Our country needs to see this: the early documentaries of Zhao Liang
Petition (Zhao Liang, 2009)
Zhao Liang is best known to contemporary audiences for Behemoth (2015) which employs extraordinary imagery, lyricism, and the structure of Dante’s Inferno to document the human and environmental cost of unchecked industrialisation in modern China. At the Open City Documentary Festival (4-10 September), Zhao was the subject of a dedicated strand that included a masterclass with the director alongside screenings of three of his earlier non-fiction feature films; Paper Airplane (2001), Crime & Punishment (2007), and Petition (2009). These films seem to form a body of work somewhat distinct from Behemoth with regards to their approach to form. In the masterclass, Zhao explained that this change of direction was deliberate. “There was a dilemma, a challenge, which was awkward to me; I would like documentary and video art to be integrated as one, rather than a clear distinction between them. You could say that Behemoth was my experiment with combining these art forms as one.” Prior to this, his films occupy a more traditional place in the documentary landscape, though are no less complicated and fascinating because of it.
Zhao’s rise to prominence in the world of independent cinema was as part of China’s ‘New Documentary Movement,’ which is widely considered to have begun in 1990 with Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers. Wu, along with contemporaries like Duan Jinchuan and Zhang Yuan sought to break free of the stylistic shackles of state-dominated documentary production to create aesthetically and narratively freer work. Zhao explained that people like him, born in the 1970s in China, has a strong sense of social responsibility, but that the early ‘90s was a time where “young artists, upon graduating, didn’t need to go into state enterprises” as those before them had. In their essay ‘Alternative Archive: China’s Independent Documentary Culture’ [1], Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel express the notion that while a “public and visible oppositional culture in the People’s Republic of China” was not possible after 1989, neither was a return to the “singularity of a hegemonic ideology” that typified the Maoist era. As such, an ‘alternative’ culture flourished and the independent documentary movement seized on the opportunity to engage with topics that are routinely overlooked by the predominance of official dialogues, and people who find themselves subjugated or marginalised by the state.
Since Zhao’s debut feature, his work has focused on alternative communities and, in his own words, “how individuals’ fates played out in a large system.” He went on to clarify that this was not a conscious intention, but when he now looks back on his first films he is able to draw a conclusion about their shared thematic concerns. Really, his initial work relied on serendipity: “I’m just filming things that are happening around me.” This is evident in Paper Airplane, which was Zhao’s first completed feature (although by this point he had shot a lot of the footage that would appear in 2006’s Farewell, Yuanmingyuan and 2009’s Petition). Zhao spent years becoming intimately friendly with a group of young punk rockers whose bohemian lifestyles found them marginalised in a changing China. In Crime & Punishment (2007), Zhao went to his home town in the northern province of Liaoning, on the Chinese-North Korean border. Intending to make a different film, he came across the subjects by happenstance and went on to observe the daily travails of a small unit of military police in a rural village. “On the face of it, it is about the goings-on at the police station,” said Zhao, whose interest lies more with the people who find themselves at the police officers’ mercy, “but really it is about human dignity.” For Petition, Zhao returned time and again for more than a decade to a shantytown in Beijing known as ‘petition village’ in order to document the ongoing struggles of people living there while they appealed to the government to have their cases reviewed in the hopes of justice being done. Thematically, all of these films fit neatly into the collective intention of independent Chinese documentaries of the time - to either broach typically disregarded subjects or to approach publicly acceptable topics from an askance angle. This is also true of Zhao’s Together (2010), the only film of his that is legally available in China (at time of writing), which focuses on AIDS sufferers while ostensibly being a state-sanctioned making-of documentary about Gu Changwei’s Love for Life (2011).
