Murmuring voices of the everyday: Jia Zhitan and his village documentaries

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the documentary films made by Jia Zhitan, a 64-year-old Chinese farmer who has been participating in the ‘Villager Documentary Project’ initiated by Wu Wenguang, the renowned independent documentary filmmaker in China. By looking at seven documentary films made by Jia Zhitan between 2006 and 2013, this essay draws upon the concept of everydayness and presents a localised picture of rural life in contemporary China as reflected in Jia's films. It also aims to investigate the meaning of peasant documentary filmmaking in the contexts of independent documentary culture in China, as well as the century-long sociological and ethnographic probing into Chinese village life. My analysis focuses on three aspects of village life featured predominantly in Jia's films: the rhythm of everyday life, village politics and the history of the socialist past. Taken together, these aspects point to the aesthetics, politics and historicity of the concept of everydayness.

KEYWORDS:

• Independent documentary film
• Jia Zhitan
• Wu Wenguang
• rural China
• everydayness

Acknowledgments

This article was written in association with the event ‘Chinese Independent Documentary: Wu Wenguang and the Memory Project’ held at the University of Edinburgh in November 2014. I would like to thank the following people for various kinds of help at different stages of the event and the writing: Joachim Gentz, Natascha Gentz, Hu Lidan, Jia Zhitan, Paul Pickowicz, Julian Ward, Wu Wenguang, Zhang Mengqi, Zou Xueping, and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Wu Wenguang made a documentary film about this project: Bare Your Stuff (Liangchu ni de jiahuo, 2010). Jia Zhitan is a main character in this film.

2. Jia's documentary I Want to Be a People's Representative was shown at an event on Wu Wenguang and Chinese independent cinema in the University of Edinburgh in November 2014.

3. The famous saying in Li Ji 礼记 (The Book of Rites) goes: ‘The things which men greatly desire are comprehended in meat and drink and sexual pleasure.’ (饮食男女༌人之大欲存焉). See Li Chi, Book of Rites, translated by James Legge, New York: University Books, 1967, p. 380.

4. Email interview conducted by the author (29/01/2015).

5. ‘Constitution of the People's Republic of China’ (official English version, last amended 14 March 2004), http://www.npc.gov.cn/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/15/content_1372989.htm. Accessed 16 Apr. 2015.

6. It was screened at the Beijing Independent Film Festival in Songzhuang in 2013 and won Outstanding Documentary Award. It was also shown in various festivals in Nanjing, Yunnan, Guangxi, France and USA, and in the University of California, San Diego and the University of Edinburgh, among others. Information is from Wu Wenguang and Jia Zhitan.

7. Jia used the word ‘archive’ in his autobiography. He writes: ‘No state archive keeps records about the experiences and feelings of villagers. I want to work together with Wu Wenguang and his colleagues and build a folk film archive or museum. I hope everyone with conscience, including our next generations, will not forget this history which involves the loss of thousands and millions of people's lives.’ See Jia 2012.

8. This film and his interviews were made under the Memory Project initiated by Wu Wenguang. For a detailed study of the Memory Project, see Zhuang 2014 and Zito 2015.

9. Wu only gave the peasants who participated in the Villager Documentary Project very basic training about the use of camera. Many independent documentary filmmakers may not have received professional training either, but they have basic cultural knowledge thanks to a university education, which Jia and his fellow villager-filmmakers did not have. Therefore, the level of amateurism is different.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xuelei Huang

Xuelei Huang teaches Chinese cinema and literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922–1938 (Brill, 2014) and currently working on a book manuscript on a social history of smell in modern China.