Forbes and Fifth

In the Here and Now

In 1991, Chinese director Zhang Yuan hosted a meeting of his peers, in the privacy of his home, to discuss duli, or independent filmmaking, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Yuan is noted as the pioneer of Chinese Sixth Generation Filmmaking, which developed without state sponsorship in the 1990s. Sixth Generation1 films lacked the humanism and reinvention of past historical and cultural themes present in older films that focused on historical epics and national allegories.2 Instead, young filmmakers directed their cameras towards social inequality and poverty in rapidly modernizing cities. Arising for the first time, in the PRC, was a form of independent filmmaking that turned the camera towards the people of the street– the rural poor who migrated into the urban centers. The directors producing independent films sought to separate themselves from state representations of Chinese life and history through the formal qualities of their films. Their films document everyday life and what French philosopher, Maurice Halbwachs, identified as “‘communicative memory’ which includes those varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communications.”3

This paper will examine how independent Chinese film initiated a form of history focused on the cultural memory of the people instead of the official history promoted by the Chinese state that glorified national mythologies. First, I will provide context to Chinese Sixth Generation film and examine two films, Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing – zuihou demengxiangzhe, 1990) and Jia Zhangke’s The Pickpocket (Xiao Wu, 1997). Second, I will discuss the ways that the Sixth Generation Filmmakers separated themselves from their predecessors and the state system. I will then look at the ways that Sixth Generation Filmmakers have encouraged and promoted the democratization of filmmaking in China, empowering the masses to represent their own histories. Ultimately, I argue that the methods employed by Sixth Generation filmmakers enabled them to successfully represent a Chinese history neglected during the Cultural Revolution, while also enabling the creation of individual cultural memories over the state-run official history.

The independent film movement captured the lives of people otherwise invisible during the years of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a sociopolitical movement led by Moa, Chairman of the Communist Party of China. The goal of the movement was to purge any remnants of capitalist or traditional elements from Chinese society. This marked Mao’s rise back to power after the disastrous outcome of The Great Leap Forward, which attempted to propel China into the modern age through industrialization. The dominant political ideology of the Cultural Revolution was Maoism, a form of revisionist Marxism-Leninism that promoted the peasant class as the true revolutionary class. Violent struggles erupted across the nation and millions of people were persecuted by Mao and his supporters. People were forcibly displaced from their homes and many important cultural artifacts and sites were desecrated. Zhangke spoke of his memories of this era saying:

The Cultural Revolution produced a 10-year blight. I really fear if I don’t do something right now to document the change right now in China we’re going to have something similar, 10 years of Chinese history that just disappear from the face of the earth in terms of individual, not official government histories4

After the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, the shift of the People’s Republic of China towards a market-driven economy commenced mass modernization projects and economic reform. China’s new political and economic strategies greatly affected the people of the nation, both inhabitants of rural and urban environments. Mass migration out of the peripheral countryside and into the urban centers created a rapid expansion of the urban landscape. At the end of 1985, it was estimated that only 33% percent of the Chinese population lived in cities, in 2013 the number rose to 53% and it is predicted that by 2020 60% of the population will live in cities.5 Millions of people were relocated from their rural villages, either due to modernization projects or because the market-economy made their way of life uneconomical. Urbanization and globalization is dramatically shaping the landscape of the PRC, sometimes leaving places and people behind, who, to rephrase Zhangke, are watching their history disappear. Zhangke, aware of ¨the urgency of capturing changing realities,” felt that it is his purpose ¨to record the memories that might be disappearing.¨6 The mass migrations of individuals into urban environments captivated the attention of young Sixth Generation filmmakers who took the opportunity to tell narratives that had long since been invisible to Chinese and international audiences.

