中国实验电影萌芽
这个学期在做 histororgaphy of avant-garde cinema 的研究，感觉实验电影在中国电影界和学术界都是很边缘的小新领域，没有太多资料和文献可以参考，希望能和对中国实验电影比较了解和关注的朋友们多多交流。
Becoming Visible: Emergence of Experimental Cinema in Mainland China
Contrary to the fruitful “a-hundred-year history” of Chinese cinema, experimental cinema in mainland China (I will use the term “China” for short in the following paragraphs) is almost a new-born baby only started to emerge in numbers after the turn of the century. Here I am not trying to contend that there is no formalistic experimentation in the history of Chinese cinema or there is not a single Chinese film made before the millennium that can be considered as experimental. As a matter of fact, a surrealism tendency was found in the 1979 film Troubled Laughter; Mu Fei’s pre-1949 narrative films also demonstrated individual experimentation; and Peili Zhang, the father of video art in China, made 30X30 in 1988, which is generally acknowledged as the first experimental video in China. Major Chinese film historians also credited early Chinese marital art films for its technological and formalistic explorations as compensation to the lack of an experimental tradition in the history of Chinese cinema.
On the other hand, there might be other experimental films or amateur films that are aberrant from the mainstream narrative conventions made in the 20th century China, but are not accessible to contemporary viewers due to the lack of archive and exhibition and loss during the war and r... eras.
However, experimental cinema, even if it existed or circulated in China before the 21st century, is almost invisible or even considered as non-xistent within the taxonomy system in the history of Chinese cinema. Indeed, narrative filmmaking, both in the form of fiction and non-fiction, has dominated criticism and scholarly work as much as it has production ever since the “exotic apparatus” was first imported to mainland China as an entertainment and later propaganda tool. It was not until the coming of the 21st century that a visible experimental cinema started to spring up in China. A poster of the “first exhibition of the experimental cinema in Peking University” on October 10th, 2009 demonstrated such visibility.
Similar to experimental cinema all around the world, experimental cinema in China is marginalized and only occurs to very limited number of audiences. Ironically enough, different from most European and American early avant-garde movements that emerged as self-motivated, autonomous counter-cinema against the mainstream filmmaking world; the emergence of Chinese experimental cinema in the 21st century was more of an institutionalized movement propelled by the academia (or maybe the government) as a supplement to fiction narrative and documentary filmmaking, completing the taxonomy system of Chinese film productions and making up the a-hundred-year’s absence of an alternative cinema.
As one can tell from the poster, the exhibition of Chinese Youth Artists’ Experimental Film and Video revealed in the first place a sense of elitism. The event was not only held in one of China’s most prestigious university - Peking University – the Harvard in China, but had also invited an academic committee with 8 members, including 4 university professors from mainland China and Taiwan, 2 experts from governmental art institutions, a British film scholar and a 6th generation Chinese filmmaker Wu Wenguang, whose documentary Bumming in Beijing was known for its avant-gardism.
As China's highest educational institution for arts and Humanities, Peking University as the exhibition location publicized and promoted the event with its high class standards, and also provided solid theoretical supports. One of the most important academic publications based at Peking University Yearbook of Chinese Contemporary Art reported the exhibition and thus reinforced its importance and significance as a belated “ground-breaking” cultural event.
The artifact also implies a strong academic and professional base of experimental cinema in Mainland China. All the filmmakers whose works were being exhibited in this event were exclusively from two film schools in Beijing that have experimental film and video programs. They were either teachers or students at Beijing Film Academy or Central Academy of Fine Arts, the first two schools in China that launched experimental film/video programs, in 2004 and 2005 respectively. Every filmmaker attending the exhibition was trained in the form of experimental filmmaking and none of the youth filmmakers was amateur.
However, the two schools have very distinct approaches and placements to experimental filmmaking. As the country’s first and most renowned film educational institution, Beijing Film Academy (BFA) is the cradle of most 5th and 6th generation Chinese filmmakers and has a long tradition of narrative filmmaking. Its departments and programs are designed very similar to the west coast industry-oriented professional film schools in US, such as American Film Institute, and Chapman University among others. The experimental film/video program in BFA is named as “new media art” under the department of art and design (Meishu Xi) and is a very minor program within a big narrative filmmaking environment. Interestingly, the program is also parallel with a special effect program, a character design program and a set design program in the same department, all of which are very specialized and career-oriented for narrative filmmaking.
The exhibition included experimental narrative shorts made by BFA students in cinematography and directing programs. Synopses of these short films (1) suggest that they integrate narrative filmmaking with artistic experimentation, reminiscent of the American trance film tradition. Unfortunately I haven’t watched any of these films because of limited access. Instead I found another film that was also made by BFA students titled as an experimental short, Ni Guang (2). The major narrative structure in this short film somehow testifies and justifies the descriptions of the article.
