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China's Igeneration Gao, Dan. "From Pirate to Kino-eye: A Genealogical Tale of Film Re-Distribution in China." 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. 125–146. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501300103.ch-007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 00:32 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. 7 From Pirate to Kino-eye: A Genealogical Tale of Film Re-Distribution in China Dan Gao In recent years, the problem of piracy has become an ever more prevalent part, and contested practice, of cultural communication and consumption around the world, due in large part to both globalization and digital technology. With a proliferation of news stories about copyright infringement lawsuits and government crackdowns on piracy in China, it is no longer a secret to the rest of the world that piracy has consti- tuted a thriving and stubbornly persistent black-market ‘profession’ and a ‘culture’ in the country for more than three decades. Since the Economic Opening-up [gaige kaifang], starting in the early 1980s, China’s piracy practice has already been studied heavily in academe, drawing scholarly interest in the fields of critical legal studies, sociology and communication studies.1 In terms of film piracy, two in-depth book-length studies written almost a decade ago have laid the groundwork for empirical research and theoretical contemplation – Shujen Wang’s Framing Piracy: Globalization and Film Distribution in Greater China (2003) and Laikwan Pang’s Cultural Control and Globalization in Asia: Copyright, Piracy, and Cinema (2005). Both works approach film piracy in China from a transnational perspective, with a shared emphasis on the post-VCD era (the technology of VCD became obsolete fairly fast in the West after the rise of DVD, but in China’s case, VCD remained an effective format from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s). While Pang ultimately reaffirms piracy’s viral effect upon the transnational creative industry in general, Wang is one of the earliest media scholars to move the spotlight away from the right/wrong moral–legal debate on piracy to its actual practices (i.e. distribution and consumption of pirated film) in East Asia – ‘in the hope of knowing the actual experiences consumers had when using pirated products.’2 Yingjin Zhang advocates the kind of switch of attention made by Wang, pointing to the significant cultural role that piracy has played in China. Zhang has gone even further, embracing the study of piracy as a whole new area of audience research, suggesting that we may better understand contemporary moviegoers by looking back at the history of film piracy, given the fact that illegitimate copies (in the formats of LD, VHS, VCD, DVD, CD-ROM, online streaming video, etc.) have been and continue to be one of the major means through which films are viewed in China.3 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 125 14/04/2014 09:12 126 China’s iGeneration In this chapter, I will expand and at times depart from Zhang and Wang’s lines of thought, arguing that it is important to keep in mind that piracy, as a mode of economic and cultural practice, is a dialectical process. In other words, as people participate in illegitimate copying and viewing of media products, they are also subjected to the transformation and construction brought about by piracy culture. This naturally makes one ask: what kind of new subjects does piracy produce? This question can lead to further questions. For instance, what kind of customs, tastes, sensibilities and knowledge are being produced alongside this subject formation of the digital ‘pirate?’ What kind of techniques do ‘pirates’ use to posit themselves within the fissure between postsocialist reality and the pirated, ‘informal’ media worlds? (Here, I am referring to both the shadowy ‘underground world’ of piracy commerce and ‘the rest of the world’ – i.e. the world beyond China – encapsulated in the pirated foreign media products, which the pirates consume and sometimes uneasily seek to identify with). How do they live with or resist the postsocialist civic order of things and the neoliberal culture in post-WTO China, to which piracy is at once an alleged enemy and a secret accomplice, by constituting part of the ‘shadow economies of cinema,’ as Ramon Lobato calls it?4 To me, these questions are no less important than the ones about the so-called ‘new people’ [xinren] (i.e. postsocialist subjects), which featured prominently in popular literary and filmic imaginations in the 1980s and 1990s.5 Indeed, the ‘pirate’ may be a close kin or subspecies of the ‘new people,’ whose legacy has been fleshed out more saliently in the new millennium. The participants in the piracy culture I describe here do not only refer to the audience/consumer of piracy, but also include the producers (smugglers, owners of the reproduction