During the private meetings in Zhang’s private home in 1991, no formal manifesto was created, but two very important rules were established surrounding independent filmmaking in China. First, the films produced must be self-sufficient, both in producing and in financing; second, the directors needed to exhibit duli sixiang, or ‘independence of thought,’ signifying to the audience their separation from the state-run media. Many of the people attending this meeting were trained artists or filmmakers, but most came from television, specifically from the state-run conglomerate, China Central Television (CCTV). Most independent filmmakers in China, during the late 80s and early 90s, worked for CCTV and borrowed equipment from the studio after hours to shoot their own pieces. For example, Wenguang worked freelance for CCTV and used their Betacams to film Bumming in Beijing.7

Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers and Zhangke’s The Pickpocket display reality in the rapidly changing PRC in different ways. But both spotlight the experiences of the laobaixing, or ‘ordinary folk,’ and their everyday lives. On the one hand, Bumming in Beijing follows the lives of five young “freelance” artists. Freelance, in this context, means that they were “drifters” without a distinct purpose in the new China. The films depict the life of a writer, Zhang Ci, a photographer, Goa Bo, two painters Zhang Xiaoping and Zhang Dali, and a director of avant-garde theatre, Mou Sen. The film was shot before and after the Tiananmen Square Massacre but it is never directly mentioned in the film. Instead the viewer becomes aware of the event because two of the artists have fled the country and two more are preparing to leave.

On the other hand, Jia’s film The Pickpocket is not a documentary, but it is still a resource for examining the social history and the changing nature of rural life in the modernizing PRC. The film shoots on location, uses unprofessional actors and includes shot of the rural public living in the area allowing viewers a glimpse into this rural region. The main character, Wang Hongwei, is a pickpocket in a provincial city, drifting through the urban environment, ¨attached to neither a state-run business nor is he a private entrepreneur. He is the unequivocal bianyuan ren--a social outcast.”8 Hongwei is experiencing the rapid development of his peripheral city, which is shown through shots of shop owners vacating their storefronts in preparation for demolition, only to eventually be rebuilt as part of China’s economic reform. 

Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers was the first documentary created outside the official state channels and, for that reason, is regarded as the first film to exhibit the formal qualities of the Sixth Generation filmmakers. Their predecessors, the Fifth Generation filmmakers, funded their projects through the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) whose “‘supervision’ created the strange world of Chinese film and TV, where the nation’s pressing problems are downplayed or simply do not exist, and real causes are never discussed.”9 The 1980s brought about the rise of the TV documentary known as zhuantipian, or ‘special topic film,’ which was a pre-scripted and heavily edited product. It was a tool used by the Central News Documentary Film Studio for political communication. Film scholar and Professor Chris Berry said:

The end of state-led socialism and the development of the market economy handed the economic initiative over to ordinary citizens, but …. the suppression of the Tiananmen democracy movement meant the one-party system remained. The result is a loss of faith in the old realism associated with the Maoist model and the emergence of a new realism10

In contrast to the major studio productions, Bumming in Beijing was shot on location with non professional actors and displayed what is known as xianchang, roughly translating to “shooting live.” Wenguang “summarizes the term as being ‘in the present and on the scene,’ a sentiment that might perhaps also be translated as "in the here and now.”11

Xianchang is demonstrated in Bumming in Beijing when Wenguang is filming the artist, Xiaping, as she installs works solo gallery show and she collapses to the floor in a nervous breakdown. The scene begins with Xiaping holding up one of her paintings and saying “This is God. Is this male or female?” The installation crew responds nonchalantly with her making it seem like Xiaping is joking around with them. But then she crumples to the floor, screaming through tears and chuckling, “Who am I? This world is so fucked up! Who am I?”12 It becomes clear to the viewer, at this point, that this extremely private moment and was not anticipated by Wenguang. Xiaping’s dramatic nervous breakdown happens in the half of the film, which occurs after the Tiananmen Square Massacre (1989).13 The Massacre is never directly mentioned but it is apparent that something has changed because Ci and Dali have fled the PRC to America and Italy. The unpredictability of the event and the reactions of the artists heightens the realism of the film, because it is out of Wenguang’s control. The absence of any reference to this event is what Berry described as the "structuring absence" and the absence in the film mimics the absence in the official PRC media. Even without mention, Wenguang’s film, allowed the audience to mourn the absence of characters and acknowledge the aftermath of the massacre.

