*

Given the demands its still-booming economy, it’s doubtful whether China’s leadership, the fourth since Mao, vets every new film it produces. The country faces serious policy questions over what do about the yuan, the One-Child Policy, privileged education, and the radical stratification that has overtaken its officially classless society.

Three films I caught a few years ago at the Bangkok International Film Festival acknowledge the accomplishments of the elder generations of filmmakers, while boldly examining the One Child Generation. New themes such as euthanasia, cyber-sex, Christian evangelism, and homosexuality mark the new Chinese film’s passage into the twenty-first century. Underlying these films is an intense yearning for connection in an increasingly lonely world.

In The Park (2006), directed by 35-year-old Yin Lichuan, the unmarried daughter of a retired army officer confronts a problem facing many educated woman in the world – how to fulfill family obligations and find a suitable mate while pursuing a demanding career.

“You’re too proud,” her widower-father announces, after discovering her boyfriend is a jobless, would-be musician – and unsuitably younger. “I will only make a suggestion. You, of course, will have to make the final decision.”

The father, played by veteran actor Wang Deshun, heads for a traditional water-park to “kill two birds with one stone,” along with other local retirees who gather to exercise and find a mate for their solo offspring.

China’s One-Child Policy, initiated in 1974, resulted in what psychologists call “emotional over-investment” in their kids. Actress Li Jing gives a luminous performance as a 29-year-old TV producer whom the father “markets” to other oldster parents. (“She’s 28, still young!”) Self-absorbed by her inner conflicts, paralyzed by indecision, and chafing under her father’s benign authority, the daughter fights him over domestic trivialities loaded with historical meaning.

“Have some intestines. I cooked it with garlic this time,” he says to her over dinner in their old-fashioned apartment. “You loved it when you were a child.”

“I never liked intestines,” she insists, furious at last. “And I never liked garlic either!”

She sulkily refuses to eat. Her father’s efforts to find her a mate are also doomed to fail, of course. His chosen marriage-target is revealed in a public washroom to be a closeted homosexual. The unhappy revelation is a huge blow to the old man:

“I fought our country’s enemies!” he cries bitterly at the modern glitzy streets. The obvious, unspoken, and real question is: For what? – So that tattooed young men are free to embrace in public? – So that his beautiful daughter can live alone in her new condo?

“You don’t understand the world today,” she tells him with almost eerie resignation. And here is the film’s power – it’s apparent the heroine doesn’t understand this new world either. She only knows what it isn’t. She is fully aware that their shared history is over – but she is also unsure what this new world is all about, or where it’s going.

But she can’t admit this to her father; she knows it will scare him. With breathtaking economy the director Yin Lichuan tackles the central issue of modernity:

Who are we now?

A pickpocket steals the father’s identity card at the railway station, just when he is “about to go home.” It’s up to the daughter to rescue him from obliteration in a forgotten history – even when her own future is provisional, and unknowable.

{Spider Lilies}

At the other end of the spectrum, but equally sophisticated in its treatment of controversial social issues, is Raised from Dust (2006) directed by Gan Xiao Er. It shows us a rural Chinese Christian community facing disruption from one of China’s vast infrastructure projects.

Actress Hu Shuli plays the cheerful young wife of a miner dying of silicosis in the local clinic. She struggles to keep her daughter in primary school and pay for her husband’s treatment, labouring at an illegal construction site for a few yuan by day, and salvaging usable coal bits from refuse tips at night.

Forced to make a terrible choice between the past and future, the heroine pulls the oxygen tube from her husband’s blue lips, loads him on a bicycle cart, and wheels him home to die. The camera lets it happen in what feels like real time: His bare feet dangle out of the handmade box in the cold light of a new spring.

Their young daughter, unknowingly saved by her parents’ sacrifice, sings grace over the family soup bowl to the Chinglish tune of “Frère Jacques” – “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, for the food, for the food,” in a final scene which combines pathos, surreal humour, and existential terror at once. The film’s Christian themes resonate with the earthy life of China’s rural poor, who still live on the knife-edge of hope and despair.

This is the world of cheap labour that moves China’s boom-economy, shown dispassionately, without moralizing. Raised from Dust, with actors who don’t appear to be acting and a director who doesn’t appear to be directing, transcends national concerns, and illuminates our common lot under globalization.

Equally adept at examining moral authority in global society is 38-year-old Taiwanese director Zero Chou, 38. Her film Spider Lilies won the 2007 Teddy Best Feature Film at the Berlin Film Festival.