factories, ordinary viewers-turned-bootleggers), distributors (whole- salers, storekeepers, street vendors, file-sharing netizens) and other possible constituent subjects; even scholars and cultural critics who are sympathetic with piracy culture (Zhang, myself and many others) can be counted among these informal distribution provocateurs. Indeed, in practice, participants in piracy are not locked within one single identity, but usually morph from one form to another, depending on their given activity and predilection. For instance, a person who goes by a pseudonym when publishing reviews in online film discussion boards such as ‘Rear Window’ houchuang[ kan dianying] (named after a well-known film BBS in China in the early 2000s) may, once he goes offline, reveal his other identity as the owner of a ‘DVD theatre’ in the corner of the street, enthusiastically changing his persona from a serious petty intellectual to boisterous informal street merchant.6 If I may use the signifier ‘pirate’ to bracket all the morphologies of this subject, then the focus of this chapter will be on two of them, whom I call the ‘pirate-cinephile’ and the ‘pirate-eye’ (a term inspired by Dziga Vertov’s idea of ‘kino-eye’). Of course, due to the limited space, it is not realistic for me to deal with all of the questions about the pirates that are stated above. As the metaphor ‘from pirate to kino-eye’ from this chapter title suggests, my major goal here is to narrate the transformation certain pirates undergo and look at how they reconstruct their experience with film piracy in their writings and audiovisual works. To be more precise, my question is: how has the genealogical trope – ‘transforming from a pirate to a kino-eye’ – become a narrative that plays into so many recent independent films? 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 126 14/04/2014 09:12 From Pirate to Kino-eye 127 In the first half of this chapter, I will give a brief account of the piracy film culture that has developed in China in the past three decades, in order to explain the trans- formative nature of the subjects whom I call the ‘pirate-cinephile’ and the ‘pirate-eye.’ This step of analysis is informed by Walter Benjamin’s theory of ‘mimetic faculty,’ Dziga Vertov’s ideal of the ‘kino-eye,’ and recent theoretical reconsideration of ‘cinephilia’ as a desirable mode of film culture in China. Then, I will closely examine several fiction films (such as Platform [Zhan Tai, Jia Zhangke 2000], Suzhou River [Suzhou He, Lou Ye 2000], and Pirated Copy [Man Yan, He Jianjun 2004]), which represent archetypal ‘pirate-eye’ characters. I will finish my analysis with a discussion of two documentaries about pirated DVD vendors (who are transmuted by the practice of piracy). A generation of pirate-cinephile It is almost self-evident that one of the most historically significant aspects of piracy film culture in China is that it has nurtured and shaped a considerable portion of the consumers and creators of Chinese film in the new millennium. Right at the beginning of China’s Economic Reform, the Chinese government started to allow the entry of non-state economic elements (individually owned economic enterprises in particular) into the market.7 The field of media production, however, was still generally kept in the hands of the state. The rights to publish and reproduce print publications (yinshua chubanwu – books, magazines, journals and newspapers) and audiovisual publications (yinxiang chubanwu – tapes, videocassettes and optical discs) were exclusively entitled to a small number of state-owned presses,8 whose production capacities (in terms of both the variety of titles and the quality of the output) were quite incompatible with the citizens’ enormous appetite for cultural products, which was recognized at that time as a new form of ‘cultural fever’ (wenhua re). A ‘book famine’ (shu huang) soon swept China.9 Similar problems plagued the field of film during this period. In the early stage of the Reform Era, film and TV were still financed and tightly controlled by the state at every step of production and distribution. In 1979, 65 fiction films were produced in mainland China, while the country’s moviegoing audience in that year was 29.3 billion – meaning the average citizen had watched an estimated 28 films that year.10 These striking numbers clearly point to a severe imbalance between demand and supply, and are simultaneously indicative of Chinese audiences’ rising passion for film. Unfortunately, domestic film output remained low throughout much of the 1980s (only 82 to 158 fiction films were produced per year; in comparison, two decades later, this number has tripled – the film output in 2009 was 456).11 In addition, film imports were heavily restricted, due to the notoriously small quota imposed by the government and stringent censorship throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
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