li yang’s socially conscious film as marginal cinema -- china’s state-capital alliance and its...

“Li Yang’s Socially Conscious Film as Marginal Cinema-- China’s State-Capital Alliance and its Cultural Ramifications,” Chinese Journal of Communication Vol 2 (2009): 212-226

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Li Yang’s socially conscious film as marginal cinema -- China’s state-capital

alliance and its cultural ramifications

Ying Zhu

The City University of New York, USA

By the end of the 1990s, Chinese media saw the convergence of politics and

commerce under the synergistic force of capital and state directive. Commerce has

joined forces with the state in regulating the Chinese media industry. The upshot has

been the marginalization of media practices that respond neither to market logic nor

state imperative. This article discusses media practices that fall into the “marginal”

category. In particular, it focuses on the positioning of Li Yang as a marginal

filmmaker due to his films' limited access to the domestic market as a result, at least

initially, of state censorship and more recently of market censure. The article further

emphasizes the significance of distribution in determining the cultural and economic

statues of media products.

Keywords: Chinese media; marginal film; Chinese independent film; New

Left; Li Yang; Feng Xiaogang; Jia Zhangke; harmonious society; distribution; film

censorship

Introduction


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The invisible hand of the marketplace has joined forces with the Chinese state

in regulating China’s media, and the outcome so far has been an unusual alliance of

interests. Instead of antagonism “between the party line and the bottom line”, the

party gatekeepers, business interests, and likeminded media practitioners have mostly

fallen in line as the Chinese state has emerged as the most powerful enabler of media

markets. So far this alliance, led by self-conscious state interventions, has functioned

to advance mainstream products that are both ideologically inoffensive and

commercially successful. In this climate media products that respond neither to the

market logic nor to the state’s imperatives have been marginalized. What are these

products and where are they? This article attempts to locate and analyze a set of media

practices and products that fall into the “marginal” category. I will zero in on Li Yang

and his two feature films, Blind Shaft and Blind Mountain. I argue that the positioning

of Li Yang as a marginal filmmaker has to do with his limited access to the domestic

market as a result initially of state censorship and more recently of market censure.

Li’s bland characters, the blunt crimes he chooses to feature and his unadorned

cinema vérité approach combine to make films that appeal neither to the party nor to

the popular market.

Locating the marginal: Li Yang and the underclass

Marginal film in the West is often associated with “core and periphery” ideas,

with super 8 filmmaking, the local, the vernacular, underground and exploitation

cinemas, while alternative film shares a kinship with the avant garde, documentary

filmmaking, feminism, Third World cinemas, and cult cinema, etc. Both imply small,

inexpensive, at times amateurish works and informal distribution channels that are at


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the periphery of the mainstream as the result of lack of capital and cultural resources.

Commonly referred to as “independent”, alternative cinema, which in the US started

in the 60s and 70s, this style of film is about auteurs such as Cassavetes, Coppola,

Altman, Scorsese, David Lynch, John Sayles, the Cohen brothers, and Tarantino. It is

also about how they chose to make films outside the major studio system and

exhibited them in art houses, at least until they became commercial mainstreamers

themselves. In China, media practitioners of marginal products such as DVs exploring

(homo-) sexuality and documentaries featuring struggling artists and social activists

that generate little state attention and market power take the position of marginal or

alternative either by choice or out of necessity.

The marginal in China and elsewhere is more often than not transitory. When

opportunities present themselves, practitioners gravitate towards either alternative or

mainstream for more resources and better accesses both in terms of audiences and

finance. Both the alternative and the mainstream, meanwhile, are constantly on the

lookout for new talents in their quest for expansion and inclusion. Jia Zhangke, for

instance, was initially marginalized yet has now been absorbed into a transnational art

house circuit and has made his way back to China. Many of the initially marginalized

art colonies in Beijing have now become part of the chic, a cultivated alternative

catering to the cultured and the affluent class with “artistic taste”.

Li Yang is one of the few remaining marginal Chinese filmmakers who have

yet to make their transition to the more artistically polished alternative and financially

lucrative mainstream. Li Yang’s marginality is apparent in his shoestring budgets, the

unglamorous social stratum he explores, and the offbeat approach he employs. Small

budgets and experimental/non-mainstream approaches are common among marginal


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Chinese filmmakers. Li has been unique because of his fixation on the poor and the

migrant workers and farmers who have been erased from the Chinese screen as the

party and the market favor characters and events with more entertaining lives and

uplifting prospects. Worse, Li does not exalt or sentimentalize the plight of the

underclass he features; rather, he amplifies the undesirable traits of the poor,

showcasing their brutality and lack of education. Li’s subjects are not the exotic, kiln-

dried peasants of 5th Generation films like Yellow Earth. Nor are they like the

protagonists of his fellow marginal filmmakers. Jia Zhangke too explores characters

and communities left behind by China’s speedy march towards marketization, but

where Jia’s petty criminals are mostly harmless and at times rather charming, Li’s

protagonists are liable to murder, enslave, and otherwise victimize their own kind

without remorse as they scrabble after their own comfort.

