
television and independent documentaries also faced this challenge. In the
1980s those of us who cared about China’s future imagined that the West and
modernization would be the sources for a post-socialist utopia. But this imagined
utopia evaporated as the gap between the rich and the poor widened with the rise
of the market economy in the 1990s, setting the scene for the second phase of the
New Documentary Movement from the mid-1990s to the present.
Today’s independent productions are made inexpensively and in a wide
variety of styles. Especially since the appearance and popularization of mini
DV technology, various experimental works have appeared, leading to even
more spaces for new developments. With the elimination of burdensome
34 Lu Xinyu

ideological pressure, a number of important independent works have revitalized

the movement. Starting with the popularization of DV, documentary production
has entered a phase of multiple developments. On the one hand, the popularity
of documentary television shows has fallen dramatically under the onslaught of
more commercial television. Influenced by Western entertainment documentary
television channels such as the Discovery Channel, Chinese television
documentaries have also begun to adopt market principles and pursue dramatic
narratives. Furthermore, the new generation of independent filmmakers is living
in a totally different social environment, where the impulse to resist authority is
no longer primary, and social and political values are less important for them.
Television stations are no longer so crucial to the new independent documentary
makers, either. Today, low-budget independent productions are made by all
kinds of companies, organizations, and individuals. For example, CNEX, or
“Chinese Next,” is a non-profit organization founded by a group of professionals
from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, who are passionate about the
portrayal of Chinese culture. It is devoted to the production and promotion of
documentaries related to the Chinese people.22
Many documentary makers during the second phase are no longer
only based in television. Many have also come from avant-garde art circles,
educational film institutions, fine art, and multimedia, or are just young people
hoping to express themselves. They have brought an experimental avant-garde
spirit and exploration of film language into the production of documentary,
imbued with a resistant and subversive impulse in both form and topic. These
documentaries are intensely, if not aggressively, focused on marginalized groups
such as sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, the disabled, low-income groups,
miners, sex workers, farmers, low-paid laborers, and substance abusers. For
example, The Box (Ying Weiwei, 2001), discussed elsewhere in this volume
by Chao Shi-Yan, is a film that addresses the lives of lesbians, without treating
them as a spectacle. On the contrary, it tries to show the poetry in their emotional
existence, making their lives appear normal by showing their beauty. The Garden
of Heaven (Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie, 2007) takes a feminist approach. It follows the
difficult pursuit of justice by the mother of a young teacher killed by her boyfriend
after an attempted date rape. Voice of the Angry River (Shi Lihong, 2004) looks at the
impact of dam building on the local populations in southwest China. The film follows
the residents of an area where a dam is planned, on a visit to a site where a dam has
already been built; the residents at that site are now obliged to live by scavenging at a
garbage dump.
In terms of subject matter, the second phase is an extension of the first phase.
However, most films during the first phase were observational, borrowing their
techniques from the 1960s American Direct Cinema, such as Frederick Wiseman’s
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 35

works, and from Japanese social issue documentaries of the same era, such as Ogawa
Shinsuke’s films. These earlier observational documentaries had also focused on the
lives of the underclass and had a great impact on society. Such observational methods
were directly connected to the motivations of the New Documentary Movement,
which were to interpret contemporary Chinese society from the bottom up. While
many works continued this tradition, others in the second phase were self-reflexive
or performative explorations. They created a new era dominated by personal images,
deploying documentaries to express their individuality by putting themselves in
the films, and producing a different relationship between documentary and art. For
example, Hu Xinyu’s The Man (2003) describes the lives of three young men. Hu
Xinyu puts himself in the film as one of its subjects. Analyzed further in this volume in
Luke Robinson’s chapter, the film does not simply record their daily lives. Rather the
young men re-enact — and therefore perform — their lives in front of the camera. It
records their feelings of failure to express a successful masculinity.

Figure 2.3. Hu Xinyu’s The Man.

