Filming Power and the Powerless

Abstract

In autumn of 1996, Zhao Liang, an aspiring filmmaker from Liaoning and recent graduate from Lu Xun Arts Academy, was living in Beijing with other young artists and looking for a new documentary subject. One day, a photographer friend came over for a drink and suggested that he go take a look at the spectacle of petitioners at South Railway Station,(l) who come from all over China to complain about abuses and injustices committed by their local authorities. The following day, Zhao Liang took a bicycle and rode over with a DV camera. For next 12 years, he would return many times to document plights of these disenfranchised people and their confrontations with state power, as well as his own evolving relationship with his subjects, a process that parallels development of Chinese independent documentaries.The 1990s and new millennium saw rise of New Documentary Movement in China, which left behind official, grand narratives for more personal narratives about ordinary people in contemporary society/2' Early films focused on vagabond young artists, such as freelancers in Wu Wenguang's Bumming in Beijing (Liulang Beijing, 1990), experimental drama in Jiang Yue's The Other Shore (Bi'an, 1995), and punk rock musicians in Zhao Liang's first film Paper Airplane (Zhi feiji, 2001). Soon enough, new documentary filmmakers also began turning their cameras away from their marginalised selves and onto marginalised others,(3) featuring figures as diverse as migrant workers, coalminers, prostitutes, homosexuals, Christians, AIDS villagers, and suppressed voices from dustbin of history. Such a shift in subject matter in last decade produced unsanctioned memories and alternative histories such as Wang Bing's nine-hour epic West of Tracks (Tiexiqu 2003), Ying Weiwei's The Box (Hezi, 2001), Chen Weijun's To Live is Better Than to Die (Haosi buru laihuozhe 2003), Li Yifan's Before Flood (Yanmo, 2005), Hu Jie's In Search of Lin Zhao's Soul (Xunzhao linzhao de linghun 2004), and Zhao Dayong's Ghost Town (Fei cheng, 2008).In its de-emphasis of dominant ideologies, however, New Documentary Movement has but rarely confronted mechanisms of state power in present,(4) as if initial turn away from politics to everyday has obscured politics of everyday. In this regard, Zhao Liang's recent works present a welcome exception in their penetrating observations of state-society relations in contemporary China, showing both their and dehumanising aspects: Crime and Punishment (Zui yu fa, 2007) documents everyday operations of a police station in a small town in Liaoning, whereas Petition (Shangfang, 2009) chronicles persevering appeals for justice by disenfranchised over more than a decade. This essay offers a close reading of these two complementary portraits of representatives of state power and of powerless, beginning with a short study of Crime and Punishment followed by an extensive analysis of Petition, a work of epic dimensions. I argue that these films provide seeing lessons for audience in three senses: by rendering visible those who are un(der)represented; by exposing and critiquing deception of mass media images; and by showing various complex ways that power is connected to surveillance and visibility. Thus filmmaker, his camera, and spectators become implicated in power relationships as we cast voyeuristic, panoptic, activist, empathetic, or critical gazes upon documentary subjects.The human faces of power: Crime and PunishmentShot near Zhao Liang's hometown at China's border to North Korea, Crime and Punishment follows a few young officers at local police station as they carry out their law enforcement duties. Unlike crime police mini-series that one might watch on television, Zhao Liang's two-hour documentary features cases too insignificant and absurd to be reported in media: A mentally ill man calls police for a corpse he has found in his bed, which turns out to be a pile of blankets. …