Films during the early 1990s “attempted to process the consequences of these events, however elliptically, films such as Bumming in Beijing… turn their attention to a history that was subsequently marginalized by the official media.”14 Zhangke’s films, also explore the experiences of youth and marginalization in the urban environments The Pickpocket begins with an extreme close-up of a pair of hands striking a match, the camera cuts and the Chinese symbols for ¨Shanxi,¨ a Chinese province, are shown on the matchbox. The film was shot in the city of Fenyang in the Shanxi province which is the hometown of Zhangke, representing his transition, like Hongwei’s and Wenguang’s “freelance” artists, from peripheral villages to urban centers. Fenyang, at the time, was part of the PRC modernization project and was rapidly expanding as populations of rural migrants flowed into the city. As we follow Hongwei, ¨Fenyang becomes the site where the local and the global converge.”15

The confrontation between the old and the new is made visible when Hongwei visits his friend Jin Xiaoyong, who recently married and did not invite Hongwei. Xiaoyong used to also be a pickpocket but gave up that life and is now a businessman. Hongwei brings a gift to Xiaoyong, representing a more traditional life, a gift economy that existed in rural villages. ¨In the film, the mise-en-scène of this ‘gift economy’ is a long shot of Jin’s home, where the two childhood friends sit facing each other in sullen silence.¨ Now Xiaoyong must reject Hongwei because he is ¨less viable than Xiaoyong financially and morally,¨ since Hogwei keeps with old traditional ways of life, instead of modernizing alongside the state.16 By the end of the film, Xiaoyong sends a man to return the gift and in that scene the old traditions of the gift economy that ¨used to bind men and women together in socialist China, is at this instant on wane, as is the ‘social network’ affixed with it.”17 The film allows the viewer to see the traditional ways of Chinese life converge with the new. Hongwei does not participate in the new reforms, instead he sticks to tradition which exiles him from the cultural changes taking shape in the urban world and from being part of the official memories.

Hongwei also returns to his peasant family in the rural periphery. The rural parts of China faced the worst of the economic hardship and where people struggled to survive to keep pace with modernization. The juxtaposition of Hongwei’s family home, a traditional yaodong18, with that of Xiaoyong’s home, where he manages his business, hosts large banquets and receives media attention symbolizes the growing inequality of wealth developing in the PRC.19 French philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu, stated that ¨...individual behavior is nothing other than a certain specification of the collective history of a group or class, and each social group or class enacts a set of dispositions and practices that reveal its own particular habitus, ¨ so the interactions between Hongwei, his family and Xioayong represent the struggles present in the Chinese nation caused by the migration of rural peoples into the city.20

Historian Hayden White discusses how in “written history, we are often forced to represent some agents only as “character types” that is, as individuals known only by their general social attributes or by the kinds of actions that their “roles” in a given historical event permitted them to play, rather than as full-blown “characters.”21 This also happens in film, where a single scene represents a much deeper history or longer narrative. Through the interactions between the different cast members the viewer is shown a portrayal of the life of both the rural and urban poor. Hongwei’s family represent the rural peasants who are watching their villages and homes be destroyed in massive modernization projects like the Three Gorges Dam, which flooded about 1,500 towns and villages relocating 1.24 million people. Hongwei represents the rural migrants who find it difficult to assimilate into the modern urban world because ¨urbanites see the migrants either as outsiders who put stress on urban infrastructure and resources or as the cause of rising crime levels in the city. Thus the migrant workers receive little sympathy for their hardships, and public concern about social security displaces the issues of their exploitation and subordination.¨22 The everyday experiences of these urban drifters became the focus of the Sixth Generation and “street-realism” in an attempt to document and add traces of their existence in the collective identity and memory of the Chinese nation.

The formal qualities of the Sixth Generation films are what set them apart from their predecessors and the Chinese media at large.

