By Jeroen Groenewegen

As Mandarin Chinese interpreter for the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Jeroen Groenewegen has witnessed a wide spectrum of independent Chinese language films, circa 2006-2009. Though not representative of independent Chinese cinema more broadly, IFFR provides a considerable slice of the real, the surreal, and the virtual of Chinese language films.

In 2007, I was shocked when I translated Tsai Ming-liang's remarks at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) for his poetic I Don't Want To Sleep Alone. The beautiful but seemingly non-narrative images of dilapidated living quarters, busy streets, and abandoned construction sites in Kuala Lumpur to my surprise where meant to show the grim social reality of migrant workers, and the silent moments of humanity. Additionally, the carrying around of a mattress, which I had mistakenly taken to be an exclusively formal device, referred to a recent scandal in Malay politics. However, although Tsai seemed to adhere to Chinese culture's credo of art's social responsibility, I also perceived ambivalence, especially in the stunning butterfly scene, which Tsai explained by referring to a well-known Daoist parable in which Zhuangzi dreams of being a butterfly and upon waking up wonders whether he is a butterfly dreaming to be Zhuangzi. This is the typical paradox of sinophone cinema: balancing serious realism and playful fiction. It almost inevitably roots itself in contemporary East Asian reality, but also deals with the less explicit fictional nature of cinema, and perhaps with the easily neglected untrustworthiness of our perceptions in general.

Engaged Realism

Films in the realist mode are often based on news items (Peng Tao, Leon Dai, and Li Ruijun's Summer Solstice (2007, at IFFR 2008)) or chronicle the hometown of the director (Han Jie, Ying Liang, Robin Weng, Wang Liren, Jia Zhang-ke, Yang Jin's Erdong (2007, at IFFR 2009) and Wang Jing's Crossroads (2008, at IFFR 2008)). Close-ups are rare, whereas objectifying, distancing long shots with digital cameras prevail. In general, directors do not aim at, and in some cases explicitly avoid, psychological identification with any one of the characters. Main characters are blank sheets: taciturn and enduring, and performed by non-professional or first-time actors that are essentially playing themselves.

For instance Han Jie has commented on the unprofessional actors of his Tiger Award winning Walking on the Wild Side that they were really local hooligans: "Of course they can't really act, so it's important to get them drunk and turn on the camera at the right moment." There is a scene in which the three protagonists and friends drink in a motel and the owner offers them prostitutes with the plan of stealing their car. Han Jie recounted how the girls (picked up from a local KTV) refused to be filmed at first, but with the drunk and ready-to-go 'actors' present they finally agreed (to a higher price). Right after the shooting the hooligans got into a real fight. (One of them was hiding from the police while Han Jie was in Rotterdam.) Peng Tao commented on the cook that he cast as the main lead of Floating in Memory (2009, at IFFR 2009): "I created a living space for him, let him live there. I couldn't possibly let him act, that'd be a mess."

Walking on the Wild Side

Hence, scripts are usually guidelines for improvisation. Partly because of improvisation, plots rarely develop suspense, although Walking on the Wild Side and a number of other films end with the violent eruption of pressure built up throughout (Ying Liang, Wang Liren). In general, narrative development is subordinate to the explication of emotional bonds (qinggan), attitudes (zhuangtai), and states of affairs (zhuangkuang). As such, the style and content matter of independent Chinese films resemble those of documentary films. For instance, toward the end of He Jianjun's River People (2008, at IFFR 2009) a fish escapes a fyke net and disappears under the surface of the Yellow River. It immediately symbolizes the secret escape of a fisherman's son from the small community and thus contrasts with the radical anti-symbolism of the rest of the film. As the drums punctuated the music, someone in the audience commented "well, the end is nice indeed." But the film continued another five minutes in order to de-emphasize the symbolism, says He.

Framing, Estrangement and Surrealism

Although realism usually implies a fourth wall, in general Chinese directors do not shy away from showing that their films are staged, manipulated and framed. The most obvious frame at the IFFR is the introduction and discussion before and after the screening. Directors explain frankly how their films are made. For instance He Jianjun stated that River People is partly a reenactment of anecdotes and partly the staging of the fishermen's aspirations and imaginations.

