Independent Documentary Filmmaking: Who Gets To Have a Voice?
Post 80s Filmmakers and Postmemory
The highly contested term “post-80s” 八零后 is used by many critics as a derogatory label and has grown to acquire connotations of a self-centered, apolitical, and ahistorical demographic group whose only concern is the materialism depicted in Guo Jingming’s 郭敬明 (b. 1983) bestselling novel and film franchise, Tiny Times (小时代). However, despite not having any lived experience of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), many of these younger-generation writers and filmmakers use their voices to engage with social issues. Han Han 韩寒 (b. 1982), celebrity novelist-turned-blogger-turned-filmmaker (among other career pursuits) has written extensively on the flaws of and challenges facing China’s educational system:
When a journalist ferrets out the truth, when a history teacher lectures on the patterns of the past, when a writer presents things honestly, when a film director depicts real life, at best they will have committed an ideological error and at worst they will have perpetrated a crime. And when someone offends in this fashion, others will indulge in speculation: He has been 'invited out for a coffee,' he has been banned, he has been arrested, when actually in the end he may not get into so much trouble and all that may happen is that the evidence of his crime is purged from view, but people still don't feel relaxed—rather, they feel all the more anxious on their own account, suspecting that it's only because the guy is quite famous that the government has hesitated to take action—maybe the government won't have any scruples taking action against me? It has to have taken a lot of reinforcement of build up that level of instinctive anxiety.
In any era, even when brainwashing becomes as routine as washing vegetables, there are bound to be a few scallions that don't get rinsed clean. In the old days people would have hacked away and discarded those dirty leaves, but with the changing of the guard these unclean scallions are asked simply to keep to themselves as they grow. However, if they try to share their thoughts with the other onions, they will be immediately squashed flat by the ones who insist on playing dumb...
As for you history teachers, literature teachers, and politics teachers, what kind of role do you think you will play and what kind of verdict do you think will be passed on you in the textbooks of the future? Perhaps you are simply a vegetable that is not in charge of its own affairs, but your students are your seedlings. Try to be real teachers, imparting to your students common sense and reflection, independence and a sense of justice, so that in your old age, when you tell your grandchildren you once served in this profession, you will feel a surge of pride rather than be stricken with shame.
- Han Han, "Those Scallions That Just Won't Wash Clean," May 14, 2010, translated in This Generation, 166–168.
The Memory Project (民间记忆计划), a documentary film series curated by Wu Wenguang (吴文光, b. 1956), is a striking example of the younger generation challenging the common critique that those individuals born after 1980 lack historical consciousness. Featuring the work of more than one hundred college students turned documentary filmmakers, the project sends young men and women back to their ancestral villages to research the Great Famine period (1958–1961) by collecting oral interviews and documentary footage from their relatives and other villagers in the local community. For example, one filmmaker, Zhang Mengqi 章梦奇 (b. 1987), has returned to her village in Hubei Province every winter for the last six years and developed close ties with the village elders, her relatives, and village children. Viewers as well as their documentary subjects may (and do) wonder why these young people are interested in investigating history they know little about. Is it precisely the young filmmakers’ lack of lived experience of historical trauma that makes them more insistent upon its significance?
Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” used to refer to the once-removed relationship between Holocaust survivors and the second “hinge” generation offspring who lack the actual lived experience of their parents, is instructive in understanding the aim of the Memory Project films. Powerful memories are transmitted intergenerationally through objects like family photographs, and documentary processes such as interview testimonials. The psychological impact of these transmitted memories is so deeply felt that the traumatic experiences “seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch 103). Postmemorial work thus relies on the reactivation and re-embodiment of “more distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and social aesthetic expression. Thus less-directly affected participants can become engaged in the generation of postmemory, which can thus persist even after all participants and even their familial descendants are gone” (Hirsch 111). In present-day China, the dichotomy between the social/national and the individual/familial is not as clear-cut, making it more difficult for the generation of postmemory to persist. In other words, it is risky for individuals to rely on the state-sanctioned version of history, and difficult to build on “archival/cultural memorial structures” that simply don’t exist, or are not readily accessible to the public, given the government’s reluctance to directly confront the past.
This makes films like Though I Am Gone (Wo sui siqu 我雖死去, dir. Hu Jie 胡杰, 2006) even more crucial. Hu Jie’s documentary is told from the perspective of Wang Jingyao, the husband of Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of the girls’ middle school that was associated with Beijing Normal University. One of the earliest victims of the Cultural Revolution, Bian was so badly beaten by her students that she was taken to the hospital where she later died. After all of these years, her husband Wang Jingyao has carefully preserved her belongings and the photographs he took at the time of her death. Hu Jie’s film is one powerful way that this archival material can finally find an audience, and Jie Li suggests that Though I Am Gone can serve as a virtual museum commemorating the Cultural Revolution in lieu of material forms of remembrance in China.
