Chinese Independent Documentary Research Articles

Tracing Evolution and Communication Dynamics in Chinese Independent Documentary Films (2012-2022): A Systematic Review of Genre, Censorship, Culture, and Distribution

In the last decade, Chinese independent documentaries have witnessed a profound transformation. While mainstream Chinese documentaries have been extensively examined in scholarly research, there remains a noticeable gap in the comprehensive analysis of independent documentaries from 2012 to 2022. This study employs a systematic literature review methodology to provide a holistic assessment of the evolution of Chinese independent documentaries during this pivotal period. It delves into various dimensions, encompassing the impact of political dynamics, funding mechanisms, the selection of film themes, ethical considerations, distribution challenges, and documentary filmmakers’ perspectives. By conducting a rigorous qualitative analysis of approximately 47 scholarly articles from the specialized journal Chinese Independent Cinema Observer and the academic database Scopus, this research reveals the nuanced progression of independent documentaries within China’s dynamic cultural, social, and political context. Preliminary insights from the selected research articles indicate a focused understanding and interest in societal hotspots and political censorship issues within independent documentaries. Furthermore, this research focuses on the unique challenges and opportunities encountered by Chinese independent documentaries during the phases of dissemination and reception. This study offers scholars a profound comprehension of the Chinese independent documentary landscape and provides invaluable strategic insights for producers and distributors.

Worrying about China: storytelling, humanitarian intervention and the global circulation of independent Chinese documentary

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of cross-border collaboration on independent Chinese documentary. Through a study of Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China, I argue that the film, which passed through training events run by CNEX and the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Programme in China, bears the formal impact of the industrial-humanitarian logic central to these workshops: character-driven storytelling as the key to generating a global Anglophone public for independent Chinese documentary. Tracing this logic through the workshop mechanism, the film’s form, and audience reactions to its screening in the UK, I suggest the result is a viewer response privileging personal action over structural critique—what in this context I term “worrying about China.” This allows me to locate the documentary in relation to broader liberal arguments over China’s place in the world system and assess the limitations of this approach to “going global” for independent Chinese documentary.

Drifting Peasant Workers: The Reflection of the Hukou System within the Chinese Cinematic Network


 Migrating from rural areas to urban areas, Chinese farmers become part of the urban working class. The migration have attracted both urban cinema and independent documentary to represent the integration of farmers into urban space. However, whether the figures of peasant workers in urban areas can be simply treated as the urban working class is problematic. Here I introduce the theories of textuality and intertextuality to explore the audiovisual representation of Chinese migrant workers within Chinese urban cinema and Chinese independent documentary at the turn of the 21st century, searching for the communal sign representation and social signification of peasant images within urban context. As a result, peasant workers are depicted as drifters between urban areas and rural areas because they are marginalized by local workers, urban elites, and urban governors due to the household registration system. Their identity, cultural manifestation, and social status are shaped by the rural-urban mediation, if not conflict.

Staging the intimate-public camera: Wen Hui’s documentary practice with her third grandmother

ABSTRACTThis article highlights pioneering dancer, choreographer, and multi-media artist Wen Hui's unique contribution to Chinese independent cinema and first person documentary by analyzing her two films made with her ‘forgotten’ third grandmother. The close reading is grounded in her explorations in intermedia performance and documentary theater centered on body as archive of memory and women's experience. I argue that Listening to Third Grandmother and Dancing with the Third Grandma experiment with an intimate-public camera for constructing a female kinship outside the patriarchal family tree and re-writing women's history through oral storytelling and choreography of the everyday.

Talking heads in Chinese independent cinema: discourses and speaking rights

ABSTRACT The talking head has been widely used within Chinese independent cinema. On the one hand, the practice is criticized by Chinese independent filmmakers for serving the propagandist ends of Chinese state television; on the other, it is also introduced by Chinese independent cinema to attest to the social sufferings experienced by marginal people. In this paper, the theory of intertextuality is adopted to analyse the use of talking heads within both Chinese Sixth Generation cinema and independent Chinese documentary, while exploring the collective documentary impulse of Chinese independent filmmaking. I shall develop the following two arguments: (1) the ideology of talking heads is shaped by the “linguistic context” of film production. They can serve official and grassroots discourses placed within an authoritative and a private cinematic context, respectively. (2) Both Chinese independent documentary and feature-length films adopt talking heads to deliver marginal voices, which advance the speaking rights of both Chinese independent filmmaking and voiceless social groups.

Show us life and make us think: engagement, witnessing and activism in independent Chinese documentary today

ABSTRACTThis introduction to the special issue, ‘Engagement, Witnessing and Activism: Independent Chinese Documentary Filmmakers’ Different Positions, Approaches and Aesthetics,’ argues that how the political is registered and expressed in Chinese activist documentaries cannot simply be read through Western ideas, concepts and aesthetics. Rather, Chinese work has been shaped partly in relation to state-sanctioned public discourse, and partly through the localising of international influences according to Chinese socio-political conditions. Contemporary Chinese activist documentary makers have chosen as their primary modus operandi an open, exploratory engagement with the ‘grassroots’ (jiceng). The core commitment in this approach is to the truth of the on-screen subject’s experience as they themselves see it. Modes of engagement with the grassroots include: making visible people and identities that state-sanctioned representations hide or gloss over; bearing witness to events and situations that are similarly hidden, or presented in a very particular manner, in state-sanctioned representations; and exploring memories and historical experiences which are otherwise unacknowledged or presented within narrow interpretive parameters in state-sanctioned media. This introduction details how the articles in this special issue analyse and discuss Chinese activist works that utilise one or more of these modes.