Spider Lilies (2006) explores international youth culture in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, where, like everywhere, tattoos, computer sex, and film-going are not merely urban obsessions, but fundamental ways of connecting to the world’s frenetic currents. A teenage web-cam sex performer falls for a lesbian tattooist, in a plot that unites the hard facts of our depersonalized age with the soft truths of private fantasy.

“I am a phantom in your dream,” the heroine reminds the darkened audience beyond the screen, “And you, too, live in mine.”

We, of course, are the unseen watchers whom Chou addresses, the multiple layers of watching watchers in a surveillance-mad society. The electronic audience is the real protagonist of her film. And, as screenwriter Singing Chen takes pains to emphasize, we are hopelessly isolated despite myriad electronic connections.

“I have no choice but to live in a virtual world,” confesses the heroine, a lesbian tattooist played by a stark beauty, Isabella Leong, 18. A violent earthquake, which takes her father’s life and sunders the family, can be read as Taiwan’s political divergence from the Mainland, or as the seismic shock of the new technology; but either way it only finds its cure in an act of personal will:

“If you remember me,” says Jade, the teenage cyber-stripper, seducing the older girl, “And I remember you, then we are real.”

This is the special burden society puts on the individual. A cogent bit of dialogue is central to both the Taiwanese and Mainland films. In The Park, the heroine’s vegetarian boyfriend refuses to eat meat at a family dinner with the response, “When animals are killed, they release a special poison in the blood.” In Spider Lilies the heroine warns that the spider lily flower of the title is “permeated with a poison that makes one lose consciousness and memory.”

Is this a Chinese folk tradition?

Or is it a comment on our increasingly narcotic environment?

*

Interview with Director Zero Chou

Zero Chou, director of Spider Lilies, was born 1970 in Keeling, Taiwan. She studied philosophy at university and became a journalist before embarking on a film career, with five films to her credit.

Were you playing with the film audience, their voyeurism?

The moment a movie begins to play, it forms a relationship with the audience. I wanted Spider Lilies to hypnotize the audience right from the beginning, so that they give the film attention under such a state, and enter a world of non-realism.

Were you deliberately making people uncomfortable with their need to watch?

The interesting thing about voyeurism is the discovery of human nature. On the surface, you are looking at an object. But in fact, you are hearing your own heartbeat, and looking at your own nature.

The film has lines about poison affecting memory. Is this a traditional Chinese theme?

The “poison” from the spider lily flower is also a “cure.” It can help one lose memories, become crazy… but it is also a defence mechanism to protect yourself.

Was the earthquake in the film about the split of Taiwan from the Mainland?

No, Taiwan is region of earthquakes, a natural force. The earthquake symbolizes a rift, a break in memory. The human heart is fragile, it is afraid of breaking, but it needs breaking to cure itself.

Who is your favorite director?

Pedro Almodóvar. I identify with his colourful style. Who said art must be grey and depressing? I always wanted to rebel against that!

*

Some years ago a security video camera recorded an armed robbery taking place inside an midtown Toronto café. A young woman on a date was shot to death in front of a number of terrified witnesses. The newspaper of record subsequently reported how the murder trial quickly became a legal nightmare.

Among the difficulties faced by the Court was the evidentiary problems created by the videotape itself:

Because of the way the camera system is set up, images are laterally reversed – right becomes left.  The times shown on the frames are off by one hour because the VCR has been incorrectly set . . .  the judge criticized the Crown counsel after they called a long series of witnesses to testify about arcane technical details relating to the camera that had recorded a surveillance video during the robbery. …The full surveillance video is available on (our) Web site. (Globe and Mail, December 7, 1999)

International experts were summoned to give their views on the impugned videotape.  For the prosecution, an expert in image processing testified that “the images of the robbers on the video are sufficiently clear for someone to make an identification, although the tape quality is dark and grainy.”

For the defence, a U.S professor who wrote a book about image enhancement said, “the video’s quality is so poor that the court should not rely on the images to recognize facial features.” Concurrently, seven ordinary witnesses swore they recognized the three accused men on the video, namely as “the man wearing the hood” and “the man with the baseball cap,” and “the man with the toque.”

