Cinema at the City's Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia

5 - Transfiguring the Postsocialist City: Experimental Image-Making in Contemporary China

Shanghai in Sixty Years (Liushi nianhou Shanghai tan) is a long forgotten futuristic comedy made in the besieged Shanghai of 1938. According to an extant synopsis, at the beginning of the film two men find themselves suddenly in a Shanghai of 1998, following an evening out in the dancehall cut short by their annoyed wives, who promptly placed them “in the doghouse,” in the attic. They fall into a long sleep. In the dreamscape they find themselves in a future Shanghai stranger than paradise, with flying cars and apartments where interior design is instantaneously changeable by remote control. The most shocking change is that people no longer have names but are identified by numbers. This popular science-fiction comedy from old Shanghai is not my main concern here. But the surprisingly accurate prophecy on the ubiquity of remote 5 Transfiguring the Postsocialist City: Experimental Image-Making in Contemporary China Zhang Zhen* * Earlier versions of the essay were presented at the symposium, “Urban Trauma and the Metropolitan Imagination,” at Stanford University, the conference on “Chinese and Asian Cinema in the Context of Globalization,” co-organized by Beijing University and Shanghai University, both in 2005; Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the symposium, in 2006. I thank Scott Bukatman and Pavle Levi for giving me a wonderful opportunity to start this project in a global comparative context, as well as to Shanghai University and C. K. Lee, for their invitations to develop and bring the essay to other engaging audiences. My thanks also go to my research assistants Shi-yan Chao and Ying Xiao at NYU, and particularly to Wen Hui, Wu Wenguang, and Chen Yusu for our lively conversations on dance, film, and the nature of contemporary urban life. 96 Zhang Zhen controls and digitalized personal identity provides a unique entry point for “traveling” to the present-day postsocialist Chinese city. Indeed, the universal adoption of ID numbers for Chinese citizens is recent, coinciding with the erosion of the socialist structure (in particular the strict city residence registration, or hukou, system) and of rural-urban boundaries. Hence the adoption of IDs parallels the unprecedented physical and social mobility of millions of Chinese, forming a gigantic “floating population” (liudong renkou). That the two men taken for dead by their families emerge intact from a futuristic construction site, along with the prescient references to digitalization and virtuality, inspire reflections on the changing nature of temporality and body in the context of frenzied urbanization in China today, especially in Shanghai — where the film unfolds in the “present” as well as “future” tenses. The film’s interest in both the utopic and dystopic potential of technology and its impact on the human body is also relevant to the place of cinema in the so-called “post-material” and “posthuman ” condition today.1 In the last decade of the twentieth century — the ambivalent locus of desire for the 1930s film — an art movement traversing experimental and documentary film, video art, photography, and performance has emerged with much creative energy in metropolitan centers such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou. This new generation of artists place themselves right “on the scene” (xianchang) to record the momentous shifts in the physical and mental topography of China in the country’s headlong rush toward a quasi-capitalist economy and culture. What are the distinctive features of the metropolitan imagination created by this nascent movement deploying, or rather blending, old and new media? In what manners do these image-makers, who grew up in the socialist period, engage with memories of the past and the post-revolutionary conditions while fashioning provisional designs for living the seismically shifting realities? More crucially, how do these experiments exploit the changing nature of the photographic or cinematic image for alternative social and cultural visions, as China is propelled onto the information highway and the full-speed lane of globalization? This tentative study aims to make sense of an array of still and moving images about performing (in) the city and explore ways for understanding their producers’ obsessive experimentation between stasis and motion, between real and virtual time, and between the documentary and the fantastical registers of time and image. I call this performative play with both image and body, in a variety of cinematic and paracinematic forms, a “transcinematic passage” cutting through the postsocialist and post-cinematic landscape. Transfiguring the Postsocialist City 97 Postsocialism Mummified The time...