The social ills depicted in Li’s films, grim as they are, might be put down to

the growing pains of China’s marketization, understood as the only viable course of

national progress. In fact, China is currently beset by a number of less sensational but

more widespread problems associated with its rapid economic rise, including rampant

corruption, massive environmental depredation, and increasing disparities of wealth

and well-being between individuals, groups and regions. Li’s casualties and these

broader problems might be dismissed as simply part of the developmental bargain --

transitory and subject to automatic amelioration as the society generates greater

wealth. The prices paid by Europe and the US along their own developmental paths

were not small either, the extended line of reasoning goes. If it were the prevalent line

in public and official discourse in China then we would expect Li Yang’s films to be

roundly rejected by both the party and the market. As it turns out, however, hard-core


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developmentalism no longer prevails in either space, and the general point that Li

Yang’s films make about the social costs of “blind” marketization is in line with both

China’s prominent intellectual movement led by Wang Hui and the Hu Jintao

administration’s official discourse admonishing the development of a “harmonious

society”. In the current configuration of China’s collective ideascape, Li’s marginal

status has less to do with his ideas than with his art, with both the way that he presents

his ideas on screen and the fact that he presents them on screen at all.

Before getting to Li’s art, let’s consider briefly a receptive context in China for

his ideas. Wang Hui, a principal figure in China’s leading New Left intellectual

movement, rejects the idea that fairness, justice, and democracy can eventually grow

out of an unchecked market (Wang, 1998, p. 20). Wang maintains instead that China

can find a way to modernize itself that avoids the pitfalls of Western capitalist society.

The social ills that have accompanied China’s economic boom have led many critics

in China to question whether a rapidly growing market alone will lead to social

progress. Wang Hui and others propose that China’s future rests on pioneering a

“third way”, rejecting both Marxism-Leninism (as traditionally understood) and

Western capitalism. As China’s economic juggernaut advanced through the 1990s,

political corruption and stagnation and deepening social divisions became apparent to

everyone, lending the third way idea broad appeal. Wang contends that an alliance of

elite political and commercial interests in China is at the root of a cluster of social ills

associated with corruption and uneven development in the 1990s, including nepotism,

bribery and the embezzlement of public funds. At the same time, the bond between

the privileged intelligentsia and working class people has been severed. Wang

advocates renewed attention to the underprivileged, asserting that their immediate


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needs are more urgent than the need for token democratic reforms. He contends that,

given the alliance of political and economic elites formed in the process of privatizing

China’s state economy, the state will change only when it is under pressure from a

large social force, like the workers and peasants. For Wang, democracy is not just a

matter of expanding political freedom for the middle class or creating legal and

constitutional rights for a minority already substantially empowered by market

reforms. Democracy in China, he says, must be able to ensure social and economic

justice, and democratic reform per se is a lower priority than getting economic reform

and development to work for everybody.

Although the Hu Jintao administration certainly would not agree that it needs

public pressure to make it do the right thing, it echoes New Left thinking in its

signature call for the construction of a “harmonious society”, essentially an attempt to

right the reform era’s wrongs and renew the state’s legitimacy in the new century by

heeding the call and delineating the terms of the “third way”. Invoking China’s

cultural heritage and an updated Confucian value system, the harmonious society

project includes continued market-based development but with the market more

actively managed for more gradual growth and more egalitarian, environmentally

sustainable outcomes. It also involves an energetic display of self-corrective anti-

corruption efforts.

In the reform era, even as the state has sought to maintain a regime of

ideological and cultural control mechanisms, there is no question that trade, travel and

technology have resulted in much greater public access to the wide world of images

and ideas, and that this in turn has given rise to a public space in China that carries

much of the moral force of Western-style civil society regardless of what it still lacks


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in terms of democratic mechanisms and the rule of law. Like it or not, these days the

Chinese state feels the breath of public opinion on its neck. Constructing a

harmonious society is the state’s new bargain with society, reaffirming the state’s

legitimacy and authority and keeping democratic reform and the rule of law on the

back burner in exchange for acknowledging obvious problems and providing strong,

responsive leadership toward solving them.

The problems of extreme inequality, rampant corruption, the dismantling of

public health and education, and a deepening environmental crisis are commonly

perceived as the result of the rapid marketization and decentralization policies of the

reform era. As the New Left argues, liberal market economics have been responsible

for dismantled welfare systems, widening income gaps, and deepening environmental

crises not only in China but in the United States and other developed countries. To the

New Left, the immediate responsibility of the state is to bridge the gap between the

haves and have-nots, and the state largely acknowledges this in its harmonious society

rhetoric. In turning his camera lens to the underclass, then, Li Yang’s films offer a

view that is neither particularly radical nor threatening insofar as its thematic content

echoes what amounts to a populist view in today’s China. Li’s marginalization,

therefore, must be owing to some other aspect(s) of his work that the state and/or the

market are not accustomed to.

Li Yang and the Chinese independent generation

Li Yang belongs to the generation of Chinese filmmakers who burst onto the

global cinematic stage in the early 1990s with their small, independent productions

and quickly became the new darlings of international film festivals and other mostly


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non-commercial, non-mainstream venues like college courses related to Chinese film

and culture, and organized college screenings.1 Occasionally banned but mostly

ignored by the state’s censors, the documentary and narrative films of this generation

have gained little access and exposure to the domestic Chinese market.

