Kiki Tianqi Yu

‘My’ Self on Camera is the first book to explore first person narrative documentary in China’s post-Mao era. Since the emergence of the individual as an ever more important social figure in China, this mode of independent filmmaking and cultural practice has become increasingly significant. Combining the approach of cultural ethnography, interviews, and textual analysis of selected films, this study examines the motivations, key aesthetic features and ethical tensions of presenting the self on camera, as well as the socio-political, cultural and technical conditions surrounding its practice. This book problematises how the sense of self and subjectivities are understood in contemporary China, and provides illuminating new insights on the changing notion of the individual through cinema.

Wen Hui (d.o.b. 1960, Yunnan) is a pioneer artist of contemporary performance art and documentary theatre in China, creating more than 20 independent productions, most notably Birth Report (1999), Dancing with Migrant Workers (2001) and Red (2015). She is also an original filmmaker, primarily exploring and documenting the ways in which bodies interact with different personal materials and hold or contain personal or public memories. Wen has created highly intimate first person documentaries and film installations, such as Listening to Third Grandma (2012) and Dancing with Third Grandma (2015), the latter of which was shown as a film installation at the 2016 Venice Biennale.
In April 2017, I conducted two conversations with Wen Hui about her practice, in Shanghai. The first was an interview in a street café near Shanghai Theatre Academy, the second was a public conversation in the form of a Q + A, held after the screening of her Dancing with Third Grandma as part of ‘Memory Talks’ – a series of screenings of personal nonfiction films I curated as a DocLab event. What follows is an edited and condensed version of these two conversations, organized according to theme.
The conversations with Wen Hui began with Wen introducing how she started first person expression through body performance in documentary theatre, using a technique that she calls ‘bodily memory’; her collaborations with Wu Weuguang; then Wen reveals the context of making these two films with a female family member who she refers as her ‘third grandma’. We also discussed how she uses the body to interact with materials, and how filming further enables new avenues of communication. In the last part, she discusses the similarities of these two different documentary mediums, live performance and film. Wen comments on how she sees editing as a kind of choreography, and choreography as editing, her approach of having performers perform their own stories in a collaborative method of co-creation.

This chapter explores yingxiang xiezuo (影像写作), literally meaning ‘image writing’, an independent nonfiction film practice of experimenting with, and ‘writing’ through, moving image as an artistic expression and cultural intervention in contemporary mainland China. I argue that current criticism and theorisation around the essay film is largely rooted in western film studies; and that features of the essayistic in cultures with different literary traditions, socio-political contexts and linguistic structures, such as those in China, require different methods of interrogation. For this reason, I aim to draw attention to different forms of ‘screen-writing’ in non-Western essay films.

‘Image writing’, a concept similar to caméra-stylo that advocated by Alexandre Astruc in his influential article ‘The Future of Cinema’ (1948), yet its motivation and aesthetic features are culturally and socially rooted in the reality of mainland China. I first contextualise the act of ‘image writing’ in contemporary Chinese socio-political reality and demonstrate how this act is similarly motivated by a form of intellectual social engagement known from ancient China. I also show how ‘image writing’ inherits the aesthetics of the scattered vision and ideographic expression of the Chinese language essay, sanwen (散文), literally meaning ‘loose text’, or ‘scattered writings’ (Handler-Spitz, 2010: 113). Then I provide a detailed analysis of Zhao Liang’s Behemoth (2015) in order to show how Zhao’s thoughts are ‘written’ on the screen, both explicitly and implicitly, through the literary rhetoric such as paibi or ‘parallelism’ and hongtuo or ‘juxtaposition’.

Yu Haibo is one of the first photographers in the Peoples Republic of China to be directly influenced by Surrealist thinking and practice after the ending of the Cultural Revolution. In this conversation with his daughter Yu Tianqi Kiki, Yu reflects on his development as a photographer and the relationship of his work to the western philosophical tradition and the shifting socio-economic and political context in the PRC since the early 1980s.

Ai Weiwei's film Lao Ma Ti Hua (aka Disturbing the Peace, 2009) is one of the most influential activist documentaries that emerged during the aftermath of Sichuan earthquake in 2009. The film relates to Ai's ‘Public Citizen Investigation Project’, which gathers many volunteers to explore the substandard ‘tofu construction’ of school buildings that took thousands of children's lives when they collapsed in the earthquake. In August 2009, Ai's group went to Chengdu court to support another independent investigator, writer, and environmentalist Tan Zuoren who was prosecuted for subversion of state power. The night before the trial, Ai was beaten by secret security agents and the group was stopped from going to the court. The film subsequently records the group searching for an official explanation from the authorities. Whilst acknowledging the power of the film in constructing a collective political subjectivity, and the discursive effect through screenings and discussions raised, this paper focuses on the very action of proactive, activist documentation of one's witness to engage with fellow participants as well as viewer followers through digital camera. Under the theoretical framework of participatory culture, I propose the term camera activism to understand the camera-enabled individual participation into activism as a form of socio-political intervention. The paper also analyses some of Ai's problematic actions as a charismatic celebrity, which sometimes overshadow and obscure the complexity of resistance by Chinese individuals within China, thereby neglecting full recognition of the complex collective forces which support Ai. Nevertheless, ‘camera activism’ demonstrated in the making of Lao Ma Ti Hua reflects, and has the potential to reshape, the political landscape in twenty-first century China. The cinematic highlight of ‘I’, confronting and eye-witnessing what happens through the utilization of digital technologies positions ‘camera activism’ as an important part of China's iGeneration cinema culture

As valuable sites that expand mainstream cinema history, and for micro history construction, amateur cinema has recently received increasing scholarly attention (Zimmermann 1995; Ishizuka and Zimmermann 2008; Moran 2002; Rascaroli, Young, and Monahan 2009, 2014; Kmec&Thill,
2012). However, amateur cinema history in China and of China still remains largely untapped because of scarcity of sources: partly due to the limited access to amateur home movie equipment in China until 1990s; and partly because accessing what is available can be very difficult.

