Qian, Ying. "Working with Rubble: Montage, Tweets and The

Qian, Ying. "Working with Rubble: Montage, Tweets and the Reconstruction of an Activist Documentary." China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu and Luke Vulpiani. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 181–196. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501300103.ch-010>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 00:20 UTC. Copyright © Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, Luke Vulpiani and Contributors 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 10 Working with Rubble: Montage, Tweets and the Reconstruction of an Activist Documentary Ying Qian I have taken the title of this essay from the last sequence in Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie’s documentary film Our Children (Women de wawa, 2009). Completed in April 2009, Our Children follows the investigations carried out by grieving parents into poor qualities of public school buildings that may have led to high death rates among school children in the Wenchuan earthquake of 2008. The film ends with a sequence shot in low light by a cheap digital camera. The trembling viewfinder captures blurry images of a group of parents sneaking into collapsed schools at night to retrieve bits and pieces of the debris. During the day, most ‘ground-zero’ sites such as this one were closely watched by local police with public access restricted. Fearing that soon the site would be cleared and no evidence would remain to hold the government and the construction companies responsible, these parents rolled out concrete columns, sawed off steel frames, and brought bits and pieces of the ruins back home. Ruins are by now a familiar motif in Chinese documentary cinema. Lu Xinyu began her book-length survey of the ‘New Documentary Movement’ in 2003 with an introduction chapter entitled ‘On the Ruins of Utopia,’ tracing the birth of new documentary in early 1990s to a double disillusionment from the socialist ideals in the Mao era, and from the ideals of modernization and democratization in the 1980s.1 Abé Mark Nornes, writing about contemporary Chinese documentary cinema in 2009, observed that demolition and architectural ruins had become a visual staple for the documentarians.2 Wang Bing’s nine-hour documentary epic West of the Tracks (Tie xi qu, 2003) portrayed the gradual dissolution and abandonment of a sprawling indus- trial complex in the Tiexi District of Shenyang in northeastern China, the workplace for about a million workers. Jia Zhangke’s feature film Still Life (San Xia Hao Ren, 2006) and documentary film Dong (Dong, 2006) were both set in the Three Gorges area, where the building of the Three Gorges Dam led to entire cities and towns being razed before their complete submersion in water. In these films, the filmmakers’ auteurial cameras cast long and pensive gazes over ruins and rubble that symbolized the destruction of ideals, certainties and homes. Ruins represented absolute loss, too 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 181 14/04/2014 09:12 182 China’s iGeneration broken to be incorporated into a new structure of meaning, and the people surviving on them were more or less powerless, unable to change what was happening before their eyes. In Our Children, however, one encounters an entirely new engagement with a landscape laid to waste. Ruins became sites of investigation, rubble became evidence, and the melancholic, auteurial long-takes in previous documentaries gave way to vibrant montages of investigative footage made by the involved people themselves. The sequence that concluded Our Children, for example, was shot not by a filmmaker but by a participant in the nightly mission of stealing debris out of the school site. Since around 2004, a new activist documentary cinema has been quietly on the rise in China, and Our Children is one of its finest examples. In this essay, I examine a number of films made by this new cinema’s most important practitioners, Ai Xiaoming, Hu Jie and Ai Weiwei, in order to understand this cinema’s distinct aesthetics, epistemology, and its embedding and intervention in politics. This activist cinema, I further argue, constitutes a new response to China’s postsocialist condition. The explorations of cinema into China’s postsocialist condition have been observed by a number of scholars. Writing on both feature and documentary cinemas from China, Chris Berry and Mary Ann Farquhar have observed in many films a postsocialist cultural logic of pastiche, ambiguity and play, an ‘aesthetic parallel to postmodernism.’3 In a recently published monograph, Luke Robinson analyses Chinese independent documentary’s engagement with the fleeting, the contingent, and the ambiguous, as a response to an uncertain postsocialist environment ‘in which all sociocultural forms are semiotically unstable, and where the power to determine their significance is open to outright contestation.’4 These observations are insightful and accurate with regard to a large number of independent cinematic productions in China today, yet they do not characterize the strategies and aspirations of the emergent activist documentary. While