Bringing the Transnational Back Into Documentary Cinema: Wu

Johnson, Matthew D. "Bringing the Transnational Back into Documentary Cinema: Wu Wenguang’s China Village Documentary Project, Participatory Video and the NGO Aesthetic." 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. 255–282. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 25 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501300103.ch-014>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 25 September 2021, 03:18 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. 14 Bringing the Transnational Back into Documentary Cinema : Wu Wenguang’s China Village Documentary Project, Participatory Video and the NGO Aesthetic Matthew D. Johnson Chinese cinema is often understood through stark, even extreme contrasts. State against private. Studio-made against independent. Fifth Generation against Sixth Generation. Fiction against documentary. Above-ground against underground. Commercial against avant-garde. Professional against amateur. To an extent, this method of labelling Chinese films and their creators reflects a certain polarizing of opinion concerning China itself – specifically, the People’s Republic of China. China’s government is either loved or hated. Authoritarianism is either resilient or brittle. China’s rise will either give way to global economic prosperity or to a Third World War. In the cases of both Chinese cinema and China generally, one of the most frequently invoked contrasts is that of the state (‘the party-state,’ ‘the Chinese Communist Party,’ ‘the Party,’ ‘Beijing,’ ‘Zhongnanhai,’ and so on) in contra- distinction to some non-state counterpart: society, film directors, artists, the people, ordinary Chinese. This last contrast is telling. It reflects the fact that for many people, whether PRC citizens or those living outside of China, social realities are understood primarily in terms of a state/society dichotomy.1 In this chapter, I argue that twenty-first-century China, and by extension twenty-first-century Chinese cinema, can no longer be understood as occupied by only two types of forces: state and society (or, perhaps more appropriately, by the party-state and everyone else). Among the elements missing from this mainstream state/society vision are transnational actors. In political terms, this third group of actors includes transnational civil society organizations and foundations, multinational corporations, international institutions and agencies, and NGOs.2 As I will demonstrate, all of these actors play a role in the production of moving image culture within China and in the dissemination of that culture abroad. Curiously, however, transnational actors have been effectively written out of accounts of how films made in China, particularly documentaries, are 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 255 14/04/2014 09:12 256 China’s iGeneration produced and circulated.3 With the exception of an emerging body of scholarship on international film festivals, the state/society dichotomy dominates our understanding of who produces Chinese cinema, how it is produced, and what mechanisms are involved in its exhibition.4 The diversity and influence of transnational actors should not be overstated, but, as this chapter shows, their activities further complicate our understanding of what constitutes independent cultural production within the context of twenty-first-century, iGeneration China.5 To be clear, my concept of ‘the transnational’ refers specifically to state and non-state actors whose activities reach across national boundaries; in other words, it is grounded in transnational relations theory.6 As I show in this chapter, connections between independent producers and cross-border partnerships and between international organizations and Chinese government actors have promoted documentary activity in ways that connect the state, filmmakers and citizens through development and governance reform. My case study is the China Village Documentary Project (Zhongguo cunmin yingxiang jihua, 2005–8).7 To most observers of the Chinese cinema scene, the project was a product of one of the premier centres of independent documentary filmmaking in China – the Caochangdi Workstation, founded by preeminent documentarian and independent, cultural luminary Wu Wenguang. The conventional story is that Wu, under his own initiative and with funding from the European Union–China Training Programme on Village Governance (about which considerably more will be said below), recruited ten villagers from all over China to receive training in digital video filmmaking and then to document life in their home villages. This footage was later edited by a team of younger filmmakers associated with Wu and screened inter- nationally along with another documentary, Seen and Heard (Jian Yi, 2006), which detailed the origins of the project and process of recruiting, selecting, and training the villagers. The China Village Documentary Project went on to receive modest international acclaim. Moreover, it solidified Wu’s reputation as a filmmaker inter- ested in marginal people and everyday life, and concerned with the question of how artistic ‘amateurs’ – like the ten villager filmmakers – might be empowered by the use of relatively low-cost digital technology. In subsequent years, Wu has pursued these concerns even further, establishing the Folk Memory Documentary History project to produce an oral history of the 1958–62 Great Leap Forward famine. One problem with this narrative is that it is not entirely true. Or, to put it another way, its credibility depends more on the abstractions of cinematic auteur theory, which assumes that authorship in film is determined solely by the personal vision of a single director, without examining how the films of the China Village Documentary Project were actually produced.8 In the sections that follow, I attempt to lay out more precisely how the project became an addition to Wu Wenguang’s rich oeuvre by tracing its origins through a complex narrative spanning post-Mao political reform, European Union promotion of China’s village democratization and self-government, Ford Foundation-funded development initiatives in Yunnan province, and reviews and promotional materials framing the documentary project as a product of Wu’s singular artistic sensibility. To return to my argument, I am trying to show that independent filmmaking in contemporary China is entangled with a range of transnational forces 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 256 14/04/2014 09:12 Bringing the Transnational Back into Documentary Cinema 257 that are rarely accounted for in scholarly appraisals of the independent film scene. NGOs, international programmes linking foreign governments directly to China’s citizenry, and cross-border cultural funding have expanded the range of opportunities for independent moving image producers, many of whom had previously relied on the better-documented international film festival circuit for patronage and exposure. They have also influenced the form of independent filmmaking itself, thus giving rise to what I call an NGO Aesthetic – a visual culture of citizen empowerment, if not activism, which privileges the principle that ordinary people should ‘tell their own stories’ as a means of transforming lower-class society into legible terrain.9 With respect to the themes of this volume, the story told here emphasizes the point that China’s accelerating internationalization, coupled with technological change, has made it difficult to continue viewing state/society relations in dichot- omous terms, or to ignore connections between visual practices in China and avant-garde artistic movements elsewhere in the world. Establishing alternatives to more dated views, however, requires careful sociological and textual analysis and a willingness to get beyond more familiar narratives concerning the recent history of filmmaking in the PRC. In particular, I find that most interpretations of the China Village Documentary Project – including those circulated by Wu Wenguang and by frequently overlooked project co-producer Jian Yi – tend to appeal to a ‘bad state, good society’ sensibility familiar to observers of contemporary Chinese politics and cinema alike. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to determine whether such a sensibility is justified. But it is possible to demonstrate that by valorizing Wu and his team of villager filmmakers as authors of the China Village Documentary Project, while ignoring or downplaying the project’s transnational origins, we are missing something important about the way that state and international forces are transforming the context in which independent culture is produced. Instead, by searching for clues that might allow us to ‘bring the transnational back in,’ we make it possible to understand how changes in iGeneration moving image culture are not only being driven by engagement with domestic realities, but also by an equally important dynamic of engagement with visual culture and media practices from other, non-cinematic contexts. Transnationalism is thus part of the texture of contemporary Chinese filmmaking, and as such deserves to be considered alongside national politics, temporality, neoliberalism, technology, and other analytics

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