The real problem with this surveillance video was, of course, that it was recording only the people coming and going through the cafe’s front entrance, the non-events.  It was the event that everyone was interested in; and this was the actual murder, which took place left to right, an hour earlier, and in full three-dimensional colour —  and mostly off-camera. The technical dyschezia confused everybody, and the huge effort required to match the event with the taped non-events surrounding it, confounded experts and common witnesses alike, people who were used to comprehending such events in the Documentary Mode.

A simple surveillance tape proved enormously complex, and resistant to other uses. Why? Because perennial locations for surveillance cameras include parking lots, underground garages, ATM machines, cash registers, shopping mall entrances, and traffic lights, and their function is simply to record traffic, not events. With their fixed fields of vision, their digital calendars, and their “dark and grainy” images, they are ideally suited to record entrances and exits and overstayed presences, and to render the time of same to the exact second, (assuming they have been properly set.)

The Cradle Will Fall: view of a baby’s crib.

However, video cannot identify — because identification is a specialized task that was formerly the province of technicians such as fingerprint experts and “eyewitness accounts,” and in digital culture this procedure has now been given over to alphanumerical data-processors, such as barcode readers and personal access-code magnetic strips. Surveillance videos as in the Just Desserts shooting case referenced at the beginning of this essay, serve only to remind us that our identities are no longer functions of visual image, but of encoded protocols such as DNA.

Most commercial video, on the other hand, is consumed in the security of the home or in the privacy of a dark audience, places where the opportunities for individual interpretation are expanded to include deliberate manipulations of the time-modes noted above. Commercial video says little about the uses of public space; surveillance tapes say little about public time.

An event, as we understand it to be, both classically and as Law defines it, is conflict-driven. It requires three essential ingredients:  plot, character, and narrative.  It needs conflict, (the issue); the protagonists’ emotional relationship to the conflict (motive); and the contextual consequences (in Law, res gestae; in film, point of view).

Narrative requires point of view; nothing is arranged beforehand with a surveillance video except its field of vision, which is not the same thing as a point of view. No meaningful narrative can come of it. Video confounds our previous notions of plot-centred film documentaries.

We would expect, however, that these two forms of recording might intersect at some point. And they do.

In 1884 Muybridge’s multiple-flash photography experiments made dupes of the celebrated sporting painters, by proving once and for all that thoroughbreds galloped three feet down at a time, followed by one foot. Wholly illogical, but there it is, in unassailable black-and-white. Given that our expectations are trained by the dominant technology, we have trouble seeing anything it does not show us. In Understanding Media, McLuhan called this culturally conditioned blindness “stasis.”

The question is, how long does it take us to recognize what we are seeing in a new medium? Andy Warhol faced this problem in the 1960’s with his eight-hour, real-time home-movie film of the Empire State Building. Home video does three new things. First, it records ambient sound and non-events.  Secondly, by facilitating immediate fast-forwarding, freeze-frame and rewinds, video creates radical new orders of narrative.

Thirdly, and most importantly, video’s miniaturized sensitivity to low light levels deconditions its subjects, who respond more “informally” to the presence of the unobtrusive lens. The ambulatory video operator, unlike a regular film cameraman or even a still photographer, remains a mobile, semi-participatory and tandem figure; and his or her peripheral presence reveals previously unknown social behaviours, as shown again and again by the amazing videos we have all seen, of spectacular arrests, drunken toddlers and narrow escapes from sudden erasure.

Baghdad Cafe: live video of a Middle Eastern take out restaurant.

Recently I bought a demo camcorder from Future Shop. The salesman had forgotten to remove the sample tape inside, which contained a recording of a suburban Mediterranean immigrant household at Sunday dinner. I was interested to see how they ignored the cameraperson as they went about their business of eating pasta, glowering, serving, criticizing, eating, pouting, sulking, clowning, eating and plate collecting. It was a fascinating social document, to be considered informal only because the social behaviours it revealed are too new to be labelled.

Everything appeared accidental on the forgotten tape; they were surveilling themselves. Here in this Calabrese-Canadian living room was a horse running on three legs, and my immediate reaction to this serendipitous chronicle was to guess the identity of the unseen jockey.

Was the video operator young, male, a nephew or son? Compared to the cameraman of a typical Cousteau doc, the operator was invisible because the camcorder had neatly eliminated his point of view. In fact, these devices keep running and auto-focusing and responding to changing light levels, all without anyone really “operating” them, as people forget to turn them off. They are like the old prank phone joke: Is your refrigerator running? Better go catch it!