New Chinese-language documentaries: ethics, subject and place

1. Introduction: New Chinese-Language Documentaries Part 1: History and Politics 2. The History of Documentary Filmmaking in Mainland China 3. The Vision and Voice of New Taiwan Documentary Part 2: Theory and Ethics 4. Independent Documentary and Social Theories of Space and Locality 5. Subject to Movement: Wu Wenguang and the Ethics of Self Part 3: Subject and Gender 6. New Subjectivities in Women's Documentary Films 7. The Other as Interlocutor: 'Voices of the People' in Taiwan's Documentaries Part 4: Place and Migration 8. Empowering Place: Jia Zhangke's Post-Nostalgic Assemblage of Shanghai 9. Migration Documentaries and the Vision of Cosmopolitanism Part 5: Exhibition and Circulation 10. YIDFF and Taiwan Documentary in the International Arena 11. The Circulation of Mainland Chinese Independent Documentary

Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street. By Luke Robinson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. viii, 198 pp. $95.00 (cloth).

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Personal camera as public intervention: remembering the Cultural Revolution in Chinese independent documentary films

Chinese independent documentary films about the Cultural Revolution provide alternative memories to official and popular accounts. In addition to the contestations of memories between the official and non-official and between the mainstream/dominant and the independent/marginal, there lies a third pair of contestation: between the public and the private, which also encompasses the previous two antitheses. To frame it in another way, what is allowed in public and what has to be restricted can be conceived as a key to understanding negotiations and discourses about the Cultural Revolution, as well as the status of independent documentary films in China. This paper explores how Chinese independent documentary films recall the past and bring private memories into public through different aesthetic approaches, reconfiguring discourses around the Cultural Revolution and the documentary films’ independent status.

Chinese documentary as public culture

This article addresses the question of publicness in independent Chinese documentary, using examples from the lesbian and gay community as illustrations. It argues that changes in both form and subject matter in contemporary lesbian and gay independent documentary reflect the emergence of a socially engaged form that seeks to raise awareness through increased visibility. This can be understood in relation to Ching Kwan Lee and You-tien Hsing’s concepts of “recognition” and “representation”. Both of these concepts, however, are connected to ideas of the public and publicness. While there is a tradition of associating documentary with the public sphere understood in Habermasian terms, in China the public sphere as an institutional space has a problematic history. Instead, I suggest that other ways of understanding publicness are demonstrated by these documentaries: publicness as representational visibility, as performance in material space, and as an affective invocation of a shared viewing experience. This allows us some perspective not simply on the role of independent documentary in China, but the social significance of documentary more broadly conceptualized.

A madwoman in the art gallery? Gender, mediation and the relation between life and art in post-1989 Chinese independent film

The figure of the artist is an important subject of Chinese independent documentary and feature film, but while some of the aesthetic and political implications of this figure have been discussed, its gender dimensions have received little attention. This article puts gender at the centre of an investigation of documentary representations of troubled artists, beginning with Wu Wenguang's Liulang Beijing [Bumming in Beijing, 1990] and ending with Gu Yaping's Qin'ai de [My Dear, 2007]. The figure of the troubled artist serves as a trope of the entanglement of immediacy and mediation that constitutes the core formal tension of Chinese independent documentary film. How various instances of this figure are inflected by notions of gender difference, how they embody the tension between art and everyday life and between madness and sanity, and the kinds of performance they engage in are fundamental questions that help reassess the heterogeneous ‘poetics of presence’ shaping this vibrant field of contemporary visual culture.

Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street, by Luke Robinson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. viii + 198 pp. £50.00/US$115.00 (hardcover).

<i>Independent Chinese Documentary: From the Studio to the Street</i>, by Luke Robinson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. viii + 198 pp. £50.00/US$115.00 (hardcover).

