|
| Those Rich-textured Image Representations |
| By Maya |
 |
 his September witnessed the scheduled happening of the fifth annual China Independent Film Festival (CIFF) in Nanjing. Since the fourth CIFF in 2007, practices of competitive election, awarding prizes and a system of reviewing committee have transformed CIFF from a film show into a film festival, opening up a larger space for communications so that the vice with a small circle’s game of self-amusement and the communication obstacle between films and audience could be removed.
The Independence Posture:
With CIFF’s goals, “independence” is a word demanding conscious and vigilant attentions and, meanwhile, involving multidimensional perspectives. Here, “independence” no longer remains on such a brighter surface as “avant-garde” and a fantasy-world like narcissistic sentiment. Then, what does “independence” mean? How can we implant an “independent” spirit in a fertile soil and see it burst out, grow strong together amid changes of time and space and before various layers of life, and be always courageous and enthusiastic in our relentless explorations into the light-sheltered depths? So, the fourth CIFF had specified the four dimensions of “independence”, namely, “free spirit”, “openness”, “fresh style” and “forsight”.
The Story Dimension:
  n China, unlike documentary film that has emerged as a “pioneer” of independent film, feature film is still confronted with the inertia of conventional questions such as “commercial film or literary film?” However, feature film’s performance in CIFF indicates that it has been going its way steadily and firmly. Directors of feature films generally don’t accept the frequently asked conventional questions; their questions stem from their persistent self-examinations in the process of filming practices, and such an attitude is the very strong power the creators of feature films in CIFF have shown. The opening film for this film festival was Wang Jing’s maiden work “The Street”, which has only a volume of 100,000 RMB; amid a burst of enthusiastic applause, the first character appearing turned out to be a petite young girl unexpectedly. For a film with her warm life experiences, for a story she wrote and directed herself, she had rushed about among the numerous characters and among the non-professional children actors in her native land, virtually experiencing the process of wring every ounce of blood out of herself as a Mainland film director producing her maiden work, which justly sets off and sharpens the humble state of those small town people depicted in this film.
Contrary to Wang’s cash-strapped film, the well-established Diao Yinan secured a relatively abundant sum for making a film, which gave people a view of the possible direction of independent feature films. The narrative dimension of “Evening Bus” is set in a reserved cool tone, but the exquisite, scrupulous and occasionally sober and fanciless peeling-analysis of the mind state demonstrates a unique charm of this maker’s film. Because of the story’s relative obscure setting and ambiguous character relationship, such a non-detailed description method allow film-watching experience a rich textural sense and a multidirectional interpretion space, hence a higher index of attraction to audience.
New phenomena in this CIFF include foreign independent film directors’ involvement, and their stories are likewise all set in China. An example is “The Hearse”; if there’s no statement when discussing the plot after the show that its director Kang Ruide is a British man, there’s no way to determine it’s a Chinese story in a foreigner’s eye. The strength of this film is “loose”; particularly its first two-third part is natural and smooth, and the on-site dialogues of non-professional actors are all coming out of the native’s ordinary lives, no wonder it’s that much familiar.
 Naturally, contemporary art people wouldn’t miss it. In Zhang Chi’s “Box Lunch”, Ai Weiwei turned a fixer by the city gate. However, as an original work by Xiang Yubi and Wang Zhijing, this feature film never detaches itself from a self-talking and self-amusing tone of the “small mass”; the surrealistic carrier the director looked highly upon lost its contact points with the surrounding lives and could only serve to preach to deaf ears.
The Documentary Eye:
 orks in the documentary unit have gradually evolved from a simple care for unprivileged groups to a penetration into richer depths of life, even into a ruthless layer-by-layer self-dissection of human nature. Such explorations have opted out a habitual judgment and power-implied doctrinal tendency, and independence of the documentary perspective has thus been asserted definitely.
What remains our unavoidable “nirvana”? In his documentary “The Nirvana”, Zhou Yu, in a crisp rhythm and plain narration, effected a ferociously violent collision in the inner hearts of the audience and of his own. The statement preceding this film, which was taken from the “Revelation” in the Bible, goes like this: “Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. If anyone's name was not found written in the book of fire, he was thrown into the lake of fire.” The cruel and hopeless forgetfulness can bring about such tragedies, and Chinese history is full of such forgetfulness. Those who awaken us are courageous people, for they also wake themselves up who are likely to be falling deep into sleep in the  tranquility.
In his “Aolu Guya, Aolu Guya”, Gu Tao narrated something about the unfamiliar tragic existence of remnant alien races, and his calm anthropological perspective is about the sympathy and last warm-blood poetic feelings towards the existence of numerous minority groups. Equally concerned with the fate of minority groups, the work “I’m Chinese” by Shen Shaomin, who shot this documentary as an artist, also exhibited in “The Third Nanjing Triennial” held at the same time. He vividly unfolded before audience the confusion and loss of a group of Russian descendants living in China’s rural regions about their identity and fate. His kind of conscientious and earnest attitude of genuine probe into the realities is indeed the quality the market-trapped contemporary art scene urgently needs. Whereas in “Brother Long”, with an interrogation “Is it the case that the director himself and the object he shoots are taking advantage of each other?” Zhou Hao has created a space for profound self-examinations; by depicting the constantly evolving relationship between these two people in the shooting process, he showed us a tough and violent force that could be created under a non-utopian light. The four-hour-long “Doctor Ma’s Clinic” by Cong Feng recorded a life pattern unfolded in a remote rural “public space”, the judgment passed on their state of existence, their unfathomable sufferings and other things of rich anthropological perspectives, which have invested this documentary with a frame of oral account of history – it was contributed by the locals who attended the clinic.
Images from the fifth annual China Independent Film Festival (CIFF):
1. Prize items for the annual CIFF
2. Diao Yinan, “Evening Bus”, Feature
3. Zhou Yu, “Nirvana”, Documentary
4. Wang Jin, “The Street”, Feature
5. Gu Tao, “Aolu Guya, Aolu Guya”, Documentary
6. Zhou Hao, “Brother Long”, Documentary
7. Peng Tao, “Silkworm”, Feature
8. Gao Tunzi, “Red Horse”, Documentary
9. Zhang Zhanqing, “One Minute of Life, Sixty Seconds of Joy”, Documentary
10. Geng Jun, “Young People”, Feature
11. Kang Ruide, “The Hearse”, Feature
12. Zhang Chi, “Box Lunch”, Feature
Translated Hu Zhu. 
|
|
|