But staging is also apparent in the films themselves, in some cases more explicit than in others. Leon Dai's No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti's (2008, at IFFR 2009) combination of a factual story of the separation of a father and a daughter to black and white images and romantic piano music has explicit roots in Chinese reportage or non-fiction literature. It doubtlessly informed the film's success in prompting Kaohsiung's mayor to support the reunion of father and daughter, and investigate illegal diving activities in the city's harbor.

The fictional half of Emily Tang's Perfect Life (2008, at IFFR 2009) stirs compassion for the dreams of a North-Eastern Chinese village girl, whereas the documentary portion shows the difficulties of realizing these dreams in actual South China and Hong Kong for factories full of Chinese women. The intimate atmosphere of the realist mode in which the fictional part is shot is stylistically different from the gritty and haphazard documentary images, revealing both the necessity and artificiality of Jia Zhang-ke style realism. (Unfortunately this distinction was lost on some audience members, who thought both stories were acted).

Floating in Memory

More explicitly staged, Peng Tao filmed the long shots that make up Floating in Memory with a digital handheld camera to create shaking and thus an alienating effect, referring to Brecht in interviews. His technique is most convincing in a scene where the camera follows the two protagonists walking on a street and then stops to let them stroll out of sight. We are left behind to contemplate the story and its social significance.

Wang Liren dislikes modern urban settings. He meticulously avoids advertisement and concrete, painting a strangely poetic and timeless image of contemporary China. The floating camera work of Weed (2007, at IFFR 2007) emphasizes this, but the film simultaneously discredits it through references to bird flu and the seemingly anachronistic appearance of high tech surveillance cameras.

Tattoo (2009, at IFFR 2009) contains logistically challenging and highly theatrical shots during which a steady camera slowly zooms out, revealing more and more events that are happening in different panes of the image. Similarly, every shot in The Land (2008, at IFFR 2009) is carefully staged. He Jia's positions his camera in order to record the genuine first reaction of Christian, ethnically Miao villagers to photographs he had taken a few years ago. The surrealist rockets and UFO's of Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life (2006, at IFFR 2007) serve to show the absurdity within reality: the unanticipated occurrences in China today. The three performances of a metal band in Ying Liang's Good Cats (2008, at IFFR 2009) similarly pushes the boundaries of realism. They seem to be visualizations of non-diegetic music, as none of the story's actors hears or sees them, and they comment from an external position.

Kernels of Romanticism and Absurdism

Emily Tang voiced the opinion of many independent PRC directors when she said she didn't care about the distinction between realism and fiction per se, but was looking for the "sharpest" (jianrui) edge for her social critique. In general, the frequency of themes such as (honorable girl falls into) prostitution, the extorting of johns, the trade of babies, petty theft, corruption, and Christianity show the preoccupation of films in the realist mode with the moral deprivation of proletarian Chinese youngsters (Ying Liang, Jia Zhang-ke, Emily Tang, Wang Liren, Han Jie, Yang Jin, Peng Tao, Robin Weng and Gan Xiao'er's Raised From Dust (2007, at IFFR 2007)).

While these socially-engaged films are rarely judgmental, there is also a number of films that refrains from politics altogether, focusing instead on imagery, landscapes, and (the impossibility of) human interaction. For instance, the draw of Zhao Ye's Jalainur (2008, at IFFR 2009) is not the story based on the Chinese saying "although I can go with you for a thousand miles, eventually we'll have to part," but rather the stunning and enchanting shots of Northern Chinese landscapes and old-fashioned steam locomotives, strictly recorded in the traverse light of morning and evening hours. Although Zhao Ye explicitly regards himself a romantic rather than a realist, I argue that his treatment of the theme of parting is best understood as a sub-branch of the dominant realist mode because it equally deals with what Chinese film expert Shelly Kraicer in an excellent article called the fixation of "creatively progressive Chinese filmmakers," namely "the seeming impossibility of capturing, in narrative cinema, some accurate representation of what it's like to live in today's form(s) of reality." These films implicitly argue that Chinese reality is not determined by politics or meaning, but by much more mundane and inexplicable human interaction.

Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest

 

Each part of Yang Fudong's three hour and forty-nine minute Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest Part 1-5 (at IFFR 2008) is in black-and-white and explores the visual possibilities of a different location. For instance, part four contains a series of slow camera movements on a track placed on a beach revealing changing compositions of worn-out wooden boats and "the intellectuals" romantically dressed as fishermen. Interestingly, part five breaks with the romantic but realist observational mode by introducing absurd events.

Absurdism, and the artificiality of realist cinema are most poignantly foregrounded in Zhang Yuedong's Mid-Afternoon Barks (2007), the only film I discuss that was rejected by the IFFR, although it was later awarded a Dragons and Tigers Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. The sources of the dog barks heard throughout the film remain unknown, which feeds directly into its bizarre, non-narrative and explicitly dreamlike atmosphere. The roles of these romantic and absurd films are usually acted by friends, and sometimes by the director himself, rather than by local hooligans. A number of Taiwanese films, such as Lee Kang-sheng's steamy study of betelnut girls Help Me Eros (2007, at IFFR 2008) can perhaps be related to these interpretation-defying films.

Playfulness and Virtuality

Explicit staging, surrealism, romanticism, and absurdism (the black humor of Robin Weng's Fujian Blue (2007, at IFFR 2008) also comes to mind) test the boundaries of the realism that especially dominates PRC films. However, there is another sinophone cinema, especially in Southeast Asia, which works from the other side of the equation: playful fiction. I disagree with Shelly Kraicer, who positions realism as the only worthy answer to the faux-reality of Hollywood's "technologically virtuosic, ideologically over-determined production[s]" and discredits Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, among others, as the activities of "good post-colonial, post-autonomous subjects [who] dutifully stamp out what their audiences have been trained to demand: colourfully fake copies of their own manufactured reality." A close look at these films reveals that they have more character and potential than this description presumes.

actor/director Liew Seng Tat

Borrowing from Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, I argue that this cinema of virtuality is rooted in kawaii, a Japanese term for "cutesy" that relates to a refusal to grow up, manga comic books, and the self-absorbedness of our sensory world. In these films, plot development, as well as humor, are much more central, although not necessarily logically sound. The most salient examples are Tan Chui-mui (Love Conquers All, 2006; All My Failed Attempts, 2009) and Liew Seng Tat (Flower in the Pocket, 2007; Chasing Cats and Cars, 2009), both favorites of the IFFR, winning Tiger Awards in 2007 and 2008 respectively. Both their films and their public personae are likeable in a childlike way. Tan's short The Need of Ritual of her series All My Failed Attempts narrates how a woman is approached by a fortuneteller on the street. She reluctantly agrees to listen to his advice, and eventually even pays him for it. It shows beautifully how people act despite themselves.

The over-the-top storylines of Royston Tan's 811 (2007, at IFFR 2008) and 12 Lotus (2008, at IFFR 2009) lean heavily on nostalgic getai pop songs, which offer colorful, hilarious, and at times melodramatic escapes from reality. Tan addresses Chinese -- more precisely Singaporean Hokkien -- identity, a topic that is more seriously elaborated upon by the Indonesian director Edwin. His Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008, at IFFR 2009) deals with the anti-Chinese sentiments of the 1998 riots in Jakarta and its aftermath from a Chinese perspective. Although the undertones are serious and political rather than kawaii, the style of Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly is not realistic, but symbolic and imaginative. The stylistically challenging scenes of a pig in the fields and the graphic scene in which a Chinese man concedes to being raped by an Indonesian mercantilist under the supervision of an Indonesian military man are clearly metaphorical.

Finally, John Hsu's films explicitly deal with the interaction between cyberworlds and reality. Real Online (2006, at IFFR 2007) humorously juxtaposes identities in a second life game world with real-life thugs, whereas Intoxicant (2008, at IFFR 2009) deals with (the impossibility of) trust in the simulacra world of an online forum. In contrast to the realist and surrealist modes, this cinema of virtuality ventures from the assumption that films are playful, somewhat SF-like worlds. Governed by wholly different laws, these strange tales are only secondarily related to our reality -- but to important and carnivalesque effect.


Thanks to Anne Sytske Keijser and the International Film Festival Rotterdam

 

Published: Friday, February 6, 2009