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“I Am One of Them” and “They Are My Actors”: Performing, Witnessing, and DV Image-Making in Plebian China Yiman Wang 12 Only many years later did people learn to appreciate the year of 1989 — the wakeup call sent from a chaotic denouement. — Wu Wenguang1 When I go out, I never forget to bring my DV with me … It’s a habit that resembles a thief always carrying his tools of crime with the mind of stealing something. — Jiang Zhi2 If Wu Wenguang posits a collective genealogy that emerges only in retrospect, a genealogy that traces the beginning of personal documentary making to the loss of idealism in 1989 (or what many critics see as the inception of the post-socialist era), then Jiang Zhi’s self-mocking analogy underscores the surreptitious connotations of a special type of personal documentary making, namely digital video (DV) documentary since the mid-1990s. Both Wu and Jiang emphasize the personal turn in documentary making since the 1990s. One identifies the historical imperative; the other describes its unique manner of operation. They invite us (as consumers and critics) to examine the unfolding personal documentary and to properly position it vis-à-vis the current historical conjuncture on the one hand and documentary tradition on the other. A crucial interface between the historical conjuncture and the documentary tradition is the ethics of documentary, which circumscribes not only the content and the form of documentation, but also stipulates the relationship between the documentary maker and his or her subjects. Such ethics of documentary are not fixed, but rather shift with time and place. To assess the significance of personal documentary in post-socialist China, one must therefore examine how DV imagemakers negotiate documentary ethics and what new options emerge. This chapter tackles this question by studying some examples of personal DV documentary made in the past decade. Specifically, I analyze how they redefine documentary ethics by configuring new relationships between the documentary maker and his or her subjects. 218 Yiman Wang In an earlier article, entitled “The Amateur’s Lightning Rod: DV Documentary in Postsocialist China,” dealing with the ramifications of amateur-authorship claimed by a large number of DV image-makers in urban China, I discussed how their negotiations with their subjects necessitate reconceptualization of the long-standing issue of documentary ethics.3 One of the important discursive maneuvers, I argued, is the DV image-makers’ management of “cruelty” inherent in DV documentation. Echoing the familiar formulation of documentary ethics, they readily admit to the intractable power imbalance between them as camera-holders and their subjects. Furthermore, such violence is aggravated by the new technology of DV that easily penetrates into the subjects’ private sphere. The “cruelty,” however, is inflicted not only on the subjects, who are obviously on the receiving end of the violence of representation. Describing DV as a “double-edged sword,” the documentary makers contend that DV hurts themselves as much as their subjects. In a further twist, they contend that only by inscribing cruelty can they be “seared” (zhuoshao) by the real, thereby capturing the pulse of raw existence.4 To affirm the necessity of documentary cruelty for certain specific agendas (with the possible result of violating documentary ethics) means that we should be attentive to new practices and theorizations, especially when a new media technology (like DV) is involved. This does not mean, however, that DV power should be celebrated unconditionally, or that the ideology and politics of representation can be ignored. Rather, the ideology and politics of representation continue to play a crucial role, even if they adopt new forms that deserve our critical attention. Indeed, the issue of ethics becomes even more urgent due to DV’s rapid popularization and apparent ease of operation, which subject it to increasing commercialization, trivialization, and misuse. As Lu Xinyu points out: To break away from ideological constraints makes sense only when it aims to critique dictatorship. It does not mean that one can be totally free from any ideological stance, or that one does not need to reflect upon this stance or that it is exempted from ethics … Chinese documentary must make its ideological commitment — herein lies its significance and power. Without this commitment, it becomes no more than a trivial toy that distracts the player from the goal.5 Similarly, Zhang Yingjin points out three major problems that potentially undermine Chinese independent documentary making. They are erasure of the self, blind belief in objectivity, and the exploitation of subjects.6 Both...

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