The experimental film/animation program in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, jointly held with California Institute of Arts is less embarrassingly placed in the School of Urban Design. As the nation’s top educational institution for fine art (but not film), the Central Academy of Fine Arts has a great reputation for nurturing artists, mainly painters, sculptors among others.
Qiuyan Wu, a graduate from the experimental film/animation joint program at the Central Academy of Fine Arts who currently teaches at the same university, provides a synopsis of his project Understand (Wu Jing) on his blog: dreamland, restless sleeping ideal, fragments of memories, belief and impulse filling the doubtful dust, and overlapped reality and illusion (3). The video starts with the shadow of a Buddha’s bronze sculpture filmed from behind, gradually revealing the back and the head of the Buddha by manipulating the lighting. Then a humming and fluctuating sound enters, and aligns with the shaking head of the Buddha. The video consists of several steady/still shots of the Buddha from different angles and perspectives, and ends with a fade-out of the Buddha that mirrors the beginning. Comparing to the BFA counterpart, this video is more poetic and symbolic, focusing on expression and aesthetic rather than narrative.
A screenshot of another film presented in the exhibition, Zhuo Chen’s Chinese carnival exemplifies a postmodernist attempt. A parody consisting of the images of the Chinese god of wealth, fancy apartment buildings, cars, money and people filling the frame, the collage generates a satire of the collective anxiety of the Chinese youth generation in a competitive capital-oriented urban society. The picture also displays an attempt to incorporate cinematic experimentation with industrial film production methods.
At the bottom of the article, there are logos of four sponsors of the event entitled as “media support”, but due to lack of textual references, I’m not able to locate these four organizations (they might probably be university organizations). Obviously the event did not receive much financial support from other commercial organizations. In a blog article, some pictures are found about the event. The exhibition was held in a multimedia classroom in Peking University and projection facilities could not be very impressive since it was not a cinema or a room designed for movie viewing. There were probably about 100 ~ 150 students attending the exhibition, and the classroom was tightly filled (6).
To sum up, the artifact introduces a blooming experimental cinema in mainland China after the turn of the century that is different from its European and American counterparts, while the recognition and definition of an experimental Chinese cinema might still be in a premature stage in China.
References and Notes
1. http://shen.chaofang.blog.163.com/blog/static/13000004220099121845823/
2. http://art.china.cn/tongzhi/2009-09/11/content_3126957.htm
3. http://blog.artintern.net/blogs/index/wqy
4. http://art.china.cn/tongzhi/2009-09/11/content_3126957_3.htm
5. Pictures of the exhibition can be found at this blog http://shen.chaofang.blog.163.com/blog/static/130000042200992483119606/
6. The artifact was first found on Douban: http://www.douban.com/event/11114919/
Becoming Visible: Emergence of Experimental Cinema in Mainland China
Contrary to the fruitful “a-hundred-year history” of Chinese cinema, experimental cinema in mainland China (I will use the term “China” for short in the following paragraphs) is almost a new-born baby only started to emerge in numbers after the turn of the century. Here I am not trying to contend that there is no formalistic experimentation in the history of Chinese cinema or there is not a single Chinese film made before the millennium that can be considered as experimental. As a matter of fact, a surrealism tendency was found in the 1979 film Troubled Laughter; Mu Fei’s pre-1949 narrative films also demonstrated individual experimentation; and Peili Zhang, the father of video art in China, made 30X30 in 1988, which is generally acknowledged as the first experimental video in China. Major Chinese film historians also credited early Chinese marital art films for its technological and formalistic explorations as compensation to the lack of an experimental tradition in the history of Chinese cinema.
On the other hand, there might be other experimental films or amateur films that are aberrant from the mainstream narrative conventions made in the 20th century China, but are not accessible to contemporary viewers due to the lack of archive and exhibition and loss during the war and r... eras.
However, experimental cinema, even if it existed or circulated in China before the 21st century, is almost invisible or even considered as non-xistent within the taxonomy system in the history of Chinese cinema. Indeed, narrative filmmaking, both in the form of fiction and non-fiction, has dominated criticism and scholarly work as much as it has production ever since the “exotic apparatus” was first imported to mainland China as an entertainment and later propaganda tool. It was not until the coming of the 21st century that a visible experimental cinema started to spring up in China. A poster of the “first exhibition of the experimental cinema in Peking University” on October 10th, 2009 demonstrated such visibility.
Similar to experimental cinema all around the world, experimental cinema in China is marginalized and only occurs to very limited number of audiences. Ironically enough, different from most European and American early avant-garde movements that emerged as self-motivated, autonomous counter-cinema against the mainstream filmmaking world; the emergence of Chinese experimental cinema in the 21st century was more of an institutionalized movement propelled by the academia (or maybe the government) as a supplement to fiction narrative and documentary filmmaking, completing the taxonomy system of Chinese film productions and making up the a-hundred-year’s absence of an alternative cinema.