The filmmakers from the first phase were born in the 1960s or early 1970s.
They are from the generation who went to the streets and protested in pursuit
of their ideals, such as democracy and an end to government corruption. They
preferred to be identified as “artisans” to distinguish themselves from the
elitist contemporary art establishment. Their works had a different spirit from
those of the newer generation. Filmmakers from the second phase, in contrast,
emphasize their individuality through self-reflexivity and share a commitment
to artistic exploration. In an era of depoliticization, individual experiences have
36 Lu Xinyu

become the premise for all artistic creation. In resistance to the absurdity and
meaninglessness of life, they use the authenticity of the individual and his or her
soul in everyday life to articulate the fate as well as the redemption of humanity
caught up in the process of modernization, presenting us with a new opportunity
to discuss art and reality in contemporary China.

Documentary China: Dual Perspectives from the City and the

Countryside
Originally, I thought Duan Jinchuan’s No. 16 Barkhor South Street signaled the
end of the search for utopia in distant places. For this film, which Duan made
after living in Tibet for a number of years, neither romanticizes nor mysticizes
Tibetan life but rather depicts ordinary Tibetans in their ongoing engagements
with the Chinese government. Yet I have discovered that this utopian impulse
never really ended but has continued under new conditions. Tibet still serves as
a symbol of distant lands and as the sign of difference from modern civilization.
Its significance has not waned, and it continues to provide a reverse-shot
perspective. In 1993, Ji Dan followed in the footsteps of Wu Wenguang when
he went to Xinjiang, and those of Duan Jinchuan when he went to Tibet in the
1980s, by also searching for utopia in distant lands. She lived together with
ordinary Tibetans, and learned the Tibetan language. Gongbu’s Happy Life and
The Elders (both 1999) are the results of her pilgrimage. They describe Tibetans’
ordinary lives, which Ji Dan, full of admiration, judges to be “happy.” By the
time these documentaries received their first public screenings in 2003 at the first
Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest), a decade had already passed
since she began filming.
“Happiness” appears to have become a keyword in several other films in
this second phase of the New Documentary Movement. For example, Jiang
Yue called his film about workers’ lives at a train station under the pressures of
potential unemployment This Happy Life (2002). Jiang redefines the meaning
of happiness and a happy life. In a vision that corresponds to his own beliefs,
it seems that no matter how stressful life is, so long as there is hope there
is happiness. Happiness is not giving up; it is having this mentality forever.
Happiness lies in how someone relates to their psychological world.
The quest for meaning in life and happiness also characterizes the repeated
turn to the countryside in films by the new generation of directors, and this quest
has become stronger than ever before as we are swept up into globalization. Even
in a film by veteran Fifth Generation filmmaker Tian Zhuangzhuang, Delamu
(2004), we can see a certain approval of cultures that have not yet been invaded
by modern civilization. Delamu is about the lives of people living in the Nujiang
 Rethinking China’s New Documentary Movement 37

