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Digital Jianghu: Independent Documentary in a Beijing Art Village Digital Jianghu: Independent Documentary in a Beijing Art Village The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Sniadecki, John Paul. 2013. Digital Jianghu: Independent Documentary in a Beijing Art Village. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11064403 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Digital Jianghu: Independent Documentary in a Beijing Art Village A dissertation presented by John Paul Sniadecki to The Department of Anthropology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Social Anthropology with Media Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 30, 2013 © 2013 J.P. Sniadecki All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisors: Arthur Kleinman & Lucien Taylor Author: J.P. Sniadecki Digital Jianghu: Independent Documentary in a Beijing Art Village ABSTRACT My ethnography explores the independent documentary film community in Songzhuang, an artist village in Beijing’s Tongzhou District. Through participant- observation, interviews, participation in festivals, and my own filmmaking practice, I describe filmmakers and festival organizers as cultural producers endeavoring to work outside the confines of both the government and the mainstream cinema industry. To offer an analysis of the social, political, economic, and ethical conditions of this independent film community, my study also focuses on concrete practices of filmmakers and film supporters; privately-owned centers and social networks that enable the production, exhibition, and distribution of films; and the relationship between this community and government regulation. I argue that the independent documentary community constitutes a jianghu (literally, “rivers and lakes”), which, drawing from Chinese literature, I delimit as a social world of marginality and resistance against the status quo. Further, jianghu refers not only to independent filmmakers, but also to millions of “migrants” within the Chinese population who, even as they provide labor that fuels development, nonetheless subsist on the margins. This study also considers the efforts of filmmakers and scholars to elucidate a Chinese visual aesthetic, which has been called xianchang (“on the spot”) and, most recently, jingguan dianying (“quiet observational cinema”). These indigenous framings counter eurocentric notions of iii documentary and prevail among the majority of independent directors as an aesthetic well- suited to represent the “cruelty of the social,” a term I introduce to describe social suffering born not only of China’s modern history of pain but also its contemporary turbulent era. I draw together the issues of distribution, social impact, and economic stability for independent documentary, as well as document the role of the state in quelling, censoring, and co-opting independent film. I conclude by exploring xianchang and my own filmmaking practice as advancing a form of knowledge that, owing to its experiential quality and its refusal to simplify and reduce phenomena into cultural data, is well-suited to represent the inherent complexity of Chinese society. Finally, a coda documents recent government oppression and festival cancellations to argue that the current moment is one of grave uncertainty for Chinese independent film. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One 34 Jianghu and the Rise of Songzhuang Chapter Two 78 Aesthetics & Ethics of Chinese Independent Documentary: Intersubjectivity, Interobjectivity, and the Cruelty of the Social Chapter Three 119 The State, Distribution, and Co-optation: Jia Zhangke, Zhao Liang, and Ai Weiwei Chapter Four 159 Lock-ups and Close-Downs: the political obstacles faced by Ai Weiwei and Li Xianting Film Fund Chapter Five 189 Reflections on Filmmaking, Writing, and Witnessing Coda 238 v Dedicated to the memory of Paola Sandri, my dear friend and my inspiration vi Acknowledgements This project began in August of 2008 with my first visit to the Li Xianting Film Fund office and Fanhall Films in Beijing’s far-flung artist village of Songzhuang. That visit and the individuals I met engendered in me the exhiliration of possibility and a comforting sense of connecting with one’s peers. In some ways, for me it was a homecoming to a community I had never entered before but yet had been hoping to find after a decade of living between the United States and China, working a wide range of seemingly disconnected jobs, from dishwasher to truck driver to instructor. Here, in Songzhuang, I had finally met up with fellow creative spirits whose dedication to the filmmaking craft and the