Contagion, Stigmatization and Utopia As Therapy in Zhao Liang's
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chapter 8 Alone Together: Contagion, Stigmatization and Utopia as Therapy in Zhao Liang’s aids Documentary Together Li Li 李力 Infectious diseases to which sexual faults are attached always inspire fears of easy contagion and bizarre fantasies of transmission by non-venereal means in public places. —susan sontag1 Introduction In 2009, when the distinguished cinematographer-turned-director Gu Chan- gwei 顾长卫 was preparing to shoot his high-profile feature film Love for Life (Zui ai 最爱),2 he made a public announcement to invite members of the hiv infected and Persons With aids (pwa) communities to participate in mak- ing a film about the aids epidemic, loosely adapted from Yan Lianke’s 阎连科 banned novel Dream of Ding Village (Dingzhuang meng 丁庄梦).3 In order to al- low the general audience to see the interactions between the crew and a group of the hiv positive volunteers who might be willing to work on the screen or behind the scenes, Gu conceived of a documentary film as a companion piece and invited Zhao Liang 赵亮 to direct this documentary, later entitled Together (Zai yiqi 在一起). Trained at the Beijing Film Academy as a photographer and media visual artist, Zhao had established himself in the rapidly expanding cir- cle of independent documentary filmmakers as “one of China’s most prolific 1 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and aids and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 115. 2 The title of this film was changed multiple times, from Moshu shidai 魔术时代 [Time of Mag- ic], Moshu waizhuan 魔术外传 [Tale of Magic] to Zui ai 罪爱 [Guilty Love]. The additional English renditions also include Life is a Miracle and Til Death Do Us Part. Kun Qian suggests in her chapter in this volume that these changes reflected director Gu Changwei’s “fundamental paradox and deepest ambivalence” in configuring the theme of this film. 3 [For a detailed discussion of Yan Lianke’s novel, see Chapter 6, by Shelley W. Chan, in this volume. Ed.] © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/97890043�9��9_0�0 Li Li - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:18:52AM via free access <UN> 232 Li and respected indie directors.”4 His Petition (Xinfang 信访) and Crime and Pun- ishment (Zui yu fa 罪与罚) are internationally well acclaimed for the director’s “fearless” speaking out for powerless people, but banned from public exhibi- tion within the country. Zhao accepted Gu’s invitation to make the documen- tary without much hesitation. This agreement, however, took Zhao’s career in an unexpected direction later when the Chinese Ministry of Health decided to fund half of the production cost of the projected documentary, and, sub- sequently sponsored the finished product for approval for public exhibition by the infamous Film Bureau.5 This news has provoked worldwide discussions over whether Zhao has switched paths “from rebel to insider,” as the title of a major report in The New York Times suggests. In a broader sense, this dispute over Zhao’s engagement with a state-sanctioned project is more about changes in the nature of independent film making in present-day China.6 Though there 4 Cindy Carter, English translator of Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village, offers this comment in her recent interview with Ethnic ChinaLit. Carter has closely worked with Zhao Liang in the past decade and translated the subtitles of four out of five documentaries Zhao made. See Bruce Humes, “The Transparent Translator: Cindy Carter on ‘Dream of Ding Village’,” Ethnic ChinaLit, http://www.bruce-humes.com/?p=6871 (accessed Aug. 23, 2012). 5 The film, completed in November 2010, was shown in seventeen Chinese cities on World aids Day (Dec. 1). It was selected to participate in the 61st Berlin International Film Festival in the following February and nominated for the 25th Teddy Award, a lesbian-gay film award officially recognized by the film festival. Then, it also screened in the 35th Hong Kong Inter- national Festival in Mar. 2011. 6 In the Aug. 14, 2011 edition of The New York Times, Edward Wong contributed a lengthy re- port featuring Zhao Liang, titled “Chinese Director’s Path from Rebel to Insider,” commenting that Zhao “has made several independent documentaries and now a state-sanctioned one [Together], a move that has cost him some friends.” One such lost friend is the high-profile fulminator Ai Weiwei 艾未未. Ai furiously criticized Zhao for accepting government funding, and associated this fact with Zhao’s decision, following Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯, to withdrew his work from the 2009 Melbourne Film Festival. Critic Richard Brody of The New Yorker, how- ever, argued in his blog on the New Yorker website that although Ai’s fury is justified, because of “his horrific ordeals in order to live freely under a tyrannical régime,…he is entitled to view those who make common cause with [that régime] of any sort, as being on the wrong side of morality. But…those of us who write and make art without fear of arrest should pause before accusing Zhao of