This paper explores a recent compilation film, Around China with a Movie Camera (2015), restored and curated by the British Film Institute. The film constitutes twenty-eight sequences, selected from over a hundred, mostly amateur home movies and travelogues. Through foreigner amateur eyes, the film offers an intimate view on the everyday life in China during a tumultuous period, between 1900 and 1948. Examining the vivid ordinariness documented and extraordinary memories constructed, this paper investigates the role of various institutions and individuals in organising the making of these films at the time, their motivations and purposes. It also explores BFI’s role in rediscovering, restoring, curating and distributing this film, and the overall project ‘China On Film’ that it is a part of.

This paper argues that such valuable, yet neglected early moving-images play an important role in public memory construction, and help to revive the rich culture of everyday life in late Qing, Republican and Wartime China. It challenges assumptions of official discourses of history and of cinema history, both in the countries where the filmmakers came from, and where these images were captured. It re-generates our understandings of the role of amateur filmmaking in transcultural communication, and reflects on the flow of people and ideas internationally in the first half of twentieth century.

This paper argues that the current notion of ‘essay film’ is a western construct and questions whether it is a useful term to understand experiments in personal nonfiction cinema in non-western cultures. Essay film can be translated as ‘sanwen dianying’. Sanwen literally means ‘loose text’, referring to writing with looser structures than verse or other highly rhetorically structured texts. Instead of simply finding a Chinese equivalent of ‘essay’, I present some observations on what the essayistic looks like in Chinese cinemas. It does not suggest a completely different set of aesthetics but seeks to explore how these films inherit Chinese literary origins and cultural-linguistic traditions, and in what way they reference western essay films. The paper opens to draw attention to emerging new forms by foregrounding practices in Chinese language context.

The post-cinematic era has given rise to online Zhibo, the Chinese name for live streaming broadcasts, through which individuals communicate with, and perform for, an interactive audience. In China, Zhibo has experienced a rapid expansion since 2012, and by 2016 more than 344 million people in China, half of China’s Internet users, had watched zhibo over nearly 300 platforms. In 2017, the state enhanced regulation on the large amount of vulgar, violent and erotic contents on zhibo, believing live streaming video can cause harm and instabilities that are difficult to control.

In this paper, I explore the aesthetics of the self as the presenter-performer in ‘one man zhibo shows’, where the presenter’s body is centralised on a personal screen, reaching to an audience whose interactions are displayed and constantly updated through danmu, live chat messages over the streaming screen. The screen of a smart phone or a tablet device becomes a frame, or a window that connects performer/presenter’s own space to the spaces of many others. In this form, zhibo is an identity technology (Poletti & Rak 2014), not merely a platform, but a space where the self is constantly in the process of construction. Zhibo embeds a complex sense of self: it is for the self as a performer to play an alternative online identity, to become a micro-celebrity, to entertain audiences; self performance or self revelation becomes entrepreneurship, identity becomes a selling point; or for the presenter-performer to search for her/his own sense of self, for recognition, for a sense of one's own existence.

The temporality of the “self” in Zhibo challenges how we think of communication, human interaction, and performance. The nonfiction live performative act of presenting the self in Zhibo questions the binary opposition of staged and non-staged, performing and non performing, real and unreal. The audience’s live interaction also contributes to the “self-making” of the presenter-performer, as well as the making of the audience’s self. The ethics of expressing and performing the self for recognition and profit will also be explored. Commercial imperatives both empower and undermine self-expression. The tangled relationship between the two reflects the complexity of the construction of self in the age of social media.

This paper explores some of the issues arising from my production of the documentary, China’s van Goghs. The film is a portrait of a peasant-turned-painter in Dafen, Shenzhen, who has been hand-copying van Gogh’s paintings for nearly 20 years, and is now transitioning to creating his own works of art, emblematic of China’s dream for the 21st Century: to go from ‘Made in China’ to ‘Created in China’. Focusing on this transition, the paper examines the relationships between the making of art based on local experiences, the ascription of value in the global market, and the social resonance as explored in the film and its production context.

The creation of this film exemplifies some new directions of sociopolitical and economic mechanisms of documentary production in China within global context. Pitched at IDFA, and financed by a number of national and international funds and broadcasters, the production of this film offers some insights on the politics of international funding, programming and distribution of independent documentaries. Whilst Chinese independent documentaries are largely associated with covering socio-political issues, this paper also reflects on the changing course of Chinese documentary production by focusing on documentaries presenting the self expression through art, and how the surface of documentary production in China is changing, with injections from other forms of visual art practices.

YU expresses her observation on the changing field of documentary production in China and her idea on documentary in the future:
"More archaeologists in the future would need to dig out digital memories/data to see what reality like today. Documentary constructs our memories."