River Valley along the ancient caravan route, the Tea Horse Road, which runs
between Yunnan Province and Tibet. Tian, who also directed the feature film The
Blue Kite (1993), documents a caravan trip taking raw materials to a modern
construction site, and interviews people who have lived along the route all their
lives.
Delamu, Gongbu’s Happy Life, and The Elders all turn away from the city
and modernity as sources of utopia. We can see premonitions of this turn in Wu
Wenguang’s documentary, Bumming in Beijing, made shortly after the 1989
Tiananmen Incident and an indirect commentary on it. The film describes five
artists — the “last dreamers” — who come from the provinces to Beijing, China’s
most central of cities, searching for their dreams. The destruction of those dreams
propels them out into the world. While no direct mention is ever made in the
film about the Tiananmen Incident, the viewer infers that Tiananmen is the direct
cause of the destruction of these artists’ dreams. In Wu’s follow-up film, At Home
in the World (1995), we see these artists transfer their unrealized dreams from
Beijing to the West. With one exception, all of the artists have migrated to the
United States or Europe. Yet the film concludes with their disillusion with the
idea that utopia can be found in the West.
Wu Wenguang’s later film, Jiang Hu: Life on the Road shatters another
idealization of urban utopias, this time from the perspective of ordinary rural
residents. The film depicts a group of migrant performers from the countryside
who try to make a living by singing pop songs. The film shows a mismatch
between their rural sensibilities and their hopes of success through popular
culture. There is a painful sadness to the film as the viewer absorbs the
contradiction between the songs’ contents and the lives of these struggling
performers, and the film becomes an indirect critique of mass culture and the
kind of unrealistic utopia it proffers.
In view of the critique of modern ideals by a range of cultural critics in
China, including the filmmakers just discussed, many of the new generation of
documentary filmmakers have embraced nostalgia. Nostalgia has become both
a kind of refusal of but also a reflection on modernity, thus giving modernity
an unintended prolonged significance. This is part of the frequent theme of
searching for utopia in the countryside, which itself picks up on a tendency
also present in the 1980s. One can discern it, as I have just mentioned, in Tian
Zhuangzhuang’s Delamu. Other filmmakers also pay homage to the dignity
and value of those people who live in the countryside under harsh conditions.
A good example would be Sha Qing and Ji Dan’s Wellspring (2002), which is
about a family coping with a dying son and the difficult decisions they have to
make about his medical care. It won the Grand Prize at the 2003 Yunfest. As
the festival jury commented: “It displays a deep understanding and compassion
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
 THE MAIDEN’S TOMB[8]

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

The Maiden UNAI (really her spirit temporarily incarnated

(Shite)
as a maiden)
Two of the Village Maidens (Tsure)
A Priest (Waki)
(Nochi-
The Ghost of the Maiden UNAI
jite)
Chorus
 Plate 6.

THE MAIDEN’S TOMB

This illustration, from a Japanese coloured
woodcut, shows the figure of the maiden Unai
(see p. 35), who wears a dress resembling that
still worn by country maidens, though with the
volume of the garment and the size of the
patterns both a little more exaggerated than
those which are now customary. The designer of
the woodcut has put in symbolic and formalized
representations of the Mandarin ducks and the
flames of hell-fire which were among Unai’s
torments.
SCENE
The fields of ONO near the hamlet of IKUTA in Settsu, in the early
spring.
[The Priest enters]
PRIEST

Far through the country has my journey lain,

Far through the country has my journey lain,
And to the capital I speed my way.

I, a priest, am from the country, from the

Western districts coming.[9]
To the capital, which hitherto my eyes have
never seen.

The paths along the coast are manifold,

The paths along the coast are manifold,
That on this journey I have traced, and oft
My way has lain by boat across the sea.
Over the sea and mountains stretching wide
I watched the sun rise up and set again,
And now I reach Ikuta which I know
Only by name as in Tsu province fair,
The hamlet of Ikuta now I reach.

SPIRIT AND MAIDENS

Green shoots we gather, young green shoots of

spring,
And here in Ono by Ikuta blows
The morning breeze so chill, so chill and strong
It turns and billows out our flapping sleeves.[10]
MAIDENS

While in the distant mountains, on the pines

The snow has even yet not disappeared.

SPIRIT AND MAIDENS

Oh, near the Capital the time has come

To gather in the fields the shoots of spring.
It makes our hearts glad just to think of that.

SPIRIT

But from the Capital this place is far,

MAIDENS

And we are country folk and therefore live

A humble life here by Ikuta’s sea.
Our lives and work are of the lowliest
And to the field of Ono every year
Without the thought of pleasure do we come.
[11]
The footmarks of the many village folk
That go to gather the young shoots of spring
Have left wide tracks across the snowy field.

And tread a path, where else there would be

none.
And tread a path, where else there would be
none.

The young green shoots that grow on field and

marsh
We now must gather. When the snow has gone
They will already have become too old—
Though still the wind blows cold thro’ shady
copse
And on the field of Ono lies the snow,
The seven herbs of early spring-time sprout
In Ikuta then let us pluck the shoots,
In Ikuta then let us pluck the shoots.
PRIEST

O good people, will you tell me if toward Ikuta

I’m nearing?