This autonomy is its own oddness, and accounts for the popularity of America’s Funniest Home Videos, which showed the pratfalls made in coming to terms with this new way of pointless seeing. There’s no conflict, people just fall on their ass. No magic wand, either, just a Fat New Nothing as they smash into it, heedlessly. Video disconnects both operator, and viewer, from the moral responsibility of the witness. Morally and causally, video is silent. As Chaplin did with his silent movies, slapstick is a levelling device, educating the audience on the confounding of the new medium.

Friluftskino – Carwash screening from Michelle Teran on Vimeo.

The thrill of living in a surveillance society is we all know no one is behind the cameras. Nobody! In Richmond, B.C., a local high school vice-principal proudly shows the TV crew from the investigative news program his new surveillance system, geared at “stopping the students from fighting,” and then he admits that no one watches the TV monitors. There’s no need. The kids are interviewed, and readily admit that they continue to fight, simply by going outside the cameras’ field of vision. They know exactly where the line-of-sight ends, too. Fight Club is what happens behind the lens. What we see is today only more dead school space, a fake show of civility co-opted by the authorities.

Video de-centers events, and dumps us upside-down in a fish bowl. The giddiness comes from witnessing ourselves as legless machines.

Carpet Culture from Donald Weber on Vimeo.

“He who says something is impossible is not speaking Korean”
—Kim Jong Il

Throughout the twentieth century, certain filmmakers explored the relationship between visuality and language. One such person was North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, who elaborated his father’s theories of communist governance and society, known as Juche, to literature and cinema.

Jim Finn inserts excerpts from Juche writings (“Let Us Create More Revolutionary Films Based on Socialist Life” and such) into a droll mockumentary about a South Korean artist living on a commune in North Korea, teaching ESL (“English as a Socialist Language”) and making her own cinema according to Juche precepts. Finn’s film is a delightful analogism and a micro-museum of ‘Kimilsungisms’ aptly titled The Juche Idea.

From Finn’s synopsis: In the late 1960’s Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father’s Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and  authoritarian Stalinist pseudo-socialism. The film is about a South Korean video artist who comes to a North Korean art residency to help bring Juche cinema into the 21st century. Inspired by the real-life story of the South Korean director kidnapped in the 70’s to invigorate the North Korean film industry, the film follows Yoon Jung Lee, a young video artist invited to work at a Juche art residency on a North Korean collective farm. The story is told through the films she made at the residency as well as interviews with a Bulgarian filmmaker and even a brief sci-fi movie.

[Update: Anthology Film Archives in New York is presenting a theatrical run of Juche Idea May 27-June 2, 2010, along with a retrospective of Finn's work. Juche Idea is also discussed in this New York Times feature on Kim Il Sung as cinema mogul.]

An effect of weaving the mockumentary and excerpts from North Korean film and television is that some of the archival footage appears more absurd than the fictional doc scenes. Was the structure of the film originally intended to be like that? Was it improvised during production? Or was it a mad political science experiment in post?

Originally, I was going to create my own Juche-style film made in a fictional Juche art colony in the US. That artist colony got transferred to North Korea. Another thought was the sci-fi film and that got folded into the narrative of the art colony-Juche studio. I have always modeled my films on a studio model. I started out making experimental short films in my kitchen and bathroom with my pets among other things. I had so much found footage from North Korea and I really wanted to use it, so I came up with the idea of a political artist allowed in to their archives and allowed to re-edit and punch up the propaganda a bit.

The English as a Socialist Language part was natural since I taught English as a second language and citizenship classes for years in the Mexican  neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago. I just wanted to radicalize it since so many lessons are based on becoming part of the American system.

I know the basic structure going in. The trick in post-production is tightening it up, cutting scenes, moving them around and going back and adding scenes. The dialogue scene in the editing room, for example, I wrote but never filmed. And when we looked at the rough cut, we realized that something was missing, which was that Yoon Jung was never established as a video artist. So we shot that scene in one weekend frantically before a festival deadline.

In many scenes, the screen is split between subtitled old Juche film excerpts or text from Juche books. It was challenging to focus on everything on the screen at once. This reminds me that the matching of text with corresponding images was not always a formalized convention. Ideally, how would one ‘read’ these scenes?

Well, I wanted to give a Juche film lesson in the film. I wrote a monologue sketching out an explication of Juche film using Kim Jong Il’s theories. Which are really an adaptation of socialist realism for Korea in the 1960’s.

