Kay Zou recently interviewed Ying Qian, associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Columbia University, about her work on documentary film making during China’s revolutionary 20th century.
For a deep dive into the history and significance of documentary in China, read the entire interview here. Below are some highlights.
What is documentary?
Ying Qian: “Documentary,” derived from the word document, was first coined in English by the British filmmaker and critic John Grierson in the 1920s. The film historian Philip Rosen has shown that “document” in the 19th century commanded a great deal of respect with the development of modern empirical sciences, and evidence-based historiography and the legal professions. Grierson’s naming of “documentary” tapped into this reverence for the “document,” positioning documentary as a mode of cinema closely related to scientific investigations, evidence-based argumentation, and public education.
Of course, we know that, even in empirical science, the investigator has a lot of discretion. Anthropologists who study the culture in science labs, and historians of science who study how scientific discoveries come about, have shown that the paradigms we use to assess the physical reality around us, and the data we collect based on these paradigms, come from preconceived ideas about how the world works. It’s the same when we consider other forms of knowledge, such as social knowledge.
If the society is a huge totality of complex phenomena, whatever representation we have of it or whatever inquiry we make is by nature partial. And the specific partiality with which we present the reality we experience depends on our positionality and our situatedness – and our intention, what kind of story we want to tell.
When are the earliest documentaries created in China?
China had been a location for documentary filmmaking since cinema’s earliest years. Starting from the end of the 19th century, filmmakers from Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States all traveled through China to take moving images. These were then marketed globally either as one-off “travel actualities,” or starting from around 1910, as regularly released newsreels, entertaining filmgoers with exotic vistas and news events from around the world.
Chinese documentary filmmaking began in the early 20th century. Unlike the itinerant cinematographers dispatched by major western film studios who were supported with good filming technology and a global infrastructure of rapid processing and distribution for international markets, early Chinese filmmakers had very limited technology, access to location, and infrastructure, and they made films not for an international audience, but for filmgoers in China’s urban centers. Therefore, documentary filmmaking was closely connected to China’s politics from the beginning.
What were these films about?
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw Chinese society going through reform and revolution. The earliest documentaries I wrote about in my book were a 1906 film made by Chinese students in Japan on building the Qing Dynasty Navy, and a series of documentaries on the 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat-Sen and his Revolutionary Alliance that in the end toppled the Qing Dynasty. Both were part of political movements.
Chinese filmmakers in the early 20th century moved fluidly between documentary and fiction film production. Lai Man-Wai, a filmmaker who hailed from Hong Kong and a long-time member of Sun Yat-Sen’s Revolutionary Alliance, made documentaries for Sun’s Nationalist Party and filmed the Nationalist troops in a successful Northern Expedition (1924-1927) to regain political control of much of the country. Lai was also a major producer for feature films and used documentary footage as backdrops for his feature film – a romance – set during the Northern Expedition.
The 1920s and 1930s was the golden age of Shanghai feature filmmaking, though Chinese filmmakers also responded actively to important political events in the documentary mode. Filmmakers took risks to document the workers’ uprising in 1925, and the Japanese air-raid of Shanghai in January 1932.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), documentary film production went through rapid development. Prior to the war, the center of filmmaking was in Shanghai. When Shanghai was captured and occupied by the Japanese army, some filmmakers stayed on, but most joined resistance – a large number went inland to Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Nationalist Chinese government, a small number went to Yan’an, the Chinese Communist Party’s stronghold in rural Shaanxi, and some went to Hong Kong.
What were filmmakers working on at Yan’an?
In Yan’an, the first film unit directly under the supervision of the Communist Party was founded in 1938. The filmmaker responsible for the founding of the Yan’an film troupe was the talented Yuan Muzhi, a leading actor and film director in Shanghai prior to the war. He wanted to build a new Communist cinema in Yan’an, and believed such a new cinema must be based on documentary, a medium closest to the struggles on the ground.
Yan’an was under frequent Japanese raids and Nationalist attacks and blockade, had little film stock and processing capacity, and only two cameras – one of which was donated by Joris Ivens – so it had only a small output. It was only at the end of the war, when with the help of the Soviet Army, Yan’an took over Japan’s colonial film establishment in Manchuria (the Man-ei in short) that Communist filmmaking began to flourish. A large number of filmmakers were trained by Yan’an filmmakers with the support of Man-ei staff and technology and were dispatched to the war front to document the Civil War (1946-1950) in which the Communist troops emerged as the winner to take state power.
After the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, documentary was considered the “vanguard of cinema.” It was closely supervised by the Party, with centralized post-production at its headquarters in Beijing (the Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio) and cinematographers stationed at regional offices around the country. This meant that cinematographers could quickly respond to all the events on the ground, while the center retained control for editing, compilation, and interpretation.
(This is an excerpt. In the full interview, Ying Qian discusses the history of documentary in China thorugh the Reform and Opening Up period as well as some of the theoretical tools she uses to analyze this history. Learn more about her work here, and stay tuned for Part 2!)