The long drive to the village of Songzhuang on the southeastern edge of Beijing is a maze of highways leading past beehive-like apartment buildings and dusty side roads leading nowhere in particular. I would have gotten lost if I were alone. Fortunately, I was accompanied by the independent documentary filmmaker Zhao Liang, who has frequented Songzhuang since the 1990s.
In fact, one of his early films, Farewell to Yuanmingyuan (filmed in 1995), documented the birth of the new Songzhuang—if this neighborhood of disintegrating buildings and overgrown alleyways was ever “new.” After the famous Yuanmingyuan artists’ community in Beijing was raided and demolished by the government, Yuanmingyuan’s residents fled to other pastures, maybe not greener, but with cheap property and farther away from the prying eyes of the central government. Songzhuang was transformed from a village with no paved roads or traffic lights into a colony of thousands of painters, photographers, sculptors, and mixed media artists. In Beijing proper, Yuanmingyuan has been replaced by the touristy 798 Arts District (think chic galleries and gift shops), and Songzhuang continues to exist as it has for the past decade: under the radar and an hour’s drive from the city center.
Zhao Liang’s name translated directly into English is “to shine light”, which is an apt moniker for a documentarian who has spent his career exposing China’s underbelly, including stories of heroin addicted rock-and-rollers (Paper Airplane), peasant petitioners airing grievances against the government (Petition), and dystopian mining operations in Inner Mongolia (Behemoth). But under the blinding summer sun, even Zhao Liang hesitated as we navigated the rabbit’s warren of Songzhuang. Every brown mud wall looked the same, papered with fading advertisements, and there were virtually no street signs; this makes residents who move between studios in the courtyards enclosed by these walls hard to track down.
We entered a street flanked by statues of dolphins that looked as if they had been stolen from Disneyland and then sandblasted, passed a bag of old clothes that someone had dumped on the street (“That’s disgusting,” the fastidious Zhao Liang commented), turned into a narrow alley, and finally stood at a doorway hidden by a curtain. Behind the curtain was a cool and verdant courtyard, welcoming after the heat and dirt. The courtyard’s owner/caretaker, a bearded man with pockmarks and fluffy hair, led us first into an adjacent room that served as a bar (stocked only with warm Tsingtao beer thanks to a broken refrigerator) and then into the dark maw of a small cinema. On that day, no film was showing, and there was no audience. The space was dark and empty but for eight rows of plush velvet theater seats.
A few weeks later, I heard that there was to be a film shown in the cinema. Zhao Liang had already returned to work in his native Liaoning Province. Alone, I returned to Songzhuang, but nearly missed the movie theater. The dolphin statues were still there as signposts, but the bag of clothing was long gone. Passerbys said, “Yes, I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know where it is.” I finally found it when I location-tracked one of the filmmakers through his WeChat account. This must be how the police stalk people, I thought.
The local police are well aware of the artists—some of whom are on the government’s watch list—who live and work in the area. Local officials tolerate artistic boundary-pushing, up to a point, because art brings economic vitality to an otherwise podunk suburb. Developers envision a second 798 Arts District—and the money that would come with it. But this fine balance is overwhelmed when either side oversteps.
Case in point: the film being shown that night was made by a painter-turned-filmmaker, and it featured documentary footage of an artist being hounded by the police in the aftermath of a protest-performance he’d done in Tiananmen Square: he had stood in the Square and repeatedly punched himself in the nose until it broke and bled. The police caught on when the blood flowed from his nose and covered his white shirt. They dragged him away. Back home, the artist was hounded to the point where plainclothes policemen were stalking him in Songzhuang’s narrow alleys at night, and black cars surrounded his home by day. He couldn’t leave his house. To get food, he had to climb onto his roof and have a friend deliver it to him fastened to a pole.
The year 2003 saw the founding year of the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF; not to be confused with the state-sponsored Beijing International Film Festival). Started by the art critic and curator Li Xianting, BIFF was not exactly smiled upon by government censors. Despite this, thanks to the festival’s remote location in Songzhuang, it managed to screen films from directors who did not have a “dragon seal” of approval by government censors and, in certain cases, were overtly critical of Chinese government and society. In Songzhuang’s shaded courtyards, directors and audience members mingled between screenings to drink and talk about films that would never be shown in mainstream Chinese theaters.