The independent filmmakers’ dependence on foreign finance, distribution

channels, and appreciation directly affects their creative choices as they try to imagine

what might appeal to foreign art-house viewers and critics, and err on the side of

content that seems politically subversive or stylistically and thematically provocative.2

As Pickowicz (2006) points out, given that censorship and self-censorship forbid truly

dissident films, many independent filmmakers turn to subversive-seeming

explorations of self-identity and self-realization. This preoccupation has resulted in a

slew of films that seem overtly self-indulgent and self-absorbed, featuring destitute

yet spiritually defiant artists and other victimized representatives of alternative life

styles. These characters, though socially marginal, are colorful enough to be

interesting and occasionally charming to art house critics and audiences. What

happens when these characters are superseded by dull-faced migrant workers and

dim-witted villagers who turn out to be murders and rapists? This is Li Yang’s

milieu.3

Li has only made two feature films to date, Blind Shaft (2003), about migrant

coal miners, and Blind Mountain (2007), about rural villagers.4

Blind Shaft

Blind Shaft is Li Yang’s debut feature. It is set in the early 1990s, a time when

China’s economic reform turned the focus of 1.3 billion people to making money.5


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The film follows two criminal drifters as they pursue a cruel scam for quick money in

China’s laxly regulated and notoriously dangerous coal mines.6 The partners befriend

uprooted men looking for work and introduce them to working in the mine shaft, only

to kill them in staged accidents and then extort the mine’s owners for a payoff,

pretending to be aggrieved relatives of the victim. The scam turns on the family

connection, which leads to escalating moral tension when one of the criminals, Song,

develops a paternal affection for their next victim, a naïve young boy who dropped

out of high school to earn money to support his sister’s education back home. As the

partners wait for the perfect opportunity to kill the boy, Song grows attached to the

good-natured young man and assumes the role of surrogate father. A fight breaks out

between the two partners when Song hesitates and in an ironic twist at the end both

con men are killed, leaving the grief-stricken boy to claim their insurance benefits.

Blind Shaft shows the poverty beneath China’s rapid development and how it

undermines humanity. Song and partner Tang work in an illegal mining town in

northern China. Like everybody else, they send money home to support their children

in school. China’s mining industry is the world’s largest and most corrupt, with

thousands of workers killed each year in accidents, so the staged accident scam seems

quite plausible. The two protagonists may be evil beyond redemption yet Li’s

sympathetic portrayals of both points to their harsh living conditions and the state’s

complicity in their moral blankness, a figure for the broader society’s overwhelming

sense of declining humanity amidst rapid economic growth.

Blind Shaft is exceptional, among other reasons, for amplifying the lives that

have so far been unseen, ignored and disposable in China’s speedy march towards

accruing wealth. Just how little the miners’ lives are valued is graphically illustrated


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in the film in the way that the partners kill their victims and themselves: a casual

knock on the head with a miner’s hammer -- “thunk” -- and you’re dead. No drama,

no death throes, life just blinks out. The two miners are canny schemers whose moral

compass has been distorted by realizing how little their own lives are counted. If they

are not cared for, how should they care for anonymous others? As Tanzer (2004)

notes, the new China depicted in the film is a place where everyone is for sale, and the

lives of the once-exalted working class are the cheapest.

The film inevitably triggers commentaries that regard it only or mainly as an

indictment of the Chinese regime, the Chinese mining industry, and/or China’s

corruption-ridden economic reform efforts. An argument can be made that the film is

not just about China or miners but also about the generic desperation of poverty and

its consequences for our individual and collective humanity. The conditions and

economics of inhumanity at work in the Chinese mining industry are at work in

varying degrees globally. The motives and relations depicted in the film, the desperate

moral choices that pit life against life in mean, de-humanizing calculations, are

universal. And the coal mining experience is a perfect vehicle for accentuating the

hardship and desperation.

Yet it goes without saying that the problem in China runs particularly deep at

this historical conjuncture and that the “blind shaft” is arguably the course that China

is on, blindly pursuing “economic development”, “free trade”, and “open markets” in

terms that leave human dignity out of the equation. It has taken some time, but again,

this is essentially the problem that Chinese public, intellectual and official discourse

has recently been coming to terms with.


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As I pointed out elsewhere (2006), the same actor Wang Baoqiang who plays

the would-be murder victim in Blind Shaft was featured less than two years later in a

popular Chinese New Year film, A World Without Thieves (Feng Xiaogang, 2004).

Here Wang plays a naive young carpenter who, after years of hard labor repairing

Buddhist monasteries in West China, takes a train home carrying his life savings in

cash. He soon falls prey to a group of thieves. The boy’s innocence and his idealistic

worldview touch a pair of master pickpockets who are on the verge of shaking off

their disgraceful profession. The pair takes the country boy under their wing, fending

off the other pickpockets to keep the world together for him.

The romantic world of A World Without Thieves speaks more to the anxiety

and ambivalence of the privileged master thieves emblematic of China’s nouveau

riche than to the harsh reality of the country boy and his rural community. Blind Shaft,

on the other hand, speaks to the anger and despair of the disfranchised, the nobodies.