MAIDENS

As thou dost know the name of Ikuta

There should have been no need to ask us that!

SPIRIT

Dost thou not know it from the many views

That scattered far and wide portray the place?

First of all, dost thou not know it as the forest of

Ikuta?
See, the many clustered tree tops which are
true to this its name.[12]

MAIDENS

And there the stream thou hast now deigned to

cross,
It is the far-famed river Ikuta.

SPIRIT

In the early breath of spring-time (like the

shallows of the river)
Do we gather, ’neath the snowy cloak, the
young shoots of the field.
MAIDENS

And this field, too, where little sprouts as yet

Are growing, why as Ono know’st it not?[13]

SPIRIT AND MAIDENS

The sweet wild cherry blossoms that do grow

In Miyoshino and in Shiga too,
The maple leaves of Tatsuta and those
Of Hatsuse—they would be surely known
By those who lived beside the poet’s home.
But we, though living in this place know not
The forest or the copse of Ikuta.
So ask us not, for we know nothing here.

PRIEST

Ah yes. Unfolding now before my eyes

The views I know—the forest, river, sea,
And mist, the scenes of Ono now expand!

And the far-famed tomb of Ikuta, the Maiden’s

Tomb, where is it?

SPIRIT

Ah, in truth, the Maiden’s Tomb! That is a place

that I have heard of;
Whereabout it is I know not, yea, I know not in
the least.

MAIDENS

But prithee, traveller, these useless things

We beg thee ask us not, we prize the time[14]
When we can gather these young shoots of
spring.
SPIRIT

And thou thyself, too, journeyest in haste,

So wherefore dost thou tarry with us here?

MAIDENS

Thereon an ancient poem has the words—

CHORUS[15]
I

“A charming hindrance to the traveller

Are they who pluck young shoots in Ono’s field
In Ikuta.”[16] Why ask then useless things?

II

“Thou, Watchman of the field of Tobuhi

That lies in Kasugano, go and see,”
“Thou, Watchman of the field of Tobuhi
That lies in Kasugano, go and see
If it is not yet time to pluck the shoots.”[17]
Thou, traveller, that to the capital
Likewise dost haste, how many days hast thou?
“For his sake do I go to the spring fields
To gather the young shoots, though on my
robe
Cling still the cold, unmelted flakes of
snow.”[18]
Let us then gather, snowy though it be
And on the marsh the thin ice still remains,
Pushing aside the sprouting watercress,
Let us then gather the green-coloured shoots
Let us then gather the green-coloured shoots.
III

Would there be much to gather? For the spring

Is very early yet—and young shoots hide.

SPIRIT

“The spring-time comes, but as I see the snow

Upon the plain, I think of the old year.”[19]
The young green shoots of this year still are few
So we must gather those with older leaves.

CHORUS

And yet, although the leaves are old and sere

The young green shoots are fresh as the new
year.
Guard then thyself, thou field of the young
spring!

SPIRIT

To the field of spring,

To the field of spring,
To pluck violets
He came, and then
Only purple leaves
Of the weeds culled he
Who came gathering.

CHORUS

Ah, yes, the colour of affinity[20]

Has brought to my sad thought the memory
Of Love’s light bridge which was asunder torn.
[21]

SPIRIT

The aged stems of plants once gone to seed

In Sano district still may sprout again,

CHORUS

And their green colour will be purple dyed.

SPIRIT

The Shepherd’s Purse of Chōan—[22]

CHORUS

And the hot shepherd’s purse, a useless thing,

And other herbs white rooted, like the dawn,[23]
Which, hidden by the snow we may mistake
And gather in the place of those we want.

CHORUS

The morning breeze in Ono still is cold

The lower branches of the pine trees still
Are weighted down with snow. Where hides the
spring
We cannot tell. And though the river breeze
Blows cold, our billowing sleeves are colder far.
Let us go home, although we leave unplucked
Some of the young green shoots, let us go
home.
PRIEST

Now there is something I would speak of unto

thee if thou permittest—
All the maidens who were gathering the young
greens have departed
Save thyself, and wherefore then art thou alone
remaining with me?