But then parts of the film were so talky, and I realized that there were direct quotes from his book On the Art of the Cinema that had obviously been read and applied to the films. This is why he gets credit for directing and producing so many movies. He’s in there somewhere all the time.

I think first-time viewers mostly ignore the text on the left since the film clips are pretty engaging and the 16mm titles are kind of hard to read, but some of it sinks in, and I think it adds weight to what could be a light film.

The Juche Idea (clip) from jimfinn on Vimeo.

So the film was not only informed by the Juche ideology but also to an extent, intended to be a Juche film itself. I know that film language was an important part of the Juche theory. Subjects in your film have their hysterical encounters with language, and the film itself experiments with conventional forms of presentation. Were you making an intentional semiotic investigation of filmmaking?

I think all of the three feature films I’ve made are to one degree or another about the process of art making, as well as ideological studies. Though, studies is really too dry a word. I am making these experimental comedies to a certain degree. One of the things that really appealed to me about Juche film was that they make really cheap films very fast with pretty good acting and with a correct ideological understanding. I feel that that’s what I’m doing. My idea of correct politics might not fit exactly with theirs but I can relate to their chollima speed campaign.

Do you feel that films are necessarily a political endeavor, whether conscious or not? People tend to characterize your work as being political satire. How do you feel about that?

I wanted to create an art movement that would point back at our political system, as well. I also think there is a real nostalgia for something that never really existed, which is an open political system that supported leftist artists. It existed in moments, maybe in Mexico or Russia right after the revolutions, but they were always used to prop up some internal political system as well.

I understand that I am not making work in a vacuum. My work is not easily classifiable, so people try to fit it into a category so they can program it or persuade people to see it. It’s part of our capitalist system. There is such a strong tradition of irony and satire in literature and film and I’m happy to be part of that. Mark Twain is from my home state. And Jonathan Swift was Irish, like part of me. As far as film being political, hell yes. It is so complicated and expensive and time-consuming to make movies that people often make deals with the devil to get the thing done.

How did you get your hands on so much archival footage?

I found a North Korean bookstore online. I ordered DVD’s and books and comics. So much stuff! I had a grant from the Hallwalls Artist in Residency Project in Buffalo, so I could afford to get what I wanted. And I just read tons of stuff. I used the library to get a lot of political background on North Korea as well.

Did you get hooked up to go to North Korea as well? The information is presented with an incredible authenticity, and anyone who has lived in a socialist country who has seen the film has been delighted by it.

I did look into going to North Korea. The problem is that even if you get in, everyone goes to the same areas. I haven’t ever been to a communist country, though I did have members of the Shining Path come to all my screenings of my movie about their group in Buenos Aires. And I had lunch with them. It was pretty intense.

They said the things I got wrong were not “errors” but “limitations” of being a low-budget filmmaker far away from Peru. They felt that I was a filmmaker of the left making my own interpretation. I’m not sure I’d get such a generous thought from the North Koreans. But I think that it is reductive to think that I am merely satirizing the North Korean system. The irony points right back at us.

I read your article on film festivals. What role do film fests play in your personal and professional life?

I have mixed feelings on them. I think they can be exploitative of filmmakers by charging fees and not paying for films. But the good ones that are able to put together strong and diverse programs that are smart and take chances are really great. For films like mine, good festivals are opportunities for me to get exposure and reach an audience that would be hard to reach with a small venue or a film tour, which I’ve gone on. Because I’ve made three back-to-back-to-back feature films, I feel like I’ve been on the festival circuit on and off for three years now.

With smaller festivals, there is no chance of making money so they have to push for quality and taking chances. The bigger festivals can be taken over by these horrible people trolling around like the National Review cruise ship visiting the Alaska governor a couple years ago.

Wait, one more question…gerbils! Why?! They seem to be a preferred motif in your other features as well. Cheeky metonymy for Social Darwinism? Or just cheekiness?

I made a film in 2002 called Wüstenspringmaus, which is a short history of the gerbil and capitalism. Then the guinea pig showed up in Interkosmos (71 min, 2006) as the international youth symbol of communism due to its gentle peaceful nature and its tendency to move in groups. I like to radicalize animals and sports and all these seemingly innocuous apolitical things in the world. They’re already loaded up with ideas of, as you say, Social Darwinism, or healthy competition. Plus, I really miss the Olympics from the ’70s and ’80s where the most badass luge team was East Germany.