The earliest manifestation of independent Chinese documentary are thus usually seen as an attempt to break with accepted values, conventions and modes of production in Chinese documentary filmmaking. Stylistically, the directors endeavours to emancipate themselves from traditional methods of achieving documentary signification23

The methods used by these filmmakers created a new sense and understanding of realism in film not experienced by audiences both internationally and domestically. Filmmakers shot on location, in natural lighting with non-professional actors and with little editing of sound and of unscripted events. Independent filmmakers like Wenguang and Zhangke wanted to “differentiate their work from that produced at the heart of the state media complex… and to suggest a point of view distinct from the government and closer to that of the “ordinary folk,” or the laobaixing.”24 These qualities allowed for the filmmakers to project a sense of realism to their viewers and document new individual memories ignored by the state-run media.

White wrote, “History is memory cultivated in the interest of producing a 'collective' past on the basis of which a collective identity can be forged. In other words, there are historical criteria regarding the reconstruction of the past which dictate what should be remembered and what should be forgotten.”25 In the 1990s, there were sixteen state-run studios who received all of the funding to create films that were specifically censored to please the government. The national media of China dictated whose past and identity was important enough to be documented and remembered. The Sixth Generation filmmakers used their cameras to change that. Zhangke, during a speech about the beginning of his career said, “At the time, the majority of the Chinese people were not aware of their agency and did not think much about using film for self-expression.”26 Not only did the Sixth Generation filmmakers produce films that challenged the state’s representation of history, but directors like Zhangke and Wenguang also advocated for formation of mass amateur filmmaking. Zhangke said, ¨… I firmly believe that our culture should be teeming with unofficial memories (minjian de jiyi), ¨ and promotes the artform finding its way back to the Chinese people.27

Wenguang initiated the China Village Self-Governance Film Project where he provided villagers in remote parts of China with digital video cameras and offered training so they could document local elections in 2005. Wenguang advertised a call for documentary film proposals and received over ninety different applications. The successful villagers were invited, all expenses paid, to Wenguang’s Caochangdi Studio in Beijing, participating in a weeklong training workshop, where they spent twelve hours a day learning how to shoot video and about village self-governance. The villagers were also put together with a human rights activist for a day and the villagers' film proposals were presented, discussed and developed. In 2010, Wenguang started the Memory Project which explores individual and collective memory through personal storytelling. The Memory Project was designed to focus on oral history, family succession and extend documentary practices to the peripheral boundaries of Chinese village life. The aim of the Memory Project is to dispatch young filmmakers out from urban landscapes and back to their hometowns and to the villages of the predecessors. Wenguang launched the project to collect oral history about the Great Famine (1958-1961)28 that occurred in rural China and is not often officially discussed.

Since the closing of the Cultural Revolution and the commencement of market-economy and modernization projects in the PRC, the Chinese landscape is in a state of flux. Construction projects, commercial districts and skyscrapers re-shape the Chinese horizon. Villages become ruins as peasants are forced to relocate or search for new jobs to survive in the new economy. The influx of people into the urban environments established a new subject for young filmmakers embarking on the mission to create independent films and separate themselves from their predecessors and from the state. Directors like Wenguang and Zhangke focused their films on the experiences of drifters, or the people living outside the state-system, in the urban world. Sixth Generation Directors captured the lives and memories of people in order to provide a representation of Chinese life and identity otherwise invisible in official media. Through the promotion of amateur filmmaking, Zhangke and Wenguang have successfully invited the participation of the masses in the cultivation of cultural memory, while also subverting the strictly controlled official state history. The works of independent filmmakers allowed for the noise of more voices within the Chinese cultural paradigm, while also advancing film in China. Independent filmmakers re-established national identity in terms of ordinary memory and the telling of stories, on the international ¨big screen,” about the transforming lives of the everyday people in the People’s Republic of China.


Endnotes


1 The Sixth Generation refers to an underground movement in Chinese film that focused on amateur filmmaking. The films were created without funding from the Chinese Government so they are usually made quickly and cheaply. The works focus on the dissatisfaction with the social and political situations in contemporary Chinese life and focuses on marginalized people in urban environments.

2 Jian Xu, "Representing Rural Migrants in the City: Experimentalism in Wang Xiaoshuai's So Close to Paradise and Beijing Bicycle," Screen vol. 46, no.4, (2005), 435.