All was well, inasmuch as they can be for independent operators in an authoritarian state, until 2012, the Festival’s 9th year. An American filmmaker and academic, J.P. Sniadecki, was a witness. In his recounting of events, as the courtyard venue filled with attendees for the premiere screening of Egg and Stone by director Huang Ji, local police officials suddenly flooded into the space. The police only allowed those with official invitation badges into the screening room, thereby reducing the audience by half. Forty minutes into the film, the electricity was cut and the screen went black. In the ensuing days, festival organizers and attendees and government representatives entered a sequence of negotiations and evasions as the festival stumbled on, with its screenings taking place in clandestine hotel rooms. After the 2012 crackdown, BIFF went on for only two years more until 2014, when police arrested festival organizers, and a blockade of hired men impersonating villagers prevented attendees from entering and anyone from photographing or filming the events. After that, the festival was permanently canceled.
On the bright side, Sniadecki, an affiliate of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, emerged from his years in China with footage for several films, including Yumen, a work done in collaboration with a couple of Chinese artists who lived in Songzhuang. Sniadecki first met one of the artists, Xu Ruotao, in 2012 at BIFF as police swarmed all around them. These kinds of chance meetings drive the collaborations between independent Chinese artists and their foreign counterparts.
While a noose tightens around the independent film community, China’s commercial film industry (approved by government regulators, shown in mainstream theaters) might be entering a Golden Age. In 2015, the super-patriotic action film Wolf Warrior—starring a heroic People’s Liberation Army soldier against a villainous Navy SEAL—topped Chinese box offices in its opening week. The 3D computer animated film Nezha (2019), raised the standard of Chinese animation above some frankly mediocre predecessors. Chinese conglomerates have gobbled up American production companies: in 2016, the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda bought Legendary Entertainment, which is responsible for Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, Jurassic World, and the King Kong franchise, among others. Wanda also owns AMC Theatres, which makes it simultaneously the biggest movie-theater operator and highest-revenue generating film company in the world. Wanda’s founder, the entrepreneur Wang Jianlin, served for nearly two decades in the People’s Liberation Army, was a deputy to the 17th National Congress, and maintains close ties with the Communist Party.
While film cameras flourish in Shanghai’s production studios, facial recognition and closed-circuit cameras are the new norm on every urban street in China. These cameras document life with unblinking patience. They are observational cinema in the purest form. Recognizing a trove of prime raw material, director Xu Bing made the 2017 film, Dragonfly Eyes, which is woven together completely from found surveillance footage. In Chongqing, where there is 1 security camera for every 6 people, cameras are used to track down lost purses and to detract “social credit” when individuals commit minor crimes like jaywalking or failing to pay a bill. In Xinjiang, cameras are used to monitor and punish Muslims when they commit misdemeanors like grow beards, visit mosques, leave their house too many times, or use forbidden applications like Whatsapp and Facebook. In Hong Kong, pro-democracy protesters have attempted to subvert cameras through acts of self transformation by wearing cosmetics and face masks that look uncanny to human eyes but pass muster under mechanical ones.
The recent Hong Kong security law, passed June 2020, punishes these actions by essentially declaring any suspected sedition, i.e. any protest, a crime punishable under mainland Chinese jurisdiction. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s collaboration with China’s mainstream film industry continues, though not without criticism. Disney’s latest live-action adaptation, Mulan, stars Liu Yifei, a Chinese-American actress who has expressed support for the Hong Kong police. In response, the #BoycottMulan hashtag began trending on Twitter. Users slammed Liu and dubbed Agnes Chow, a young Hong Kong activist who has been arrested for her actions, the “Real Mulan.”
Censorship is old news to independent filmmakers in China, even if technologies of surveillance are more sophisticated. Being censored has been in the fabric of Chinese independent film since the first DV camera was picked up. As Brian Hu aptly writes, “Independent Chinese directors always emit a collective groan when asked the same question by international audiences: what is it like to deal with the censors? Beyond the question’s inherent othering of an exotic “forbidden” China, it also reduces independent filmmaking to an act of resistance with only one intention: to oppose the government.” Not that it’s the sole fault of the audience—indie filmmakers know well the commercial and fame cachet that comes with the label “banned in China.” Famous artists like Ai Weiwei are aspirational examples of censorship at home, success overseas. Artistic boundary pushing is not only a political act, but an economic calculation: a way for disobedient artists to get noticed outside of China.
In China, censorship is simply a fact of life, no matter how much foreign film festivals adulate the theme. In Songzhuang, the film that I saw about the artist at Tiananmen would be seditious under any interpretation of the Hong Kong security law. At the screening, no one seemed to care. During intermission, the audience took a break from the stuffy theater to drink Tsingtao beer in the courtyard. The refrigerator had been fixed, so the bottles were cold. People were relaxed and congenial under the influence of alcohol and cigarettes; there was no underlying tension. There were no policemen in sight that night, but plenty of people—aspiring photographers, filmmakers, students—had brought their own cameras.