Film and Television

Over the past decade, the predominant style of Chinese documentaries produced outside China's official production channels has shifted from a Wiseman-inspired observational mode to an interpersonal approach that often lays bare the interactions between film-maker and documentary subject. The work of director Zhao Liang reflects this trend, but Zhao's films are also distinguished by an ethically reflective approach that questions and problematizes the film-maker's involvement in his on-screen subjects' lives. This article will elucidate how Zhao's reflective style plays out through a close reading of his first completed feature documentary, Zhi Feiji/ Paper Airplane (2001), and his best-known work, Shangfang/Petition (2009). It will be argued that in Petition, Zhao parlays his ethically reflective style into an examination of the impact that China's comprised legal system has on the broader ethics of social relations.

This collection for Cultural Studies Review aims to address gaps in existing mobilities scholarship from two perspectives. First, while several articles here discuss the physical movement of various groups, the overarching focus is the complex interplay of mobile technologies and information on the one hand, and rapidly evolving formations of culture and identity on the other. Geographically, our focus is outside the ‘global north’, on a region that has perhaps been more dramatically transformed by physical, cultural and informational mobility than any other: East and Southeast Asia. Rather than taking ‘Asia’ as a category of cultural identity, this collection conceptualises the geographic region as a zone of cultural and political plurality, in which a vast array of migrations, imaginings, representations and discourses are constantly bumping up against political and cultural borders, as well as various state-sponsored and state-sanctioned ideas and images, in fascinating and often highly volatile ways. Topic covered in this collection include Hong Kong working holidaymakers in Australia (Louis Ho), literary narratives of overseas adoptees who have returned to South Korea (Ethan Waddell), online debates and conflicts between Chinese migrants and local Chinese-Singaporeans (Sylvia Ang), the politics of representing urban demolition and relocation in independent Chinese documentaries (Dan Edwards), the ‘glocalisation’ of Japanese anime culture in the online space in China (Asako Saito) and the representation of migrant worker experience in South Korean cinema (Sina Kim).

China’s transformation in the reform era has been most immediately experienced by many ordinary citizens in spatial terms, as existing urban communities have been dispersed and their environments levelled, to be replaced by ‘spaces of flows’ that prioritise speed, mobility and circulation. A wide range of Chinese films have represented this experience from the perspective of existing urban communities. This article argues that in certain ‘unofficial’ documentaries produced outside China’s state-sanctioned channels of production and distribution, using small, highly mobile digital video cameras, an engagement with grassroots communities has opened up a new space on screen, in which a critical questioning of the developmental ethos driving contemporary China becomes evident. A close analysis of Ou Ning’s Meishi Street (2006), Shu Haolun’s Nostalgia (2006) and Du Haibin’s A Young Patriot (2015) will illustrate how the unofficial spaces of localised, grassroots cultures (minjian) are represented in these works as sites of resistance to the coercive imposition of a globalised modernity on Chinese cities.

Zhang Zhen has recently brought Jane M. Gaines’ notion of “political mimesis” to bear on a young lineage of Chinese activist documentaries. This article considers the appropriateness of political mimesis as a critical tool for understanding Chinese activist works, arguing it needs to be heavily qualified. The article proposes that Laura Rascaroli’s theorisation of the essay film can help us understand the critical dialogue Chinese activist documentaries seek to open with viewers, through a close analysis of Hu Jie’s pioneering Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2004). The article considers how Hu Jie encourages the forging of an emotional bond between viewers and his film’s absent subject – the murdered dissident Lin Zhao – via the filmmaker’s embodied presence on screen. It then analyses how Hu Jie uses a mode of direct, embodied address to insert viewers into a politicised dialogue in the film’s concluding moments, via an act of dialogical interpolation similar to that which Rascaroli describes in relation to the essay film. It is through its emotive representation of a political “martyr” and the interpolation of the viewer into a politicised dialogue relevant to the present that Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul achieves is efficacy as an “activist” text.

This introduction to the special issue, ‘Engagement, Witnessing and
Activism: Independent Chinese Documentary Filmmakers’ Different
Positions, Approaches and Aesthetics,’ argues that how the political
is registered and expressed in Chinese activist documentaries
cannot simply be read through Western ideas, concepts and
aesthetics. Rather, Chinese work has been shaped partly in
relation to state-sanctioned public discourse, and partly through
the localising of international influences according to Chinese
socio-political conditions. Contemporary Chinese activist
documentary makers have chosen as their primary modus
operandi an open, exploratory engagement with the ‘grassroots’
(jiceng). The core commitment in this approach is to the truth of
the on-screen subject’s experience as they themselves see it. Modes
of engagement with the grassroots include: making visible people
and identities that state-sanctioned representations hide or gloss
over; bearing witness to events and situations that are similarly
hidden, or presented in a very particular manner, in state sanctioned
representations; and exploring memories and historical
experiences which are otherwise unacknowledged or presented
within narrow interpretive parameters in state-sanctioned media.
This introduction details how the articles in this special issue
analyse and discuss Chinese activist works that utilise one or more
of these modes.