Rico's rants: One from Column A, two from Column B

19 February 2011

One from Column A, two from Column B

Larry Rohter has an article in The New York Times about Chinese independent film:

As a group, they give a new and truer meaning to the phrase “independent film”. In a country where all movies must obtain official approval to be exhibited commercially, the five Chinese directors whose work will be featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight in New York are forced to operate in a peculiar gray zone.
“You have to have an awful lot of energy and passion to make films with no funding and no prospect of having them seen in public in your home country, except under the radar and off the grid,” said Sally Berger, the curator of the festival, who visited China last fall. “These are sophisticated, experimental filmmakers with a strong aesthetic sense, making films filled with a sense of urgency and change, even though they know they have a better chance of having their work seen abroad than at home.”
Few, if any, of the Chinese independent films that have begun appearing over the last decade or so are overtly political, or dare to challenge the authority of the Communist Party directly. But their focus on issues like poverty, pollution, injustices, rapid urbanization, and the individual’s struggle for autonomy, gives many of them a subversive, questioning quality that alarms those in power and closes off the channels of official support and money.
Of the films to be shown at MoMA the most ambitious may be Xu Xin’s Karamay, a six-hour examination of a fire in the remote far west of China in which 323 people perished. Most of the dead were schoolchildren brought to the local Friendship Theater to perform for a visiting group of high-ranking officials, who, in a crucial detail not reported in the official accounts, escaped the blaze unscathed through the single door that was not bolted shut.
“One sentence centered my attention on this incident, and that was the instruction to the students to ‘stay behind, don’t move, let the leaders go first,’” Mr. Xu, a former art teacher, said in a telephone interview from Beijing before leaving for New York, where he will appear at the film’s showing. “That left a mark on my psyche.”
Another film, Xu Tong’s Fortune Teller, looks sympathetically at a vanishing folk tradition, while Li Ning, the leader of an avant-garde dance troupe, documents his own artistic struggles in Tape. The director Jia Zhangke, who alternates between the worlds of official (like Still Life) and independent cinema, will be represented by I Wish I Knew, a hybrid of documentary and fictional elements that examines the recent transformation of Shanghai with a nostalgic eye for that city’s past.
“You can see that these independent film directors do have ideological concerns, that they have a social mission they need to accomplish with their films, speaking out or standing up for the underprivileged or marginal, and exposing corruption,” said Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, author of Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film and a professor at Oberlin College. “That social mission gives them the drive and the passion to be bold and experimental and fearless.”
Though the bulk of independent films produced in China are described as documentaries, some of them, as Mr. Jia’s film indicates, do not follow the conventions of the form as practiced in the West. Instead they mix in experimental technique, sometimes eschewing narrative altogether. “The borders between documentary, fictional and experimental films are very blurred for me,” said Huang Weikai, 38, who trained as a landscape painter before turning to cinema.
Mr. Huang’s Disorder is a piece of bricolage drawn from more than 1,000 hours of video, shot in large part by nonprofessionals working in Guangzhou and other cities in the Pearl River delta of southern China. They made their footage available to Mr. Huang, who then chose, edited, and ordered the sequences he wanted down to just under an hour. “It’s like a chef who goes out to the market to get ingredients,” he explained when asked about the process he used in making the film, which shows scenes of urban chaos in which pigs wander onto a congested expressway, water mains burst, streets flood, the police beat vendors, and a baby is found abandoned in a garbage-strewn lot. “What he makes of those ingredients depends on him.”
For distribution in the United States, many Chinese independent filmmakers have turned to dGenerate Films, a company founded in 2008 by Karin Chien, a Chinese-American film producer whose credits include American indie movies like The Exploding Girl. It was after attending a screening of San Yuan Li, in which a group of painters and visual artists, Mr. Huang among them, combined to create a vivid depiction of urban sprawl overwhelming traditional village life, at New York University, which sponsors the biennial Reel China festival, that she decided to branch into Chinese film. “The way it mixed images and music, without dialogue or narration, reminded me of Koyaanisqatsi,” she said, referring to the 1982 experimental film collaboration between Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass. “It would be hard to imagine anything more different from the costume dramas most Americans are used to seeing out of China.” Ms. Chien’s company now distributes 38 independent Chinese films abroad, mostly to film societies and universities and for showings at festivals. In some cases, she said, to get the films out of China, “we end up inventing some very creative routes of transmission” involving networks of couriers to evade export licensing and other controls.
Xu Xin, 44, said he hoped someday to have his films exhibited in Chinese theaters and on Chinese television. But, he added, making them is even more important than getting them shown. “I think my job is to supplement history, the official history,” he said. “Not many people are aware of the truth, of things that really happen, so to make a record for the future is the basic duty of a documentary filmmaker.”