Despite the brutal nature of the miners’ story, Shaft manages to squeeze in

some funny moments. The dialogue is full of biting satire and irony. As commented

on by Tanzer (2004), in one scene when Song and Tang patronize a karaoke bar

doubling as a brothel, Song complains that he only knows old songs like “Socialism Is

Good”. Song is mocked by his female companion, “Those are the old lyrics! Don’t

you know? There are new lyrics”, and she launches into a rousing rendition of

“Reactionaries are back! Capitalism is in charge now”! Likewise, “new” and “sex” are

pronounced the same in Mandarin, despite a tonal difference. So in additional lyrics

instead of “new climax of Socialism” now you have the “sexual climax of Capitalism”.

Humorous puns like these have been widely circulated in China.


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Another funny moment occurs when the two grafters talk about the code of

conduct/honor as they negotiate when to send their next victim “home” to the grave.

In his attempt to stall the inevitable, Song insists that there are certain rituals such as

male initiation and a farewell banquet one must observe before taking a boy’s life.

After this we follow the three men into a brothel and witness the boy’s seduction by a

prostitute.7 The boy later runs into the woman who facilitated his male initiation when

he waits in line to send money home. It turns out that she too is sending money home,

to her child. Their connection is poignantly felt as she lets her hand lingers on his

shoulder while bidding goodbye. He watches her intently, though somewhat

awkwardly as she walks away.

The next step in the improvised killing ritual is the farewell banquet where the

young man downs his first sip of alcohol. This step brings the young man closer to his

death. As fate has it though, the young man survives as the fight between Song and

Tang kills both schemers. The crucial moment is again depicted in anti-climatic

fashion. Dazed, the young man simply runs out of the mine, escaping the explosion

that takes the lives of both men.

Li’s Blind Shaft couldn’t be farther from the self-indulgent and self-absorbed

films characteristic of the early Chinese independent generation films. That said, Shaft

is not free of embellished moments like the erotic bathing and sexual initiation

sequences that might be expected to appeal to the art film circuit. Of course, this kind

of calculation, if it was calculation, is part of the filmmaking routine. Though playing

to conventions like this by necessity, Blind Shaft still is not your typical art house fare.

It is more socially conscious than self-conscious.


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As a film debut, Blind Shaft is surprisingly well crafted. It follows the

naturalist-realist tradition, sharing thematic and stylistic cues with Italian neorealism:

themes of defeat, poverty, and desperation; poor and working class characters; long

takes on location utilizing natural lighting and ambient sound; a mix of non-

professional and professional actors. Italian neorealist films mostly contend with the

difficult economic and moral conditions of postwar Italy, reflecting changes in the

Italian psyche and the conditions of everyday life. Likewise, Blind Shaft captures the

desperation of people left unattended and uncared for in China’s chaotic reform era,

and the society-wide sense of the loss of moral grounding. Li Yang’s restrained

approach renders the narrative so transparently real that the ordinary grind of being a

Chinese migrant worker becomes all the more terrifying.

On the other hand, the film insists on the possibility, even under these brutish

conditions, of upwellings of mutual care. In this regard, Shaft is an optimistic,

humanistic film. This, and the way that the film taps into the country’s rising

resentment about the inequities of the reform era suggest that Shaft might have been a

solid box-office success had it been screened in China, particularly given its

shoestring budget. Instead it remains marginal both in terms of production and

distribution because it is made under the censor’s radar without approval and then

banned from being screened in China.

Li’s next feature, Blind Mountain (2007), though it garnered the censor’s

approval, received only limited distribution as its unapologetically blunt and less

polished documentary feel made it a hard sell to popular tastes.

Blind Mountain


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Blind Mountain is Li’s second film “about the callousness of the human heart”.

The plot follows a female college student who is kidnapped and sold into sexual

slavery in a poor village far from home. To make some money to help defray her

father’s expenses for her education, Bai Xuemei traveles to a tiny village in northern

China with the manager of an herbal medicine company. As in Shaft, where the

mundane routine of working in a coal mine turns suddenly sinister when two

innocuous looking miners murder a third miner without a blink, the playful travel

scene in the opening sequence of Mountain also takes a frighteningly cruel turn. Bai

wakes up the following day to find herself abandoned and sold off for 7,000 yuan (a

sizable amount for a peasant family) as bride to the son of one of the village families.

Much later, it is revealed that she was drugged.

Bai is held captive, forcibly held down by the parents of her “husband” while

he has his way, and later told by other ransomed brides in the village that it would

best to adapt to her circumstances. She is surrounded by strangers indifferent to her

plight. She pleads for help from the other women, goes on a hunger strike, fights back,

escapes repeatedly on foot, and even attempts suicide. Yet she is not able to change

her situation. Her attempts at running away are all defeated by the community’s

solidarity. Repeated defiance results in increasingly severe beatings. But rapes and

beatings never break her will to escape. Desperate for money to buy bus tickets for

her another escape she sells herself to the local shopkeeper for a few quick bucks. The

letters to her father she regularly delivers to the village postman are all passed to her

“husband” in exchange for some free goods. She temporarily knuckles down to form a

friendship with a young teacher who seems to offer a chance at escaping. Their

friendship turns into something more, but they have separate agendas. Eventually he


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is banished from the community and does not return for her. Most devastating is the

reaction of the villagers, who are either enablers or indifferent bystanders. The head of

the village not only turns a blind eye but encourages her “husband” to tame her by

force, and the indifference of the bus driver led to her recapture after another

attempted escape.

