When feminism encounters New Documentary Movement: an uncompleted academic discussion

ABSTRACT

This article starts with the “encounter” between feminists in the “International Symposium on Chinese Women and Visual Representation” and Chinese documentary filmmaker Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest, and explores the viewpoints and standpoints of feminist actors. With the analysis of the similarities and differences between the independent documentary perspective and the feminist stance, the author elaborates more deeply on why Chinese female directors do not have the consciousness of “feminism.” China’s independent documentary shows how the issue of feminism in China is intertwined with China’s various complex socio-political issues. The way of Chinese documentary filmmaker as “living with the bottom rung” is a kind of practical behavior that seeks truth by integrating itself with it. This requires great courage and idealism, as well as social experience. The bottom layer is where the dark side of the society exists which is beyond the law and morality. The question raised is precisely how to promote the development of feminism and documentary together to work for an equal and just society itself. The more urgent task of Chinese feminism is how to rethink the relationship between the reality of China and feminism, and how to re-establish effective dialogue and cooperation with various critical forces in this society. In the historical perspective of the feminism development of China over one century, gender and women's issues have never existed in isolation, but have moved forward with various social and political movements. How to re-examine this historic heritage to face China's problems and crises today is an uncompleted answer that China's feminism must hand over.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• Wheat Harvest
• independent documentary
• the lowest rung

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Center for Research on Women of Shanghai University, Nanjing-Brown Joint Program in Gender Studies and the Humanities, and School of Foreign Languages of Shanghai University for the organization of the international conference on “New Development of Global Capitalism and Women’s Movement” in June 2014 and their help in translating the article into English.

Notes on contributor

Lu Xinyu is professor and dean of the School of Communication, ECNU (East China Normal University), where she also serves as senior research fellow. Her research is focused on the relationship between visual culture in China, mass media and the social development. Her many writings include Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement (Beijing, SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2003), Writing and What It Obscures (Guiling, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008), The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (as two chapters author and co-editor, Hong Kong University Press, 2010), and Academic, Media and Publicity (Shanghai, East China Normal University Press, 2015).

Special terms

Table

Notes

1 In “Why should we reject Wheat Harvest,” the author said,

Since the Yunfest Documentary Festival in 2009, the controversial documentary has been boycotted but come into public view over and over again. From Yunnan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, to Fudan University, each screening was fiercely denounced and protested; but that didn’t decrease the mania and passion of the middle class’ academic interest in the revelation of the privacy of the lowest rung, which was only for fun. (Ermao 2012)

2 The video briefs at the beginning,

In 2009, a few NGO workers set up an informal group specifically for boycotting a documentary Wheat Harvest. They met with a filmed subject appearing in the documentary to investigate into the filmmaking process and the pressure on the filmed subject caused by the film. The group members have kept following up on this issue. In the International Conference on Chinese Women and Visual Representation held in Shanghai, a group member chanced upon a screening of the film and registered a strong protest in the meeting. This is what “I Know What You Have Done at Fudan University,” a feminist accusation of visual violence against human rights, want to tell you.

3 For the video, see http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzQxMTkyNTg4.html.

4 Jia (2011) said,

As Professor Lu Xinyu in the School of Journalism at Fudan University suggested, we discussed the topic of ethics in the 1990s because we hoped to better protect the filmmakers and the filmed. However, we now need to reflect on the way we discuss the ethnics while the ethnics today turned to be a violence that strangles the documentary directors and the films. Many people said that Wheat Harvest is a good piece but that’s not how it should be made. But if the film was made in their way, all people in it would have to be pixelated. Then the film would not even exist at all. The ethics thus traps itself and reduces to a rope that hangs the documentary to death. Such practice is something that I oppose. We should respect the director, who voluntarily produced a documentary like this and assumed the responsibility and the burden of consciousness. Only on the premise of respect, the documentaries that represent the bottom society can truly express themselves. And in front of such respect, there would be little room left for the audiences’ moral superiority.

5 For the articles, see http://www.douban.com/people/4551346/notes.

6 For the article, see http://www.douban.com/note/42286864/.