possibilities of cinema mirrored the emerging community of filmmaker-anthropologists producing films in the newly-formed Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, which I had the honor of joining in its first year. This initial visit to Songzhuang was followed by a second and a third, until I was regularly spending weekends and then weeks in Songzhuang over the next few years. My gratitude thus goes out to all the individuals who so generously opened their homes and their lives to me, and shared their insights and opinions not only about independent documentary, but also the broader political landscape in China. Foremost among them are Zhu Rikun, Li Xianting, Wang Wo, Xu Xin, Xu Ruotao, Li Hongqi, Lu Zhixin, and Huang Xiang. Filmmakers, scholars, and cinephiles who do not live in Songzhuang but also kindly contributed to my understanding of this sphere of alternative film production include Ai Weiwei, Zhang Yaxuan, Zhang Xianmin, Feng Yan, Wu Wenguang, Hao Jian, Wang Xiaolu, Hu Jie, Wang Hongwei, Jia Zhangke, Zhao Liang, Wang Bing, Xue Jianqiang, Huang Weikai, Ji Dan, Yi Sicheng, He Yuan, Lu Xinyu, Qiu Jiongjiong, Wu Haohao, Cong Feng, Ying Liang, Xu Tong, and Zhang Zanbo, among many others. vii I owe a tremendous debt to Arthur Kleinman, whose skilled guidance and indefatiguable support kept this project moving forward. Arthur also provided critical feedback with each new draft, which he read and responded to with astounding and inimitable speed. I also wish to express a great deal of gratitude to Lucien Castaing-Taylor for the many theoretical contributions his friendship and his tutelage made to my empirical and phenomenologically-inflected approach, as well as for his amazing and tireless support for each of my filmmaking endeavors. Angela Zito, as an expert member of the diverse “tribe” that makes up the Chinese independent cinema community, has held an ongoing dialogue with me regarding a wide range of questions surrounding the social processess of festival exhibitions and documentary productions, and for her insights and interrogations I am deeply grateful. Angela also co-organized with Zhang Zhen a symposium at New York University titled “DV-made China” for which I prepared a version of chapter two of this dissertation. I also would like to thank David N. Rodowick for his encouragement and guidance early on in the project, and for his help in structuring my overall research plan and its scope. Mark Peranson, in his role as editor (and de facto commissioning editor) of the Canadian film magazine Cinema Scope, also spurred me to compose several articles and conduct a handful of interviews for popular publication, which I then later re-worked for integration into the body of this manuscript. Finally, I wish to thank the many colleagues and friends who have been interlocuters, confidantes, and supporters throughout the entire fieldwork and writing process, most notably Li Jie, Qian Ying, Joshua Neves, Wang Qi, Markus Nornes, Zhang Zhen, Shelly Kraicer, Tony Rayns, Yan Xiaoxiao, Libbie Cohn, Yuan Jing, Liao Qingrui, Alex Cockain, Odette Scott, Verena Paravel, Toby Lee, Diana Allan, and Berenice Reynaud. viii INTRODUCTION On a typical smoggy and muggy Beijing afternoon in mid-August 2012, filmmakers, artists, cinephiles, and scholars gathered at the Original Art Expo Complex (yuanchuang yishu zhongxin) located along the main artery of Songzhuang, a dusty, gentrified artist village on the far eastern outskirts of the Beijing municipality. In the spacious main hall, over 500 people gathered for the opening ceremony of the 9th Beijing Independent Film Festival (BiFF), organized by the Li Xianting Film Fund. Wang Hongwei, who most film fans recognize from his acting career in Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s celebrated underground film productions of the mid-to-late 1990s, played the festival host as he paced back and forth with a cordless microphone on a stage flanked with tall audio monitors that sputtered and hissed his welcoming remarks. Wang introduced Li Xianting himself, who greeted the sizable crowd – the largest ever gathered for an independent film event in Songzhuang – and thanked the several festival sponsors, a group of successful contemporary artists whose rise to fame and wealth benefited from Li’s earlier passionate work as a leading curator and critic of China’s emerging art world. Next, the directors whose films were selected for this edition’s program were invited to the stage to introduce themselves. Due to a multitude of factors – the unexpectedly impressive turnout of people, the inherently precarious nature of independent cultural activities
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