Bai’s experience, like the murderous coal miners’ scam, can be seen as an

extreme case, but it is an effective device for dramatizing the insular traditions of the

mountain villagers and their brutality and greed in the face of their poverty and their

sense of being left behind while coastal communities enjoy the fruits of China’s

economic take-off. As Richard & Mary Corliss (2007) note, the woman-in-chains

story has been told countless times; the twist here is that it’s a parable of inequities

and ignorance in interior rural China. Li himself says, “The film is less about actual

poverty than it is about a blind spot in people’s hearts in China. It is a criticism of

indifference” (Landreth, 2007). As reported in Schrumpf (2007), Li suggested that the

film “is a critique of both the ‘money reigns supreme’ attitude prevalent in Chinese

society and also a relentless exposé of the ugliness, greed, brutality and treachery in

human nature. It is a call for the return to basic human values, love and conscience in

our society”. Chinese rural dramas of the past, right up through the 5th generation

elegies of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have similarly featured rural practicality,

lack of education, and strong community solidarity, but without the hard edge of

poverty and envy-driven meanness. Mountain could have been a remake of Yellow

Earth and The Story of Qiuju, except that the taciturn families and villagers in the 5th

generation rural dramas were not money-obsessed and hadn’t been touched by the

jealousies of the reform era’s extreme inequities.


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In making Shaft and Mountain, Li has established himself as China’s rare

social realist director, a specie in danger of extinction. His position solicits

comparison with Ken Loach, the British helmer whose films capture the struggle of

the British working class. Indeed both Li and Loach share an ear for regional dialects

and humour and an unobtrusive yet evocative visual style that illuminates character

and place in a naturalistic fashion. Yet unlike Loach, who typically dramatizes the

plight of an individual character and the impact of public institutions upon personal

lives, Li amplifies the greed and callousness of the underclass and the failure of the

society to nurture human dignity and life. While Loach designs his characters for

emotional impact, Li’s characters, even as they move through situations fraught with

moral and material terror, utterly refuse to bait us with any cinematic trick of

heightened significance; even their most desperate acts are performed in the least

dramatic fashion imaginable as they practically insist upon their own insignificance.

They are also unaccompanied by a film score, and in every other way the art of the

filmmaker is obscured as far as possible, leaving an apparently art-less spectacle on

screen, and achieving an exceptionally compelling sense of realism. And it is this

realism, in turn, that gives the films their weight – they are so believable, and it is

terrible to have to believe.

Li financed Mountain with euro 600,000 ($809,000) raised with the help of

individual overseas Chinese investors who chose to keep their names out of the credits.

Despite his devotion to the project, Li’s investor pulled out during production. “There

are no companies willing to put money into films that are socially critical”, Li said

(Landreth, 2007). To keep the project afloat, Li borrowed money from his family. The

script for Blind Mountain was officially approved, but Chinese censors wanted


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significant changes to the finished film, demanding a more upbeat ending and other

alterations that would lighten its exposure of Chinese society. The film was then cut in

several rounds of review by the Film Bureau in Beijing over the space of two months

in 2007 (Landreth, 2007). Gone, for instance, is a scene of a female infant who is

discarded due to the premium still put on male children in rural China. Also left out is

a line of dialogue that touched on the expense and corruption of the country’s rural

health care system. After 20-plus cuts, the film gained permission to travel to Cannes

as an entry in the Un Certain Regard category. It screened at the 60th Cannes Film

Festival to a standing ovation.

Some charged the film with pandering to a weakness of the occidental market

for films that expose the ugliness of Chinese society. Elley (2007), for one, remarks

that “the quietly scenic Chinese background, the backward peasant stereotypes, and

the socially pertinent theme of sold-off brides appeal instantly to the occidental

markets that respond to social portraits of Mainland Chinese backwardness”. To the

extent that these sneaky feelings really appear in an instant, they are surely routed in

the very next instant, converted to admiration for the art and intelligence of the

filmmaker, and appreciation for whatever mechanisms and authorities afforded the

production and distribution of the film. On balance foreign audiences, even those

children of the West who are involuntarily pricked by vestigial murmurings of the

imperialist subconscious, when confronted with a film of such manifest sophistication

are much more likely to credit the art and think about what it says that Li Yang is able

to work in China than to draw conclusions about China’s “backwardness”. To suppose

otherwise is a complete misconception of the effects of films on foreign audiences.

Unfortunately, Chinese censors do still worry that foreign audiences will read stories


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of unsavory aspects of Chinese reality as figures for the whole, and this does figure

into their decisions to demand cuts or to ban films altogether.

Blind Mountain was released in China in winter 2007. As some critics have

pointed out, it is likely that few people from the economic strata of society depicted in

the film saw it because of the high cost of a movie ticket. Furthermore, the story

neither sensationalizes nor sentimentalizes the event, which makes the atrocity as it

unfolds all the more real, hence all the more grim and hard to swallow. The film was

shot realistically in the Qinling Mountains near Xi’an by Taiwanese cinematographer

Jong Lin, whose previous work includes Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (1994).