As one can tell from the poster, the exhibition of Chinese Youth Artists’ Experimental Film and Video revealed in the first place a sense of elitism. The event was not only held in one of China’s most prestigious university - Peking University – the Harvard in China, but had also invited an academic committee with 8 members, including 4 university professors from mainland China and Taiwan, 2 experts from governmental art institutions, a British film scholar and a 6th generation Chinese filmmaker Wu Wenguang, whose documentary Bumming in Beijing was known for its avant-gardism.
As China's highest educational institution for arts and Humanities, Peking University as the exhibition location publicized and promoted the event with its high class standards, and also provided solid theoretical supports. One of the most important academic publications based at Peking University Yearbook of Chinese Contemporary Art reported the exhibition and thus reinforced its importance and significance as a belated “ground-breaking” cultural event.
The artifact also implies a strong academic and professional base of experimental cinema in Mainland China. All the filmmakers whose works were being exhibited in this event were exclusively from two film schools in Beijing that have experimental film and video programs. They were either teachers or students at Beijing Film Academy or Central Academy of Fine Arts, the first two schools in China that launched experimental film/video programs, in 2004 and 2005 respectively. Every filmmaker attending the exhibition was trained in the form of experimental filmmaking and none of the youth filmmakers was amateur.
However, the two schools have very distinct approaches and placements to experimental filmmaking. As the country’s first and most renowned film educational institution, Beijing Film Academy (BFA) is the cradle of most 5th and 6th generation Chinese filmmakers and has a long tradition of narrative filmmaking. Its departments and programs are designed very similar to the west coast industry-oriented professional film schools in US, such as American Film Institute, and Chapman University among others. The experimental film/video program in BFA is named as “new media art” under the department of art and design (Meishu Xi) and is a very minor program within a big narrative filmmaking environment. Interestingly, the program is also parallel with a special effect program, a character design program and a set design program in the same department, all of which are very specialized and career-oriented for narrative filmmaking.
The exhibition included experimental narrative shorts made by BFA students in cinematography and directing programs. Synopses of these short films (1) suggest that they integrate narrative filmmaking with artistic experimentation, reminiscent of the American trance film tradition. Unfortunately I haven’t watched any of these films because of limited access. Instead I found another film that was also made by BFA students titled as an experimental short, Ni Guang (2). The major narrative structure in this short film somehow testifies and justifies the descriptions of the article.
The experimental film/animation program in the Central Academy of Fine Arts, jointly held with California Institute of Arts is less embarrassingly placed in the School of Urban Design. As the nation’s top educational institution for fine art (but not film), the Central Academy of Fine Arts has a great reputation for nurturing artists, mainly painters, sculptors among others.
Qiuyan Wu, a graduate from the experimental film/animation joint program at the Central Academy of Fine Arts who currently teaches at the same university, provides a synopsis of his project Understand (Wu Jing) on his blog: dreamland, restless sleeping ideal, fragments of memories, belief and impulse filling the doubtful dust, and overlapped reality and illusion (3). The video starts with the shadow of a Buddha’s bronze sculpture filmed from behind, gradually revealing the back and the head of the Buddha by manipulating the lighting. Then a humming and fluctuating sound enters, and aligns with the shaking head of the Buddha. The video consists of several steady/still shots of the Buddha from different angles and perspectives, and ends with a fade-out of the Buddha that mirrors the beginning. Comparing to the BFA counterpart, this video is more poetic and symbolic, focusing on expression and aesthetic rather than narrative.
A screenshot of another film presented in the exhibition, Zhuo Chen’s Chinese carnival exemplifies a postmodernist attempt. A parody consisting of the images of the Chinese god of wealth, fancy apartment buildings, cars, money and people filling the frame, the collage generates a satire of the collective anxiety of the Chinese youth generation in a competitive capital-oriented urban society. The picture also displays an attempt to incorporate cinematic experimentation with industrial film production methods.
At the bottom of the article, there are logos of four sponsors of the event entitled as “media support”, but due to lack of textual references, I’m not able to locate these four organizations (they might probably be university organizations). Obviously the event did not receive much financial support from other commercial organizations. In a blog article, some pictures are found about the event. The exhibition was held in a multimedia classroom in Peking University and projection facilities could not be very impressive since it was not a cinema or a room designed for movie viewing. There were probably about 100 ~ 150 students attending the exhibition, and the classroom was tightly filled (6).
To sum up, the artifact introduces a blooming experimental cinema in mainland China after the turn of the century that is different from its European and American counterparts, while the recognition and definition of an experimental Chinese cinema might still be in a premature stage in China.
References and Notes
1. http://shen.chaofang.blog.163.com/blog/static/13000004220099121845823/
2. http://art.china.cn/tongzhi/2009-09/11/content_3126957.htm
3. http://blog.artintern.net/blogs/index/wqy
4. http://art.china.cn/tongzhi/2009-09/11/content_3126957_3.htm
5. Pictures of the exhibition can be found at this blog http://shen.chaofang.blog.163.com/blog/static/130000042200992483119606/
6. The artifact was first found on Douban: http://www.douban.com/event/11114919/
