Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. ix, 397 pp. (Figures.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-4682-4.
Independent cinema in China constitutes one of the most exciting cultural scenes in the world today; the diversity of aesthetics and critical voices has generated immense social energy and attracted increasing attention at film festivals and in film scholarship. DV-Made China provides a rigorous and up-to-date treatment of the subject, making a unique contribution by its parallel inquiry of technological change and social transformation.
DV-Made China’s transnational and comparative perspective gives the book a unique edge: highly conversant with methodological innovations in film studies and new media studies, the book draws its attention more specifically to the implications of digital technology on film production and exhibition as well as on articulations of plural subjectivities and modes of social interaction, thus linking alternative film practice afforded by digital technology with social change. This sensitive reading of technological change, aesthetic experimentation, and social transformation is carried out by an interdisciplinary field of innovative and rigorous scholars from film studies, anthropology, comparative literature, and cultural studies, engaging their own experiences in filmmaking, curating, and exhibiting.
The book is divided into two main parts, each constituted by six essays. The first part, focusing on ethical and political stakes, sets the stage with a penetrating analysis by Abé Mark Nornes, who critiques the dominance of observational cinema in China as suppressing concerns of ethical responsibilities for filmmaking. The “visible hidden camera,” for Nornes, registers the tension between the filmmaker’s claimed objectivity and the lack of contractual consent between the documentary filmmaker and the filmed subject. This lack of reflection and consent, Nornes argues, perpetuates the exploitation of film subjects’ marginality. Filmmaker and anthropologist J. P. Sniadecki, however, offers an opposite view. Zeroing in on Chinese filmmakers’ aesthetic commitment to xianchang, or “on the scene” realism, Sniadecki takes a phenomenological approach by highlighting the embodied nature of the documentary camera. The corporality of the camera and the rich heterogeneity of the profilmic scene, Sniadecki argues, register an intersubjective and interobjective encounter, enabling a reflexive dimension of observational cinema by its openness to contingency. Li Jie joins this debate by introducing the politics of seeing. Using Zhao Liang’s film Petition as a case study, she draws attention to a wide range of gazes involved in documentary filmmaking and viewing with different ethical implications. The film, in effect, provides “seeing lessons” for the audience to recognize the marginalized subject, to see through the official media’s deception, and to experience and reflect on the triangulated power dynamic between the filmmaker, the state, and the film’s spectators.
Other essays in this section address a variety of ethical and political concerns. Shen Shuang situates her inquiry in the history of “crowd” studies in the West in conversation with the configuration of the crowd in modern Chinese political and visual history. She asks how independent DV generates and empowers the crowd, thus giving her readers glimpses of emergent mass publics and imagined social action. In a richly nuanced study, Robert Barnett provides a rare look at the emergence of a regional cinema in Tibet through five different types of digital cinema and broaches the problem of representation and self-representation. The first part concludes with Gao Dan’s sensitive treatment of the ethics of DV distribution and exhibition, ranging from domestic online consumption to international film festivals and distribution. Gao considers these venues not as neutral sites but as regulating and delimiting, raising much needed attention to different agents involved in exhibition and distribution.
The second part of the book approaches aesthetic experimentation and activism from a variety of angles. Bérénice Reynaud draws on her extensive curatorial and exhibition experience to consider how DV in China has replaced celluloid in registering the tension between the documentary and the artistic impulse of cinema as manifested in a range of hybrid film aesthetics. Wang Qi draws insight from performance studies to provide a fascinating analysis of the tension between performance and documentary, as demonstrated differently in Li Ning’s highly avant-garde and self-reflexive documentary Tape in contrast to Jia Zhangke’s celebrated 24 Cities. Whereas Jia tries to smooth out the difference between nonfiction and fiction, Li’s varied aesthetic strategies open up the performance space for reality with all its contingency and in effect disrupts the power hierarchy between the filmmaker and the film subject by allowing the latter’s performance to range from collaboration to violent address.
Other essays in the section, including those by Luke Robinson and Angela Zito, examine alternative media and aesthetics in relation to the building of alternative communities. Robinson highlights the challenge and promise of “small media” in a new generation of queer cinema that mobilizes networking and incorporation beyond the performative paradigm in building LGBT communities. Zito turns to filmmaker Gan Xiao’er’s negotiation with a local Christian community between representation and self-representation. Whereas Gan prefers modernist aesthetics in creating an artistic object for global circulation, the Christian community pushes towards narrative affect, treating film as a community-building process rather than an object, ironically driving at a more avant-garde conception of film than Gao’s by integrating art in everyday praxis.
Paola Voci introduces an unusual subject in alternative cinema, “animateur” films—amateur animation shorts distributed online or through mobile media. Voci extends her discussion of “light” media from her own fascinating book on independent cinema and considers how the amateur mode of animation production and distribution embraces a liminal space of playfulness and participatory spectatorship. Voci connects animateur films to the exhibitionist film tradition in early cinema and invites a broader dialogue with film and digital media studies. The section culminates with Zhang Zhen’s powerful analysis of aesthetic affect in political activist DV. Zhang canvases a broad range of politically engaging documentary to consider the critical purchase of what she calls the “digital political mimesis,” (317) which fashions the indexical possibility of digital media with melodrama, thus creating an updated “pathos of fact” in postsocialist media. Zhang concludes by noting the shift in documentary activism from pathos to everyday playfulness, leaving open creative possibilities for aesthetic and social engagement with independent digital video.
Rich, sober, innovative, and provocative, DV-Made China is a highly desirable addition to the literature of contemporary Chinese society, culture, and media.
Weihong Bao
University of California, Berkeley, USA
pp. 138-140