The harsh mountain-ringed valley, the absence of a musical score, and the

aggressively documentary like narrative with no elaborate plot structure and dramatic

arc all serve to underscore the hard-scrabble rural atmosphere, leaving little room for

emotional manipulation. As in Shaft, local dialect is utilized to accentuate the realism,

and the large number of bit-characters played by local amateurs also does not help to

advance the film’s popular appeal. As such, Mountain is a hard sell to Chinese who

can afford the ticket but generally prefer more conventional fare.

Making matters worse, the Mountain’s domestic release was sandwiched

between Feng Xiaogang’s Assembly (2007) and Peter Chan’s The Warlords (2007),

two blockbuster events that limited Li’s box-office still more, even though celebrities

like Wang Xiaoshuai, Gu Changwei, Cui Jian, and Feng Xiaogang himself all

attended the film’s premier (Luo, 2007). Asked if he is worried about making money,

Li said that he too wants to make profit but someone has to make these films to raise

social awareness of the problems they address, even if the distribution channels

available to socially conscious films are limited (Luo, 2007).


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Marginal at the site of distribution

Broadly, there are three distribution channels available to film: the multiplex

that sells popular entertainment films, the art house circuit showing specialty and

alternative films, and what Cubitt (2005) terms the “subcinema”, or films available

via piracy, diasporic networks, cult markets, and popular video circuits, all operating

outside conventional channels of film distribution. Channels of distribution are crucial

in determining the perceived status and commercial life of a film. Of course, the

multiplex is associated with the popular and the big box-office. The ‘high’ mode of

distribution, including art house cinemas, museums, galleries, college campus venues,

non-mainstream festival screenings and so on, suggests prestige.8 Finally, the “sub”

mode of distribution denotes the underground and the marginal.

Indeed, what we watch is often less important than where and how we watch it.

Cultural capital accrues differently through different modes of distribution. Seeing a

movie on free-to-air TV two years after its cinematic release or downloading it via a

file-sharing system gives one less to talk about than attending its opening-night

screening (assuming it has one). In this regard, though delivering vast amounts of

media to audiences every day, the profit-seeking, non-resistant, and largely informal

subcinema occupies the lowest rung in the distribution hierarchy.

Clearly not mainstream commercial cinema, Li’s two feature films fall

somewhere between alternative/oppositional cinema and subcinema. Alternative

cinema such as avant-garde movements and third cinemas often carry an explicit

political agenda, or at least a vague oppositional charge, which Li has sought to

avoid.9 Subcinema, on the other hand, seeks profit rather than progress, which Li has


20

striven to transcend. Li’s work is socially conscious yet non-oppositional. In fact, his

films did travel via well-established alternative cinema channels such as Cannes and

the Berlin Film Festival. Shaft won the Silver Bear at the Berlin, and Mountain

received recognition at Cannes, including massive applause at the end of its first press

screening (Bennett, 2007). Yet Li’s goal is to move beyond the overseas festival

channel and into the domestic exhibition channel.

Like subcinema, which is forced to travel via subterranean channels, Li

doesn’t spurn the mainstream on purpose. He takes little pleasure in his marginal

status, and would happily go mainstream if market conditions allowed him to

articulate his side of China’s reality (Teo, 2003). The same desire to access domestic

audiences is expressed by other marginal Chinese film/DV makers, and not just for

the money, but also for the recognition and understanding. As Li Yu (Fish and

Elephant, 2001) puts it, “The people who truly understand our movies are Chinese

themselves” (“Chinese directors,” 2007).

Yet stylistically unconventional and thematically non-mainstream films such

as Li Yang’s and Li Yu’s cannot survive in exclusively commercial markets. Li

Yang’s best bet is to appeal to the protection of the state, and he acknowledges caving

in to the censors in order to gain access to his home audience (Lee, 2003). Indeed, the

state and its censors have become more welcoming than the market to both the

alternative and marginal filmmakers in China. Jia Zhangke, known for his stark

portrayals of working-class struggle, said he rejected two requested cuts to his Still

Life (2006) but was still allowed domestic screening. Set in a small town about to be

demolished to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, the film was Jia’s first to be

screened at home in China. Jia’s most recent film, the documentary Useless, which


21

highlights the gap between rich and poor by juxtaposing the life of a fashion designer

with small-town tailors, cleared the censors without any cuts. No doubt this has a lot

to do with adapting to the realities of commercialized culture markets, to a

dramatically better-informed society, and to the consequent changes in China’s state-

society relations.

At this point, if you are small enough you can do pretty much what you like

creatively. There is a new community of underground filmmakers who shoot digital

movies without government approval but also without much interference.

Documentary maker Du Haibin attests that he hasn’t run into problems showing his

films in bookstores, bars and on college campuses (cinema-pedia.com, 2007). “I’m

used to this way of working. What I appreciate the most about it is the creative

freedom”, he said (cinema-pedia.com, 2007). Jia Zhangke remarks similarly that, “If

you change your fundamental principles about creativity and your understanding of

society for the sake of getting your movies released, you might as well not make

movies” (“Chinese directors,” 2007). Lofty sentiments notwithstanding, keeping it

real in Chinese film generally means keeping it small. Independent filmmakers are

finding that it is often easier now to negotiate with the state than with the market, but

a green light from the censor obviously does not guarantee market access. Even Wang

Xiaoshuai, who made his domestic debut with his ninth movie, attests that the main

difficulty now is marketing alternative films amid the crush of big-budget commercial

epics (“In Love We Trust,” 2008). Unlike Western film markets, China doesn’t have a

separate art-house circuit. Before Still Life was released in China in 2006, Jia Zhangke

made feature films and documentaries that won many awards in many international

festivals without ever being shown in public cinemas in China. The only channel for


22

ordinary Chinese audiences to access his work was through the pirate market. Jia

finally threatened to sue when the domination of digital screens by martial arts epics

initially prevented Still Life from finding a theater (Barboza, 2007).