it is true that the majority of independent documentaries, as Yiman Wang observes, do not seek to alter the social conditions in front of the camera, but only to provide a ‘densely textured,’ ‘historical’ experience to alter the way people remember things,5 activist documentaries do strive for actual social change. Therefore, rather than reflecting and articulating postsocialist experiences such as moral ambiguity, epistemological uncertainty, and loss of security and ideals to the banality of neoliberal-inspired consumerism and state capitalism, activist documentaries respond to them by resurrecting ideals based on moral reasoning at the grassroots and reasserting an epistemology based on evidence and testimony. Aiming for lucidity not ambiguity, activist documentaries deal with contingency not by denial but by understanding what one has reasons to believe. In this chapter, I begin by discussing Hu Jie’s Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (Xunzhao Lin Zhao de Linghun, 2004) and Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie’s first collaborative work, The Vagina Monologue: Backstage Stories (Yindao dubai, 2004). Resurrecting the heroic figure of the political activist calling for social change, and portraying exhilarating experiences of empowerment enabled by activism, these two films, I argue, laid the foundation for the emergent activist documentary. I then proceed to close-read Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie’s film Our Children, in which the filmmakers reinvigorated the 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 182 14/04/2014 09:12 Working with Rubble 183 use of cinematic montage to bring together fragmentary evidence and found footage, and reach for a deeper social reality made visible by the ruins after the earthquake. Finally, as Ai Xiaoming regards her earthquake documentaries as forming a series of tweets and re-tweets with Ai Weiwei’s documentaries, I discuss Ai Xiaoming’s Why are Flowers so Red (Hua’er weishenme zheyang hong, 2010) and Ai Weiwei’s Disturbing Peace (Lao ma ti hua, 2009) together as serialized and corroborated cinematic actions, and contemplate the conceptual affinities between montage, serialization and tweeting as means to bring together activist communities, and reconstruct a bottom-up activism that returns epistemological cogency and political salience to cinema. In search for the political activist: Hu Jie’s Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul and Ai Xiaoming’s The Vagina Monologue Like all new beginnings, China’s new activist cinema began with retrospection. In 2004, Hu Jie finished Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, a three-hour documentary film on Lin Zhao, a former Beijing University student condemned as a ‘rightist’ in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. A gifted writer and courageous thinker, Lin Zhao never rescinded her right to think independently and critically. Writing in her own blood on scraps of paper and bed sheets in prison, Lin Zhao produced voluminous writings amounting to hundreds of thousands of words, protesting against the ruthless political oppressions during the Anti-Rightist Campaign as well as during the first years of the Cultural Revolution. She was executed in April 1968. In the 2004 documentary, Hu Jie searched for Lin Zhao’s soul by contacting and then interviewing people who knew her and who experienced the same turbulent historical period. By finding everyone who knew Lin Zhao and contacting them for interviews, this former soldier and painter tapped into a close-knit network of memory. For years, Hu travelled all over the country to conduct interviews, which make up most of the film’s running time. The film not only resurrected the heroic figure of Lin Zhao from oblivion, but also created a collective portrait for a whole generation of people living through the darkest period of the PRC’s history, some of whom had come forward to recount their experiences and offer testimony after forty years had passed. Hu started to show rough drafts of the film in 2003, four years after the production began. Cui Weiping, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy, wrote in 2004 about the shockwaves generated by the rough cuts of Hu’s film: ‘The news of the film was passed from mouth to mouth; copies travelled from hands to hands among friends… Many shed tears, even more lost sleep over it.’6 While the film moved many, it also generated a fair amount of controversy. Cui reported that some criticized the film for its enthusiastic portrayal of Lin Zhao’s heroism. Lin Zhao, the suffering heroine, and her eventual martyrdom were considered to bear too much similarity to the heroic figures in China’s socialist era. As the documentary discourse in the 1990s had moved 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 183 14/04/2014 09:12 184 China’s iGeneration away from heroism and favoured narratives about ambivalent characters living with everyday compromises, some felt that Hu Jie’s film was nothing other than nostalgia for a lost era.7 Cui Weiping defended Hu’s film against these critiques.

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