DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film ed. by Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito (review)

DV-Made China is a fascinating and well-researched contribution to (and one of the best edited volumes on) contemporary Chinese screen culture, digital culture, and social transformation. It is marked by originality in research subject, vigor and consistency in academic writing and presentation, and sophistication in argument on and intellectual engagement with critical issues that are central to discussions on Chinese DV culture and its digital subjects. It makes a significant contribution to research on contemporary China, particularly its media culture and everyday life.

The book opens with a strong introduction, which delineates the research background; critical issues pursuant of the shift from independent fiction film to independent, alternative, and DV documentary and filmmaking; and especially the centrality of “digital subjects” to the understanding of the “other” China existing mostly in “alternative” space and time. Such alternativeness, as the introduction and many other chapters suggest, does not necessarily pose a challenge to the “mainstream,” but exists in collaboration and appropriation with both mainstream and various forms of perspectives, alternative technologies, techniques/styles, venues/spaces, and temporalities.

We understand, from both the introduction and the twelve chapters, that this book draws on transnational and comparative perspectives and networks that individual contributors, who are all well-known authors with solid scholarship, have established through their longtime engagement with China’s DV cultures as curators and collaborators in documentary production, circulation, and exhibition. It asks important questions about politics of difference that DV products and producers embody in production, distribution, and consumption. The politics of difference underlines aesthetic, political, and ethical challenges, as well as possibilities and dilemmas that independent, amateur, and activist filmmakers and animateurs experience, experiment with, and contest when facing the tension between old and new media technologies, platforms, spaces, and cultures. It unpacks key issues in the politics of difference through detailed case analysis in the twelve chapters, including power and representation, intervention and experiment, art and politics, fiction film and nonfiction documentary, China and the world.

The twelve chapters are neatly divided into two parts, with six chapters in each part. As the editors point out in the introduction, the four terms in the title of the two parts—“Ethical and Political Stakes” (part 1) and “Aesthetic and Activist Experiments” (part 2)—are inseparable in many of the films, videos, analysis, and practices discussed in the twelve chapters. The focus on similarities in grouping chapters together is worthwhile, as it gives a clear idea of where each part starts and how it is related to the other part. Throughout the two parts, the contributors highlight the paradox of democratic aspirations of the DV technologies and culture that are disturbingly liberating and restricting at the same time.

Part 1 opens with a powerful essay by Abé Mark Nornes, an established scholar in Japanese cinema and documentary studies, who offers a scathing critique of the lack of ethical concerns among Chinese filmmakers toward their filmed subjects, whether they adopt Wiseman’s direct cinema style or Ogawa’s cinema verité techniques. For Nornes, filmmakers like Wang Bing (West of the Tracks, 2003), Xu Tong (Wheat Harvest, 2008), and Xue Jianqiang (Martian Syndrome, 2009) have shown a troubling irresponsibility with little regard for the right of consent in filming their subjects using the “visible hidden camera.” A lack of an established distribution system for the independent documentary in China and its alternative nature contribute to such “a daring cinema driven by an anything-for-the-sake-of-the-film narcissism” (p. 52). By deliberately violating and ignoring the rights of people being shot, Nornes argues, these directors ironically embody the violent power structure often associated with state surveillance cameras.

Anthropologist J. P. Sniadecki, however, differs from Nornes in his understanding of and argument for filmmakers’ commitment to xianchang or “on the scene” realism, such as Xue...