3 Maurice Halbwachs and J. Alexandre (Ed.), La memoire collective, Paris: PU de France, 1950, in Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka (Trans.), “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique, no. 65, (1995), 126.

4 Martha P. Nochimson,"Passion for Documentation: An Interview with Jia Zhangke," New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, (2009), 411.

5 Zhu Ningzhu (Ed.),"China's Urbanization Level to Reach 60 Pct. by 2020," Xinhua, 16 Mar. 2014, Accessed, 15 Oct. 2015.

6 Nochimson, "Passion for Documentation: An Interview with Jia Zhangke," p. 415.

7 Dan Edwards, “Street Level Visions: China’s Digital Documentary Movement,” Senses of Cinema, no. 63, July 2012, Accessed, 26 Oct. 2015.

8 Lin Xiaoping, "New Chinese Cinema of the 'Sixth Generation': A Distant Cry of Forsaken Children," Third Text, vol. 16, no. 3, (2002), 281.

9 Edwards, “Street Level Visions: China’s Digital Documentary Movement.”

10 Chris Berry, “On the New Chinese Documentary Movement,” dGenerate Films, 14 Nov. 2013, Accessed, 15 Oct. 2015. This was first presented as a talk at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for the opening of their exhibition Chinese Realities: Documentary Visions that opened on 17 May 2013.

11 Robinson, "Voice, Liveness, Digital Video," 490.

12 Wu Wenguang (Director), Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers, Digital Video, 1990.

13 The Tiananmen Square Massacre took place on June 4th of 1989 in Beijing during student-led Democracy Movement demonstrations against the one party political system in China. The leaders of the country order the military to enforce martial law after students occupied the Square for 7 weeks. Troops attacked unarmed civilians with assault rifles and tanks who tried to block the army from entering Tiananmen Square. Hundreds of civilians were killed from June 3-4 as people tried to fight off the military and keep the demonstration going. The exact death toll is unknown because the Chinese government has actively suppressed discussion and research of the event.

14 Robinson, "Voice, Liveness, Digital Video," 494.

15 Shquin, “Boundary Shifting,” 178.

16 Xiaoping Lin, "New Chinese Cinema of the 'Sixth Generation': A Distant Cry of Forsaken Children," 267.

17 Xiaoping, “New Chinese Cinema,” 268.

18 Yaodong translates roughly to “house cave” and is a particular kind of earth shelter carved out of a hillside. They are most common in the Loess Plateau in Northern China.

19 Huang Bingyi, "Screening Cinematic Space: On Chinese Experimental Films from the Last Decade," in Gao Minglu (Ed.), The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, Beijing: Millennium Art Museum, 2005, p. 278.

20 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Rice (Trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, in Jian Xu, "Representing Rural Migrants in the City: Experimentalism in Wang Xiaoshuai's So Close to Paradise and Beijing Bicycle," 447.

21 Hayden White, “Historiography and Historiophoty,” The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 5. (Dec., 1988), 1199.

22 Xu, ¨Representing Rural Migrants..., ¨ 434.

23 Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street, 2013, 17.

24 Robinson, "Voice, Liveness, Digital Video,” 490.

25 Hayden White, The Fiction of Narrative, The John Hopkins University Press, 2010, in Shu-chin, Wu, "Time, History, and Memory in Jia Zhangke's 24 City." Film Criticism vol. 36, no. 1 (Fall 2011), 18.

26 “I Don’t Believe That You Can Predict Our Ending,” trans. Tianzi Cai, dGenerate Films, 10 Nov. 2010 Accessed, 26 Oct. 2015.

27 Cheng Qingsong and Huang Ou, My Camera Doesn’t Lie: Documents on Avant-garde Filmmakers Born Between 1961-1970, Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chuban gongsi, (2002), in Yingjin Zhang (Ed.), Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China, 2010, 105.

28 The Great Famine was caused by the policies of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, which was a period of industrialization in the country. Certain rural populations were ordered to focus on producing steel over agriculture and because of drought and poor weather a widespread famine killed between 15-45 million people.


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Volume 8, Spring 2016