Voice, Liveness, Digital Video: The Talking Head in Contemporary Independent Chinese Documentary

This article addresses the use of the human voice in contemporary Chinese independent documentary in relation to xianchang. Broadly analogous to the Anglophone concept of “liveness,” xianchang is a shooting practice that interrogates questions of immediacy (being “on the scene”) and mediated distance (the reflexive consideration of such a practice). It is critical to any genealogy of independent documentary in the People's Republic of China. In turn, sound practice, and particularly direct sound, is critical to xianchang. Analyzing the use of talking heads in early independent documentary, this article argues that they were not simply a relic of the televisual zhuantipian aesthetic but also the focus for a particular form of xianchang: liveness as presence and as testimony. In particular, following Erving Goffman, it suggests that critical moments of “flooding out” in Bumming in Beijing and I Graduated! serve both to construct the documentary subject as an “internal witness” to the events of 1989 and also — by suggesting the uncontrolled and contingent nature of filming “in the present” — to validate this act of witnessing as unofficial, and therefore truthful. While this form of liveness lives on in activist documentary by directors such as Ai Xiaoming, Hu Jie, Zhao Liang, and Cui Zi'en, other directors have used the talking head in ways that highlight its mediated side. Using Shu Haolun's Nostalgia and Wang Bing's Fengming: A Chinese Memoir as examples, the article explores how these films present the talking head as a product of technical intervention by the director, or as a response of the documentary subject to the act of filmmaking. This does not mean that liveness has ceased to be important; rather, that it is understood to be a quality produced from the encounter of director and subject “on the scene” of filmmaking (mediated distance), rather than as existing independently of such an encounter (immediacy). The article connects this increasingly catholic use of the talking head to the emergence of digital video. This has not only facilitated more experimental approaches to documentary — as reflected in Nostalgia — but also encouraged consideration of the self-mediating capacity of the documentary subject. This question is addressed directly in Fengming: A Chinese Memoir. The use of the human voice in these two films thus demonstrates an awareness of documentary production dynamics that is not inherent to digital video as a medium but has been stimulated by its impact on the Chinese independent documentary scene.

Chinese Independent Documentary Films: Alternative Media, Public Spheres and the Emergence of the Citizen Activist

:This article argues that contemporary independent documentary filmmaking in China has been used as a tool by Chinese citizens to intervene in the public sphere and to provoke social change. I therefore propose to look at the phenomenon of Chinese video activism under the umbrella of alternative media. In particular, I take into consideration the “rhizomatic” media approach, which focuses on the interaction of alternative media with authority, the market and civil society. The case studies I present consist of several documentary projects completed between 2004 and 2010 that opened up spaces of dialogue between filmmakers and local authority, mass media and civil society. The paper claims that documentary films have an impact on audiences, whose members are consequently motivated to engage in discussion and action. I argue that activist video-making in China is reshaping the identity of urban citizens: through filmmaking, urban citizens claim their right to access information and demonstrate their will to participate and intervene in social issues.

Departing from Songzhuang: Interviews with Chinese independent documentary film-makers Feng Yan and Wang Wo

Departing from Songzhuang: Interviews with Chinese independent documentary film-makers Feng Yan and Wang Wo

Making space for Chinese independent documentary: The case of Yunfest 2011

ABSTRACTWhile the history of independent documentary film production in China has illuminated many of the challenges faced by Chinese film-makers, the question of independent documentary film festivals has been less directly considered. This article examines how films are seen and discussed in the context of one such festival — the 2011 Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest), held in Kunming, Yunnan Province. Over the last decade, one goal of the festival organizers has been to construct a documentary space that exceeds the temporal and material boundaries of the festival itself. To understand what this space might entail and engender, it is necessary to consider just what kinds of spaces Yunfest itself employs. By analysing the configuration of exhibition spaces utilized during Yunfest 2011, this article explores the politics of spatial disaggregation that shaped particular audiences and that, we argue, contributed to the emergence of a postsocialist public within these documentary spaces.

Dream-walking in digital wasteland: Observations on the uses of black and white in Chinese independent documentary

In the past two decades, an alternative film practice in China has actively engaged with digital media, yielding a robust body of DV works, fiction and non-fiction alike. In this article, I trace an evolving trend which uses a black and white ‘digital palette’, visible particularly in independent documentary, and I analyse its aesthetic and socio-political implications. Focusing on Huang Wenhai's Meng you/Dream Walking (2005) and Huang Weikai's Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai/Disorder (2009) and their different portrayals of the state of ‘dream walking’ on both individual and massive scales, I probe how they use black and white to move and push the sliding-door between realism, naturalism and surrealism as a means of redefining documentary realism and film-making in the digital era. These unique works boldly explore the new media to seek fitting texture and form for a turbulent postsocialist society bereft in chaos and confusion.

Filming Space/Mapping Reality in Chinese Independent Documentary Films

This article is a general attempt to sum up and challenge some of the issues the notion of Space raises when in contact with the Chinese independent documentary film movement. I will focus my analysis on how this concept influences the choice of topics, the roles it plays during the shooting process and how the representation of space in these films is linked to the emergence of a new documentary aesthetic and practice.

Bulldozers, Bibles, and Very Sharp Knives: The Chinese Independent Documentary Scene

A report on the state of independent documentary filmmaking in China in 2009, covering in particular the Yunnan Multicultural Visual Festival (or Yunfest, as it is known) in Kunming and the China Documentary Film Festival in Songzhuang. A variety of factors have converged to make an anti-authoritarian documentary movement possible, but it may be ending as directors become professionalized.

Thinking outside the box: mediation of imaging and information in contemporary Chinese independent documentary

Thinking outside the box: mediation of imaging and information in contemporary Chinese independent documentary