SPIRIT

For the Maiden’s Tomb but just now thou didst

ask me. I will show thee.

PRIEST

Yes, indeed, I do desire to see it and I pray thee

show me.

SPIRIT

This way honourably follow. And the Maiden’s

Tomb is this!

PRIEST

What its history, and why then, is the Maiden’s

Tomb so calléd?
Pray minutely tell the story.

SPIRIT

Then will I the

tale
unfold.
Once upon a time a maiden who was called
Unai did live here,
And two men there were, called Chinu and
Sasada, and they loved her.
And to her upon the same day, in the same
hour, both declaring
Fervent love, they sent two letters. But she
thought that if she yielded
Unto one, the other’s anger would be deep, and
so to neither
Would she yield (and then her father said the
truest shot should win her).
But upon Ikuta’s river did the two men’s flying
arrows
Pierce together but one water-fowl, and pierce
the selfsame wing.

And then I thought, how cruel now I am.[24]

The wild fowl’s troth, though plighted deep and
true
Is broken for me, and the happy pair—
Mandarin ducks—for my poor sake must bear
The pain of separation. Piteous!
So, with my life dismayed, I’d throw myself
Into Ikuta river’s flowing tide[25]
Here in the land of Tsu. Ikuta stands
Merely a name to such a one as I.
CHORUS

These were her last words, as she took her way

Into the river’s water. When they found
They buried her beneath this mound of clay.
Then the two men, her lovers, came to seek
Her tomb. No longer will we live, they said,
And like the stream of Ikuta, the tide
Of their remorse rose up. Each with his sword
Ended the other’s life.
And that was too my sin! That too my sin!
What can become of such a one, so full
Of sins? I pray thee therefore give me help!
So saying ’neath the tomb once more she sank
Yea, down beneath the tomb once more she
sank.
[Ghost of Unai appears]
PRIEST

Short as a young stag’s horns in summer

time[26]
The night of sleep! The weeds grow on her
tomb,
And from their shade appears again the ghost.
I’ll raise the voice of prayer. “Thou spirit soul,
Awake thyself to understanding true,
Enter Nirvana casting off from thee
Delusions of thy life and of thy death.”[27]

GHOST

Oh, the wide field, how desolate it is—

My own deserted tomb and nothing else!
Only wild beasts contending for the dead
Which come and go in gloom, and o’er the tomb
The watching spirits flying in the wind
That circling ever beats upon the pines.
The heaven’s lightening, and the morning dew
Are still before my eyes, and symbolise
The world of Earth, as transient as they.
How many of the lonely tombs are those
Of Youth, whose lives are so unlike the name
Of Ikuta, so-called the field of life.
CHORUS

A man comes from the world I left long since.

How thankful am I. ’Tis the voice of prayer!

CHORUS
I

O human world. How much I long for thee.

II

A [living] man while spending [in this world]

Even a single day and single night,
A [living] man while spending [in this world]
Even a single day and single night,
Eight billion and four thousand things has he
To think about. But how much more have I,
I, who left long ago the pleasant world—
’Twas in the reign of Tenchi and by now
The second Horikawa holds his sway.
Oh, that once more unto the pleasant world
I might return. How long in shady weeds
And ’neath the moss, how long I buried lie!
But worse, not buried under the cool earth
I suffer from a roasting heat and burn,
Within a flaming dwelling-place, behold!
Within a flaming dwelling-place, behold!

PRIEST

Alas! How truly piteous is thy state,

If only thou wouldst once but cast away
The clouds of thy delusions, thou wouldst be
Freed from thy many sins and from all ills.
“From evils all, and sins, from hells and fiends,
 Illnesses all and deaths, be thou set free.”
Oh, quickly float thyself in buoyant thought!
GHOST

Ah, grateful am I, for the voice of prayer

Has reached my ears, and tho’ my sufferings
Do know no intermission, in hot hell
The smoke clears back a moment, and I see
A little open space. How glad I am!