collaboration or cowardice.” Brody further argued, using Jia’s I Wish I Knew (Haishang chuanqi 海上传奇), a government-approved documentary made for the 2009 Shanghai Expo, that Jia’s work is a rich, symbolic art which is “ingeniously conceived to say exactly what is on his mind regardless of external constraints.” Despite his apparent effort to save Jia’s and Zhao’s works from Ai’s self-righteous attack, Brody’s comments perpetuate a lasting and simplistic binary between the “State” and the “independent” filmmakers. In fact the boundaries between old categories, such as the official, the intellectual, the underground, the dissident, the mainstream, the popular, are constantly changing, either re-dividing or Li Li - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:18:52AM via free access <UN> Alone Together 233 have appeared sizable debates in newspapers and on the Internet about the funding of Together and whether this had changed the way Zhao makes docu- mentaries, few in-depth investigations have been made into the thematic and stylistic experiments in which Zhao engaged while making Together, exploring such aspects as how those experiments contribute to the existing Chinese nar- ratives of the aids epidemic, and what kinds of cultural work these narratives do in changing or enhancing public understanding of the aids epidemic. This chapter aims at a close examination of Zhao Liang’s making of Togeth- er through investigation of such matters as how the disease of aids is con- structed in Together, as a medical problem, a social issue, an individual agony, and a collective socio-psychological crisis, and how the disease is texturized to become “the spectacle” through language, visual images, sounds, or silence. It demonstrates that, whether entrenched in medical or social rhetorical realms, the fear and fantasy of aids contagion in China is always closely associated with the “risk group” considered prone to spread the disease as well as pollute public morality. The complex, often paradoxical, nature of aids seems to be perfectly captured by the oxymoronic “alone together.” Indeed, aids (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is believed to be “acquired” from “the other,” suggesting human contact, relatedness, interconnectedness, that is, intimate “togetherness.” This disease, however, has been so threatening to the sense of protection that it has forced the carriers of the hiv virus into a stigmatized and insular life—the desperate “aloneness,” as this essay demonstrates from merging, in postsocialist China. In this regard, Paul Pickowicz and Yinjing Zhang shed im- portant new light on our understanding. In the Preface to their co-edited From Underground to Independent: Alternative Film Culture in Contemporary China (Lanham: Rowman & Little- field, 2006), ix–x, Pickowicz and Zhang call our attention to two important points about Chi- nese “independent” films and filmmakers: first, “independent means a cinematic project’s independence from the state system of production, distribution, and exhibition, rather than from its sources of financial support…,” not necessarily due to censorship pressures; second, Chinese directors are “divided as to their self-positioning to postsocialist politics. While some may thrive on political controversy by astutely acquiring and cashing in on their ‘political capital’ overseas…, others insist on the ‘apolitical’ nature of their work, strategically distanc- ing themselves from previously cherished roles of intellectual spokespersons for the nation and the party.” This is probably why Zhao claimed that, though he “did not directly oppose the party,” “his subjects, from oppressed peasants to drug-addicted rock musicians, live on China’s margins,” as Edward Wong mentioned in his report. Indeed, to rigorously search mar- ginal issues and bring out the voices of the underrepresented communities and the innova- tive aesthetics are the essential characteristics of Zhao’s documentaries, including Together. For Richard Brody’s comments cited here, see Kevin Lee, “The New Yorker’s Richard Brody on Zhao Liang, Jia Zhangke, Ai Weiwei,” dGenerate Films, Aug. 23, 2011, dgeneratefilms.com./ page/24 (accessed Aug. 1, 2012). Li Li - 9789004319219 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:18:52AM via free access <UN> 234 Li place to place. Whereas “the terrible accident of the hiv epidemic and the ter- rifying social threats constructed around it gave new virulence to the category of ‘deviance’,”7 Zhao’s faith on being “together” as a “family” supplies a wishful, utopian therapy for a psychological release of social threats, however ambiva- lent and imaginary. Means of aids Contagion, Types of Moral Story The emergence of certain diseases is often conceived by historians as condi- tioned by modern times. For instance, sexually transmitted diseases are often imagined as a side effect of increased physical mobility, social interconnected- ness in the historical contexts of industrialization, urbanization, colonialism, and globalization with their consequent transgression of old social norms, individual boundaries, and inspiration of unconventional ways of living.