China Vérité: Ying Qian on Documentary Cinema, Part 1

Kay Zou: What is a documentary?

Ying Qian: When I teach documentary in classes at Columbia, students come already with a lot of exposure to the medium. PBS documentaries have been a cultural staple in American cultural life. Viewers today also see many documentaries on streaming platforms where it’s an important category. Historically, documentary has long been associated with political and social movements.

It was the preferred form of filmmaking for radical film groups in the 1920s and 1930s, including the Workers Film and Photo League in the United States and Prokino in Japan. It also figured importantly in the activist film cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, as in works by the Dziga-Vertov Group in France, the Newsreel groups in the United States, and the Third Cinema of Latin America.

Now as our digital culture has made it easier to share videos, we instinctively pull out our phone when we see something worth documenting and sharing, and short digital videos in the documentary mode have become omnipresent and are where we learn about what’s happening in the world. 

“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 19^th 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. This is why peer reviews are so important in scientific research, as each individual process of generating evidence and arguments must be interrogated and put into conversation with those done by other researchers. It’s the same when we consider other forms of knowledge, such as social knowledge.

KZ: How so?

YQ: 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. It also depends on how we interact with the prevailing norms of storytelling and knowledge formation – are we aware of these norms? Can these norms help us tell our stories and describe the world as we know it? Do we have the means to go beyond these norms, that is, to innovate on how to tell stories and form social knowledge?

Now coming back to documentary. To think about documentary as a document, we should look at it with the same level of sophistication, as we would look at a historical document. How does this historical document come about? Who wrote it, under what circumstances, within what power structures? Documentaries tell stories about the physical and historical worlds we live in, and what kindn of stories they tell depends on the positionality of the filmmaker, the power dynamics between the filmmaker and what’s in front and around the camera, and the broader political and social situations in which the filmmaking takes place.

KZ: How has the practice of documentary filmmaking changed over time in China?

YQ: I hope your readers are interested in history, because as a film historian, my impulse is to offer a narrative of documentary’s development over a longer period. I am very involved in Chinese contemporary documentary, especially independent documentary. But I think a historical perspective will give depth to our understanding of documentary’s long engagement in mass politics, which explains why it’s so contested in today’s China and beyond it too.

China had been a location for documentary filmmaking since cinema’s earliest years. Starting from the end of the 19^th 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.

It’s worth noting that this sensorial reach into the world enabled by cinema was part of a broader culture of imperial expansion and colonization, when the world was seen to be within reach, as markets, resources and territories for settlement.

Chinese documentary filmmaking began in the early 20^th 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.

KZ: What were their films about?

YQ: The late 19^th and early 20^th 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.

After 1911, many political forces, including political parties, warlords, and the new political force of the working class, competed for power, and they all resorted to filmmaking – the new media at the time – for member recruitment, fund-raising, and publicity. Commercial publishers such as the Commercial Press and civic organizations also made films for educational purposes and for organizational fundraising purposes.

Chinese filmmakers in the early 20^th 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.

The latter turned out to be very challenging undertakings for Chinese filmmakers, because their film studios were heavily damaged during the bombing, and as Chinese they had more limited access to the city compared to western filmmakers who had the protection of neutrality and could move in and out of foreign settlements more easily.

It’s fair to say that Chinese documentary from the beginning had been embedded in political and civic lives; they were often partisan and proudly so.  And by 1920s and 1930s, Chinese filmmakers had thought very consciously about positionality. They didn’t treat documentary as a “neutral” or “objective” medium. but understood it as a means of political intervention, to tell “their side of the story.”

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.

In Chongqing, documentary production centered at two state studios under the Nationalist Party. A large number of filmmakers – including leftist filmmakers – worked at these studios. Documentary was the most important mode of Chongqing cinema. Documentaries were expected not to show reality as it is, but to capture “winning realities.”

Filmmakers hoped their films could usher in victories, by encouraging Chinese troops, demoralizing the enemy, and rallying for resistance. There was a lot of discussion on how to mobilize effectively with documentary, and how China must do it better than the Japanese and the German armies, who had been making rousing propaganda documentaries.

During the war, as part of the allied forces, China joined the circulation of images across the allied countries and was a filming destination for international filmmakers. Joris Ivens, a leftist Dutch filmmaker who had made films in the Soviet Union and worked with the workers’ film and photo league in New York, came to Chongqing in 1938 to make The 400 Million (1939). Chongqing filmmakers also contributed footage to Frank Capra’ s The Battle of China (1944), made for the American military to train American soldiers who now must fight in unfamiliar places far from home, when the U.S. entered the war after Pearl Harbor.

KZ: You mentioned Yan’an. What about filmmakers working with the Chinese Communist Party?

YQ: 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.

The 1950s was a period of radical social transformation.  With the expansion of film exhibition across the country, largely through expanding mobile film units that took films on arduous journeys across difficult terrain to China’s vast countryside for mass screenings in open air, cinema joined propaganda posters and pamphlets, and the expanding radio network, to play an important role in political communication.

Documentary depicted domestic campaigns such as the land reform and the nationalization of private enterprises, and international events from the Korean War to the Bandung conference.  During the Great Leap Forward production campaign (1957-1960), documentary was the fastest growing mode of cinema. Filmmakers felt safer making documentaries, as changing politics around the Anti-Rightist campaign (1957) had made it unclear what a politically correct feature film would look like.  But more importantly, documentary could be speedily and easily made, and therefore suited the fast speed of the Great Leap.