Crime & Punishment (Zhao Liang, 2007)
Primarily, Zhao’s early films are acts of witnessing the hardships of the marginalised and the ways in which people are either forgotten, ignored, or actively harassed by the state - in one scene in Paper Airplane the father of an addict addresses the camera to say that “our country needs to see this.” Although there are ways in which the films complicate the relationship between filmmaker and subject, their power often lies in the unflinching gaze of the camera, which remains relatively inexpressive even when it is intimate. Zhao spoke, for instance, about Paper Airplane, which includes scenes of drug-taking in uncomfortably close proximity but recalls: “I was very aware that I was there to work. I wasn’t there to get involved in these people’s circumstances,” meaning that he was able to maintain a professional remove despite the fact that he was filming people he might otherwise have regarded as friends. “That is why I have kept a distance of 2-3 metres from the subject - in order not to create that emotional involvement.” Quite how successful he is in doing that is debatable, but it is often the very act of uninterrupted observation that provides the films with their perspicacity.
This manifests in the prolonged multi-year shoot for Petition (a film that exists in a considerably longer cut than the two-hour version being screened at the festival) which is reminiscent of Helena Trestikova’s ‘time collecting’ documentaries in the affecting presentation of years genuinely passing on screen. It is more a case of the unblinking lens in Crime & Punishment, the most conventionally observational of these films, which involves scenes of police brutality which are deeply troubling to watch but imperative to understanding the broader socio-political relationship Zhao is presenting.
There is a moment in Crime & Punishment where a man is locked in a long, circular debate with the officers and regularly looks over, directly into the camera, as if hoping that Zhao is able to offer support or camaraderie. It is not a defining facet of that film, but Zhao’s position at the forefront of more interpersonal Chinese documentaries is one the most oft remarked-upon elements of his films and his position in the New Documentary Movement. “I didn’t think I had to keep a distance just for the sake of it,” Zhao explained at the masterclass, “the participation I had in these circumstances was quite natural.” Although the way in which Zhao interacts with his subjects throughout his films may not have been premeditated, there is definitely a vein running through his work that needles at the filmmaker-subject dynamic. In a video art piece called A Social Survey, which Zhao made the same year he made Paper Airplane, he wandered around Beijing with a gun held directly in front of the camera and pointed it at people on the street. In the essay ‘Excuse Me, Your Camera Is in My Face: Auteurial Intervention in PRC New Documentary’ [2], Yomi Braester asserts that in A Social Survey “Zhao gives the lie to the implied position of the director as an unobtrusive observer and reverses the roles — the director looks eagerly for action, while the subjects shut him out.” This description chimes perfectly with one of the most infamous moments in Petition, in which Zhao is asked by one subject, Juan, to pass a letter to her mother, Qi. Such intervention might already seem ethically conflicted but when Qi refuses to open the letter in front of him and leaves, he chases her with the camera before finally letting her recede into the distance. Zhao has subsequently referred to that sequence as ‘cruel’ and in the masterclass, he spoke more broadly about the challenges such involved, interpersonal filmmaking raise for his ethical integrity. “This work pattern - this style of work - is making me more and more uneasy because I am an intruder. I feel that I am exploiting them. I feel it is an original sin to be intrusive or offensive to these people… because of that my more current work is more matter-of-factly shooting.”
It’s quite an interesting way to view these early films in comparison to Behemoth which, while certainly less personally involved, also feels more ambitious and artistic – anything but ‘matter-of-fact.’ Still, the compulsion to move away from a more embedded form of observation makes sense even if all three of the features in this programme do foreground the filmmaker-subject relationship in such a way as to make the viewer acutely aware of the ethical implications of what they are seeing. Even in moments that feel ethically uncomfortable, the films never seem to let Zhao off the hook for this, re-enforcing the power of what it means to witness and be witnessed, for better or worse.
References:
[1] Berry, Chris and Rofel, Lisa, ‘Alternative Archive: China’s Independent Documentary Culture’ in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record ed. by Chris Berry, Lisa Rofel and Xinyu Lu (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2010) pp. 135-154.
[2] Braester, Yomi, ‘Excuse Me, Your Camera Is in My Face: Auteurial Intervention in PRC New Documentary’ in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record ed. by Chris Berry, Lisa Rofel and Xinyu Lu (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2010) pp. 195-215.