Oh, how terrible! Who art thou? What! Of

Sasada the spirit?
And thou art the ghost of Chinu? And from right
and left you hold me
By the hands, and saying to me “Come, come,
come.” Though they torment me
I don’t dare to leave the shelter of my burning
house; for no one,
Nothing, is there to rely on. And I see another
spirit
Flying from afar towards me. Oh, how terrible! I
see it,
’Tis the duck, and turned to iron, turned to steel
it is before me!

With beaks of steel like naked swords the bird

Pecks at my head and feasts upon my brain.
Is it because of crimes I did commit?
Oh, how resentful is it, cruel bird!

Oh! I pray thee, Priest, I pray thee, from these

sufferings relieve me!

PRIEST

“The time of torment fierce has now arrived.”

The spirit had not finished saying this,
When o’er the tomb flew out a band of flame.
GHOST

And then its light became a hellish fiend,

PRIEST

Who raised the torture rod, and drove at her.

GHOST

Before me is a sea if I attempt

But to advance

PRIEST

While flames are in the rear.

GHOST

And on the left.

PRIEST

And on the right as well.

GHOST

By water and by fire am I now held

In double torment.

PRIEST

Helpless utterly.
GHOST

When to the pillar of the burning house

CHORUS

I reach my hands, and do attempt to cling

At once the column bursts out into flame—
The blazing pillar must I then embrace.
Oh, scorching heat! Oh, unendurable!
The whole five members of my body turned
Into black smoke by this fierce burning fire.

GHOST

And then when I arose—

CHORUS

And then when I arose, a jailor fiend

Applied the torture-rod, and drove me out.
I left the house and wandered through eight
hells
And there all suffering I underwent.
Now I would show thee how I blotted out
My many sins. Before thee lie the scenes
First in the hell of all equality,[28]
Then in the hell of black rope, devil led,
And driven to the hell of gathering,
Where all assemble. Then the hell of cries,
Of bitter cries, came next, and then of heat,
Of utmost heat, and then the hell of depth,
Depth infinite, into whose space I fell
Feet upwards and head downwards for three
years
And three months more, in agony the while.
 And after that a little interval—
The devils left me and the flames expired,
I thought there was a respite to my pain,
But then the darkness grew more terrible
And to my burning house I would return
I thought—but where then was it? To myself
I asked the question in the pitchy dark.
And seeking, seeking, to and fro I groped.
“The Maiden’s Tomb”—I searched it everywhere,
And now at last I find “The Maiden’s Tomb.”
Like flying dews leaving a grassy shade,
Like flying dews leaving a grassy shade,
The spirit’s form has once more disappeared
The spirit’s shadow has now vanished.

END OF “THE MAIDEN’S TOMB”

(The play ends thus abruptly, leaving us in doubt as to whether or

not the Priest’s admonition prevailed, and she escaped into Nirvana.)
 KAGEKIYO[29]

Authorship of the Play

This Play was probably written about 1410; at any rate in the first
quarter of the fifteenth century. Its author was Motokiyo, who was
born in 1374 and who died in 1455. He was the eldest son of the
famous Kiyotsugu (see p. 7).

Outline of the Story

The time of the action of the play is about the year 1190, and
Kagekiyo, the hero of the story, is a very renowned warrior of the
Taira clan. The Taira and the Minamoto (Gen) clans were rivals and
were perpetually at war; during the years 1156-1185 more
particularly this struggle culminated, when Japan had her “Wars of
the Roses.”
Kagekiyo, known as the Boisterous, owing to his uneven temper and
ready appeals to arms, was a famous warrior of the Taira clan, and
when the Minamoto Shōgunate was established at Kamakura,
Kagekiyo was exiled to a distant place in Hiuga, where he became
blind and passed a miserable existence as a beggar. He had a
daughter called Hitomaru, whom he left in Kamakura in the charge
of a lady. At the time of the play, Hitomaru has just grown up to be a
young lady, but she had a great desire to meet her father, and so set
out with a servant to seek him. She has a long and arduous journey
to the place of her father’s exile, and after enduring considerable
hardships she at last finds Kagekiyo’s retreat. She and her servant
encounter a villager who assists them in the final search for
Kagekiyo, and they make inquiries of a blind beggar dwelling in a
miserable straw hut. This beggar is actually Kagekiyo, but at first he
refuses to answer them or to acknowledge it, out of shame and
consideration for his daughter. Ultimately, however, he recounts to
her some of his adventures, and then he commands her to leave him
and they part for ever.

