China as documentary

some basic questions (inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni and Jia Zhangke)

Rey Chow

pp. 185-202

in: Gary Bettinson, James Udden (eds), The poetics of Chinese cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

Juxtaposing Antonioni's Chung Kuo/Cina with discussions on photographic realism by Sontag, Bourdieu and Barthes, this chapter delineates the aesthetic, epistemic and cross-cultural problems that emerge when China is captured and viewed in the documentary mode. If the most acute of such problems is the gap between "foreign observer" and "native informant," whose claims to the reality in question tend to be incommensurable, would things be different if and when the filmmaker is Chinese? The work of Jia Zhangke offers an interesting provocation: as well as subjectivity and time, he makes mediality part of a consciously stylized gesture of documentary-making, turning the notion of "China as documentary" into a new kind of conceptual project.