The solution for China’s alternative/marginal filmmakers is either for the state

to subsidize non-commercial cinema, as in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and some

Middle Eastern countries, or for the filmmakers to court the mainstream market by

changing their cinematic approaches. With the Chinese state still enthusing over its

commercialization of China’s media industries -- lately it has been encouraging the

film industry to cultivate big-budget blockbusters with plenty of CGI effects to

compete directly with Hollywood in the domestic market -- the establishment of a

supportive infrastructure for alternative films might be long way off. For now, it

seems to be up to the filmmakers to make their own adjustments, and going

mainstream seems desirable if not inevitable. In Still Life, for instance, Jia shifted his

focus from the social dropouts and petty criminals of his under-developed hometown

of Fenyang to more accessible urban types. These he coupled with a polished

narrative and, with the aid of a larger budget, sleek production values. Li Yang

certainly seems eligible to go the same route.

Marginal as a result of censorship by both the market and the state

Much has been written about Chinese media’s marketization and

decentralization. Certain ideologically and artistically challenging films have likewise

received ample academic coverage (Zhang & Pickwicz, 2006). The problem of state

censorship and its impact on media practice has also been repeatedly noted. Less

discussed are the ramifications, at the site of distribution, of a cultural policy that


23

encourages popular entertainment films boosting profit and main melody films

promoting state directives. The upshot of the state-capital alliance is the

marginalization of media practices that respond neither to the market nor to the state.

Shaft is censored by the state because it was shot and shopped to film festivals without

official permission. Mountain gained state approval but was shunned by a market that

was gearing up for blockbuster New Year’s films. Li’s marginal position in China is

the result of his focus on the unpleasant aspects of contemporary Chinese society and

his determination to reveal them via a realistic aesthetic that both the state and the

market turn a blind eye to.

I use the phrase “turn a blind eye” not just to make another clever use of Li’s

film titles but to make the point that this really is a case primarily of “turning away” --

of choosing not to see -- rather than of severely restricted speech. Li’s articulation of

poverty and moral decline in the midst of China’s go-for-broke economic

transformation is not a shocking revelation to anybody, and not threatening to the

state. Public discourse, intellectual discourse and the party leadership are all now well

aware of the problems that have attended development in the reform era so far, and

more or less in agreement also that a “third way” approach to continuing development,

along the lines of what the Hu Jintao administration has described (and prescribed) as

constructing a harmonious society, is the appropriate response to those problems.

State censorship is still in force in the film industry, but it has moved and audience

tastes have moved toward each other as the imperatives of commercial entertainment

have come into greater force. In fact, at this point it makes sense to begin to speak in

terms of state and market-based constraints together, because even though one is

expressed in regulatory terms and the other in terms of distribution and ticket sales,


24

the separation is no longer terribly significant in actual effect, which is to say, what is

cut or shunned. Though “disharmony” continues to present a challenge in

synchronizing the demands of the popular and the state, state censors and popular

tastes are more and more inclined to “censor” the same things.

Li’s insistence so far on the unpleasant and the unpopular might elicit

comments that his marginalization is self-inflicted. Yet this misguided line of

argument only makes it salient the main point I have advanced here that the

opportunity is not there in China for a cinema of non-mainstream appeal. When we do

start to think in terms of a comprehensive “discourse” of film censorship, what we

find is that there is a long history and a continuing preference in China for a visual

representation that accentuates the positive rather than exposing or dwelling on the

negative. A related idea, the subordination of provocative or radically different

representation to one thing or another – politics, the people, socialism, a harmonious

society, entertainment – seems to be another fixture. Whenever there is some grand

thing to be done in China, there is little compunction about drafting art into the

service of doing it. Mao and Confucius are not very far apart on this. In the Confucian

ethos art is beautiful and good, part of the moral education of the gentleman and a

positive goad to society.

Of course, preferring goodness and light to earnest depictions of grim realities

– a New Year’s firecracker over a Li Yang mineshaft – is a universal trait of popular

audiences. What is different about China is the greater weight of expectation that

when film does show us adversity it should then also show us the triumph over

adversity, that it should never leave us feeling defeated or mired in uncertainty. This

difference in expectations, that art should serve other purposes than its own and that it


25

should generally present positive images, suggests that establishing alternative spaces

for alternative film production, distribution and exhibition may be more difficult in

China than it has been in all the part of the world that already host art house cinemas.

Needless to reassert that, as state regulation of film content continues to give way to

the rule of the market, China’s marginal media practitioners must come to terms with

the market mechanisms that determine who gets to see which films, under what

circumstances, and where.