Comments on the Play

In this play there is perhaps less description of the beauties of
Nature than in many of the Nō, but the opening lines are particularly
fraught with the meaning which permeates the whole play.

The dew remains until the wind doth blow.

The comparison of human life to a drop of dew is one frequently

made in the literature of the Nō. Throughout this play there are
many phrases showing how deeply the characters feel the
transitoriness of human life. After Hitomaru’s longing for a place to
rest a little while, Kagekiyo exclaims—

Nay, in the three worlds there is not a place.

Kagekiyo’s behaviour to his child, and his reception of her after her
long search for him, appears to us to be most cruel; but it is,
nevertheless, based on the conceptions of the chivalry of his time.
Kagekiyo’s leading thought was the really unselfish desire to keep
the shame of his condition from touching his daughter. His first wish
is that she shall not even recognise or speak with him; but when this
is frustrated, he commands both the servant and the villager to send
her back immediately their short meeting is over. And yet he does
not seek even a moment’s embrace, nor does he use an endearing
phrase to his daughter. The play is a good illustration of the way that
the old codes of Japanese chivalry imposed courses of action which
seem now in this softer age well-nigh inhuman in their repression
and conquest of the natural feelings.

KAGEKIYO[30]

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

Kagekiyo Shite
Hitomaru, Kagekiyo’s daughter Tsure
Servant to Hitomaru
Villager Waki
Chorus
SCENE
A mountain side at Miyasaki in the province of Hiuga.
Time about 1190.
HITOMARU AND SERVANT

The dew remains until the wind doth blow,

The dew remains until the wind doth blow.
My own life fleeting as a drop of dew,
What will become of me as time does pass?

HITOMARU

My name is Hitomaru, and I am

A maiden, who in Kamakura[31] dwells.
My father’s name is Kagekiyo, called
By some the Boisterous, and he is a friend
Of the Hei[32] clan, the Taira family
And so is by the Gen[32] house hated much.
To Miyasaki exiled, in Hiuga
He deigns, in shame, long months and years to
pass.
To travel unaccustomed, I am tired,
And yet inevitable weariness
I mitigate by thinking of my quest,
And I am strengthened for my father’s sake.
HITOMARU AND SERVANT

The tears of anxious sleep run down my cheek

And to the dew upon the pillowing grass
Add drops that drench my sleeves.

From Sagami the province we set out,

From Sagami the province we set out,
Asking from those we met, the road to take
Toward our destination. And we passed
The province Tōtōmi,[33] and crossed by boat
The distant bay. And Mikana we passed,
By Mikana, spanned o’er with bridges eight.
Oh, would that we could grow accustomed soon
To our short nights of sleep that we might
dream
Of the high capital above the clouds,
Of the high capital above the clouds.

SERVANT

Endeavoured as you honourably have

To hasten on the way, already now
This is Miyasaki, as it is called,
To Hiuga you have honourably come.
This is the place to honourably ask
Your honourable father’s whereabouts.
KAGEKIYO
[Evident to the audience, but supposed
to be hidden from the other actors.]

The pine trees that have seen long months and

years
Entwine themselves to form the arching bowers.
Yet I, debarred from the clear light of day
Discern no sign that time is passing by.
Here idly in a dark and lowly hut
I sleep the time away. The seasons change
But not for heat nor cold my clothes are planned
And to a skeleton my frame has waned.

