Abstract
“In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it.” - Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1971 In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau gazes down upon New York City from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre and sees the island of Manhattan as an image. In particular, he witnesses the famous Manhattan skyline as a powerful ‘image-text’ containing a multiplicity of meanings, interpretations, and symbols. Considering the possibilities of the city as visual simulacrum he asks: “[i]s the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation; an optical artefact?” Twenty or so years after De Certeau wandered the streets of New York and pondered its pictorial power, such a perspective can be applied to Olympic and Post Olympic Beijing. The Olympic Games gave the world an opportunity to read Beijing’s powerful image-text following thirty years of rapid transformation. David Harvey argues that this transformation has turned Beijing from “a closed backwater, to an open centre of capitalist dynamism.” However, in the creation of this image-text, another subtler and altogether very different image-text has been deliberately erased from the public gaze. This more concealed image-text offers a significant counter narrative on the city’s public image and criticises the simulacrum constructed for the 2008 Olympics, both implicitly and explicitly. It is the ‘everyday’ image-text of a disappearing city still in the process of being bulldozed to make way for the neoliberal world’s next megalopolis. It exists most prominently as a filmic image text; in film documentaries about a ‘real’ hidden Beijing just below the surface of the government sponsored ‘optical artefact.’ Film has thus become a key medium through which to understand and preserve a physical city on the verge of erasure.
Highlights
Meishi Street (2006) courtesy of Icarus Films ‘In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it’
Abstract: “In China, what makes an image true is that it is good for people to see it.” - Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1971 In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau gazes down upon New York City from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre and sees the island of Manhattan as an image
Considering the possibilities of the city as visual simulacrum he asks: “[i]s the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes anything more than a representation; an optical artefact?” Twenty or so years after De Certeau wandered the streets of New York and pondered its pictorial power, such a perspective can be applied to Olympic and Post Olympic Beijing
Summary
The documentary impulse and obsession with preserving the built environment through image in the build-up to the Olympics, was the catalyst for a community film project located in Beijing’s Da Zha Lan district; an inner city area south of Tiananmen Square made up of pre-Revolution courtyard housing and set along traditional hutong alleyways. In line with the general ethos of the New Documentary Movement, this can be seen as an innovative way of emancipating the image of Beijing from the powers of official representation, rebranding, and image maintenance; all of which increasingly meet the neoliberalist demands and soft power interests of corporations and the state This idea of emancipating the image resonates with Lu Xinyu’s ‘vision of reality’; the idea of freeing the image from old ideological narratives and allowing it to be left open to uncontrolled interpretation. What follows is a slightly more provocative montage of images beginning with Zhang Jinli’s half demolished home and several long take shots of other houses along the same street, in similar states of disrepair These naturalistic images of brick piles, slum like conditions and half demolished homes are in stark contrast to the spectacular television images of official Olympic Beijing. In place of the fantasy of Olympic Beijing, Zhang’s locally constructed images present us the destruction of a reality
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