Lastly, fringe film and video work has been an energetic and vital aspect of

Chinese film culture over the last 20 years. Early manifestations of the Chinese

independent media practice were markedly influenced by the stylistic cues of

international art house fare, resulting often in self-conscious films couched in

disjunctive narratives. The injection of Li Yang into this independent scene is a breath

of fresh air, shifting the camera to characters left usually ignored by both commercial

and art cinema. Li Yang’s explicit social agenda is affecting the polemics of

independent film, but regardless of the shifting focus, alternative dissemination

mechanisms and funding remain a central issue.

The position and nature of marginal filmmaking have only intermittently been

addressed in China. For the Chinese media at large the only profile that exists for film

is for mainstream Chinese cinema, and again, this may not be easy to change.

Recognizing the need to promote cultural pluralism, in Europe, Australia, New

Zealand, and some Middle Eastern and Asian countries, government funding agencies

have supported projects with potential to use international film festivals as a means of

circulation for fringe films and videos to help provide a cushion for lack of exposure

in the commercial arena. An equivalent realization and infrastructure for alternative


26

films may be a long time coming in China and even then there will be the danger that

alternative film projects will be excessively subject to selection for their political

correctness.

Future study in Chinese marginal media practice should look further into

distribution. The management of product, payment and data flows between producers

and audiences has rarely been addressed in Chinese media studies. Yet distribution is

the core mechanism of cultural dominance and political power in the cultural

industries. As Cubitt (2005) elaborates, both promoting and denying circulation

confer wealth and power, introducing disjuncture, deferrals, omissions and selections

that restructure and reorganize both content and audience activity. The engagement of

states in global distribution networks and regulation is thus critical, promoting some

production sectors and limiting others.10 Despite the risk that any deliberate support

for marginal films in China will come with a built-in penchant for instrumental uses

of cultural products, it is probably in the vagaries of domestic and global distribution

that the best opportunities for an alternative Chinese cinema can be found.

References

Barboza, D. (2007, July 1). A leap forward, or a great sellout? The New

York Times, pp. AR7.

Bennett, R. (2007, May 21). Bottom line: dynamic and beautifully shot

film about sex trafficking in China. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved March

22, 2008, from

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play.jsp?&rid=9234


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Chan, P. (Director). (2007). The warlords [Motion picture]. China:

Applause Pictures.

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id=VE1117933698

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picture]. China: Focus Films.

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Film Co-Production Corporation.

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Film Studio.


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Landreth, J. (2007). Yang cuts Mountain for Chinese approval. The

Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved May 5, 2008, from

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news/e3i1f890f625ffdd190718f3a516ff27a73

Lee, A. (Director). (1994). Eat drink man woman [Motion picture].

Taiwan: Central Motion Picture Corporation.

Lee, M. (2007, October 31). Have China’s “underground” directors

gone mainstream? The Associated Press. Retrieved May 13, 2008, from

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/movies/2003983864_webdirectors.html

Li, Yang. (Writer/Director). (2007). Blind mountain [Motion picture].

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Li, Yu. (Director). (2001). Fish and elephant [Motion picture].

(Available from Ariztical Entertainment. 12400 Ventura Blvd., #686, Studio

City, CA 91604-2406).

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Blind Mountain; Feng Xiaogang and Gu Changwei cheerleads for Li.

Chongqing Evening News. Retrieved May 30, 2008, from

http://www.cqwb.com.cn/webnews/htm/2007/11/22/266735.shtml

Pickowicz, P. (2006). Social and political dynamics of underground

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Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.


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Schrumpf, B. (2007). Blind Mountain (Mang Shan). KinoCrtics.com.

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Notes

1 UC San Diego, for instance, has the largest depository of Chinese independent films in the US. 2 This might change though as the domestic funding becomes available to these independent filmmakers. Recently, a Film Fund was established in Beijing by a man named Li Xianting, whose website suggests that his organization attempts to combine the functions of a production fund, archive, collection, and film festival sponsor in order to create, support, sustain, and exhibit independent filmmaking in China. This would certainly have an impact on the future of Chinese independent film practice.


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3 Though often being grouped with the independent generation of Chinese filmmakers, Li is closer in age to the Fifth Generation. The youthful age of some of the independent generation filmmakers and their relatively limited life experience might be a contributing factor to their early films’ obsession with coming of age issues. 4 Born in Xi’an in 1959, Li studied at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute from 1985 to 1987, after which he moved to Germany. There he made several documentary films and spent some time acting on German television before eventually enrolling and graduating from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne in 1995. 5 The film is an adaptation of Chinese writer Liu Qingbang’s short story Shen Mu (Sacred Wood), which won the state sanctioned and peer endorsed literary award, the Lao She Prize. 6 Li shot his footage inside illegal Chinese mines without gaining approval from the State. 7 This reminds me of some of the classical crime movies by Cohen Brothers. 8 Elite or cinephile audiences are more susceptible to such semiotic realignments than other audience segments 9 In my conversation with Li in Beijing in the summer of 2008, Li insisted that Shaft was not a politically oppositional film as the social problems the film sets out to explore has been widely acknowledged in China. Li suggested that he did not intend to court controversy at the expense of a Chinese domestic market. 10 In the US, for instance, idiosyncratic technical standards in television and cell phone networks and other corporate strategies help exclude the country from competing global media products, effectively making the US domestic market one of the most staunchly protectionist markets in the world.

li yang’s socially conscious film as marginal cinema -- china’s state-capital alliance and its...

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