CHORUS

If one has got to leave the world, then black,

Black should his sleeves be dyed. Then surely
black
His sleeves should all be dyed, and yet my
sleeves—
Oh, more inglorious! So utterly
Worn out and waned my state that I myself
Feel much averse unto my wretched self.
So who could be benevolent enough
To visit such a state of misery?
No one inquiring of my misery
Will ever come.
No one inquiring of my misery
Will ever come.

HITOMARU

Incredible that one should dwell within

That wretched hut, it does not seem to be
Fit for a habitation. Strangely though
I heard a voice proceeding from its wall.
A beggar’s dwelling it must be. I fear,
And from the lowly dwelling keep away.
KAGEKIYO

That autumn now has come I cannot see,

And yet I feel it for the wind has brought
Tidings from somewhere, tho’ I know not
whence.

HITOMARU

Ah, knowing not my father’s whereabouts

In misery I wander, with no place
Where I can rest even a little while.

KAGEKIYO

Nay, in the three worlds there is not a place,

’Tis only in the heavenly expanse.[34]
Choose any man and ask him, he will say
“Where else!” And what else could he ever say?

SERVANT

How now, you in the thatched hut, I would ask

A question of you.

KAGEKIYO

Well; what is it then?

SERVANT

Knowest thou where dwells an exiled man?

KAGEKIYO

An exile though he be, what is his name?

SERVANT

The Boist’rous Kagekiyo is he called,

And of the Taira house, a warrior.

KAGEKIYO

Yes, yes, I think that I have heard of him,

Though being blind the man I’ve never seen.
Miserable, his honourable state!
To hear of which stirs pity in my breast.
Pray then inquire elsewhere the full account.

SERVANT

Then hereabouts he does not seem to be.

[To his mistress]

But further on we should inquire again

If you will honourably now proceed.

KAGEKIYO

She who has just been here—Why! is she not

The very child of this selfsame blind man?
Once, very long ago, at Atsuta
I met a woman, and this child I got.
It was a girl,[35] and so I trusted her
To Kamegaegatsu’s châtelaine.
Now grieving parent meets with child estranged;
She, speaking to her father, knows it not.
CHORUS

Her form unseen, although I hear her voice,

How sad my blindness is! Without a word
I let her pass. And yet such action is
Due truly to the bond of parent’s love,
Due truly to the bond of parent’s love.

SERVANT

How now, you there! Art thou a villager?

VILLAGER

And to the Villager what hast thou then

Of honourable business?

SERVANT

Dost thou know

Where lives an exiled man?

VILLAGER

What sort of man

—
An exile though he be—of whom you ask?

SERVANT

A warrior of the Hei house, and called

Kagekiyo the Boist’rous, him I seek.

VILLAGER

Just now as thou hast come along this way

Upon the hill-side, was there not a hut,
A hut with thatch, and somebody within?
SERVANT

Yes, a blind beggar sat within the hut.

VILLAGER

Aye. That blind beggar is the man you seek,

The very Kagekiyo whom you seek!
How strange! When I said Kagekiyo’s name
That honourable lady there did deign
To show a look of sadness. Why was that?

SERVANT

Thy wonder is most reasonable. Naught

Shall I conceal from thee. Kagekiyo’s
Most honourable daughter is the maid
Who hopes once more her honoured sire to
meet.
That being so, and as from far away
She has come hither, I pray thee devise
Some proper way of speaking face to face
With Kagekiyo.

VILLAGER

Oh, unutterable!
Is she his honourable daughter then?
Well, calm your heart, and pray you deign to
hear.
The sight of both eyes Kagekiyo lost;
So helpless, he cut short his hair and called
Himself Kōtau of Hiuga and he begs
For his poor living from the travellers,
And with the pity of such lowly folk
As we ourselves, he just sustains his life.
And that he doth not tell his name must be
Shame for the contrast with the olden days.
At once I shall go with you and call out
“Kagekiyo”—and if it is his name
Then will he answer and you can observe
Him face to face, and of the distant past
And of the present you shall tell him all.
Pray come this way.

Holloa! in the thatched

hut
Is Kagekiyo there within? Is there
The boisterous Kagekiyo?
KAGEKIYO
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com