Independent cinema in China is not only made outside the commercial system but also without being submitted for censorship. We know that for several decades it has been the crucible out of which China’s most exciting new films have flowed. The essays in this volume interrogate what else we think we know. Did it really start with Wu Wenguang and Bumming in Beijing in 1990, or can its roots be traced back much earlier? What are its aesthetics? And its ethics, including of gender and class? Where do audiences watch these films in China and how do they circulate? And, since the 2017 Film Law defined uncensored films as illegal, is independent Chinese cinema still alive? What does it mean today? And does it have a future? The essays in this anthology—many by exciting new scholars—explore these urgent questions.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Chris Berry, Luke Robinson, Lydia Wu, and Sabrina Qiong Yu
- Genealogies
- 1. The Soil and the Scar
- A Genealogy of Photography and Documentary in Post-Mao China
- 2. Video Relics
- Hu Jie and the Official Style
- Ethics and Aesthetics
- 3. Hu Bo’s Ethics of Realism
- 4. The Filmmaker as Feminist
- 5. Of Found Objects and Projected Things
- The Relational Field in Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks and Ma Li’s Born in Beijing
- Beside the Screen: Independent Cinema as Social Practice
- 6. In Dependence and in Relation
- A Relational Sociological Approach to Chinese Independent Cinema
- 7. Distribution and Exhibition of Independent Film in China
- Informal Infrastructure and Its Affordances
- Chris Berry, Luke Robinson, and Sabrina Qiong Yu
- 8. Mediating the New Alternative Film Culture
- An Ethnographic Study of Post-Independent Exhibition Practices Since 2017
- 9. Three Modes of Independent Creative Documentary Production and the Rise of the Industrial Mode
- Community and Engagement
- 10. Cinematic Fabulation
- Trans Representation in Miss Jin Xing
- 11. Village Film and Place-Based Film Archive
- Towards an Ecological and Archival Chinese Independent Documentary
- 12. The Ethic of Collaboration
- Rethinking Chinese Independent Cinema’s Engagement with Grassroots Creativity
- Index
- List of Illustrations
- Figure 1.1. Inner pages of People’s Mourning. On the verso page, a young worker is showing a letter written in his blood: ‘Beloved Premier Zhou, we will defend you with our blood and lives.’ The recto page shows a wide shot in which the crowd applaud the
- Figure 1.2. Inner pages of People’s Mourning show people copying down poems in their notebooks or on their palms and putting up posters and wreaths around the Monument to the People’s Heroes. (Author’s photograph.)
- Figure 1.3. Screenshot from Drawing the Sword. Due to restricted access to state archives, only a lower-resolution version of this film is currently available for studies.
- Figure 1.4. Screenshots from Public. (Reproduced with permission of Elaine Wing-ah Ho and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga.)
- Figure 2.1. After retrieving a lock of her hair from a crumpled 1966 newspaper, Hu’s camera confronts Lin’s physical remains. Here, he holds her hair in one hand, filming it with the other. (Reproduced with permission of Hu Jie.)
- Figure 3.1. An Elephant Sitting Still: Huang Ling and Wei Bu at school.
- Figure 3.2. An Elephant Sitting Still: Wang Jin and his dog.
- Figure 3.3. An Elephant Sitting Still: on their way to Manzhouli, the runaways are finally together in one shot.
- Figure 4.1. We the Workers: Activists and workers celebrating a successful collective action before their mass detention in December 2015. According to the ‘Social Unrest in China’ dataset of media reports from 2003 to 2012, worker protest is the second m
- Figure 4.2. An open ending: A bird’s eye shot from a drone shows Jinyan Zeng carrying her camera into the Hong Kong 2014 Umbrella Movement crowds and listening to protesters.
- Figure 5.1. Old Hao in her rented house. (Reproduced with permission of Ma Li.)
- Figure 5.2. Jingsheng interrupts her own story: ‘How shall I put it? Ok, let’s stop here today!’ (Reproduced with permission of Ma Li.)
- Figure 7.1. Map of Chinese Independent Cinema 2010–2013. (Credit: Peexie Image Studio.)
- Figure 8.1. The lounge of the Cinexpress. (Author’s photograph.)
- Figure 8.2. Pre-screening of the Japanese film Kai (directed by Hideo Gosha, 1985) in Ozu Bookshop. (Author’s photograph.)
- Figure 8.3. Fei and his team preparing for a Sound & Sense screening at a live music venue. (Author’s photograph.)
- Figure 9.1. IDFA Forum, the first pitching forum in the world, gathering some of the strongest documentary projects in development and production of the year. (Author’s photograph.)
- Figure 9.2. The international poster for China’s van Goghs (2016) directed by Haibo Yu and Kiki Tianqi Yu. The film was pitched at IDFA Forum in 2014 and received its world premiere at IDFA in 2016. (Reproduced with author’s permission.)
- Figure 11.1. Screenshot from Ji Sha Chronicle of the forest fire. (Credit: Wangta, From Our Eyes.)
- Figure 11.2. Screenshot from Wildflower. Pilgrims drinking homemade alcohol. (Credit: Guo Jing and Tshering Sgrolma.)
- Figure 11.3. Screenshot from Yak Dung. A Tibetan herder family uses yak dung to make a door handle. (Credit: Lanzhe, From Our Eyes.)