Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global
368
Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global
368eBook
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Overview
Contributors. Conerly Casey, Jenny Chio, Michelle Cho, Kay Dickinson, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Feng-Mei Heberer, Tzu-hui Celina Hung, Rahul Mukherjee, Joshua Neves, Bhaskar Sarkar, Nishant Shah, Abhigyan Singh, SV Srinivas, Marc Steinberg, Chia-chi Wu, Patricia Zimmerman
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822372547 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/16/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 38 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Bhaskar Sarkar is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition, also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
VIDEO DOCUMENTARY AND RURAL PUBLIC CULTURE IN ETHNIC CHINA
Jenny Chio
The technological and political advances afforded by digital video are, by now, canonized and celebrated in the narrative history of post-Mao independent Chinese documentary filmmaking. Whereas many documentaries in the 1980s and early 1990s were produced by filmmakers with access to state-run television stations and equipment, the introduction of the mini-DV camera in the late 1990s spurred a radical rise in the number and scope of documentaries produced outside of the state media system. Not only were filmmakers more able to work individually, but more individuals could be filmmakers; this was to become, according to Jia Zhangke, "the age of the amateur." Or, as Wu Wenguang, one of the first and most active independent Chinese documentarians, has written, "The result of this way of doing things [using a DV camera and digital, nonlinear editing] is that I have moved farther and farther away from 'professionalism,' television, film festival competitions and awards. ... It was DV that saved me, that allowed me to maintain a kind of personal relationship to documentary making."
Yet while digital video production has become more accessible and personal, the production and consumption of video documentaries in China are associated with modern, and by extension urban, practices and people, even if many films themselves depict rural conditions. This reflects and refracts a discursive tendency to approach the rural from the perspective of the urban, or more precisely, to focus on the urbanization of the rural rather than the qualities of rural lives and livelihoods in and of themselves. Recent national policies in China bolster and lend empirical justification for this perspective: the goal of urban-rural integration (chengxiang yiti hua) underlying state policies of "city and townification" (chengzhenhua) makes explicit the expectation that the "three rural issues" (sannong wenti) will be solved precisely when rural people, places, and economies are overcome by urbanization and modernity. Furthermore, emboldened by statistics about population density, construction booms, and highly publicized state-led policy initiatives to resettle nomadic communities in newly built concrete planned communities, what is considered important about China now is expected to fall within the realm of the urban, so much so that any and all changes to social lives and practices in rural regions become subsumed under, and understood as constituent steps toward, the ultimate goals of development and modernization.
Bringing media to villages has been a critical component of previous attempts to address the "three rural issues," commonly glossed as farmers, villages, and agriculture. But the assumption that media is primarily an urban practice collapses rural media under the rubrics of modernity and urbanity and risks overlooking the significances of digital video and documentary forms in rural and peri-urban contexts. This also obscures the potential for differences in interpretation, meaning, and politics that documentary video production, consumption, and circulation might hold in urbanizing or even non-urban contexts. The "digital divide" in China, as elsewhere, is no more or less a lived reality than the rural-urban divide: these boundaries are contingent and porous. As Paola Voci reminds us, although many people in China are excluded from even the (supposedly) most accessible forms of digital media, including the Internet, "for many poor, ICT [Information and Communication Technology] is not completely out of reach but, rather, it is associated with much more restricted (both in terms of time and sophistication) occasional encounters." The question of how and in what form some people may "occasionally encounter" video documentary thus points toward both the empirical and theoretical necessity of understanding how video is integrated into contemporary rural and, specifically for this essay, ethnic minority experiences in China today.
I take seriously the on-the-ground realities of rural video practices in ethnic China in order to move beyond the framework of media and modernity as indicative of an urban experience. The challenge is to define what might be considered rural modernity, or the ways of being modern and rural and ethnic that may not align with dominant discourses and state-led policies of development, modernization, and urbanization. The increasing affordability of digital video technology combined with gradually rising incomes has facilitated a vibrant, dynamic business in rural and regional marketplaces, far from the centers of state-run and commercial media (such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou), for the production and purchase of video recordings of local festivals and folk performances on video compact disc (VCD) and more recently on DVD. Likewise, the portability and low overhead costs of digital video production have prompted the inclusion of documentary video training as a commonplace feature of rural, ethnic minority community-development programs across China, many of which are organized by scholars, filmmakers, and local cultural institutions and groups. Taken together, these form a range of possible encounters that rural, ethnic minority individuals have with video and with documentary. As media texts and mediated contexts, video documentary in rural ethnic China thus provokes the question of how (video) media relates to, or perhaps even contributes to, the formation of a more distinctly rural way of being modern.
Given the reality of video documentary production, circulation, and consumption in rural ethnic China, is it possible to trace the salient features of an emerging, specifically rural public culture? Elsewhere, I have argued that local, nonstate media is shaping what I called a different kind of "visual mainstream" in parts of rural and ethnic minority Guizhou Province. Here, however, I push this idea to a fuller and possibly more challenging extreme — to consider not only the possibility of multiple "mainstreams," but also of a rural public culture that is engendered and enlivened by local video documentaries and that exists alongside, but not necessarily in conflict with, mainstream national media. Delineating the contours of rural public culture in ethnic China opens the possibility of understanding rural ways of being modern without subsuming these practices within the value-laden frames of "alternative" or "resistance." It also steps out of the framework of urbanization as the defining feature of rural transformation. The video documentaries I discuss are almost all self-consciously celebratory, not critical, in feel and content. Moreover, the popularity of locally produced video documentaries in rural ethnic China suggests ongoing desires to grapple with social transformations in very particular ways, beginning with the experiences afforded by engagement with media itself.
Digital video is exceptionally quotidian and common throughout much of rural China. Developments such as the state-led expansion of television to villages (the Cun Cun Tong policy), the relative affordability of satellite dishes, and the sale of VCDs and DVDs of domestic and international television shows and films throughout provincial towns and cities illustrate both Voci's point about how people might occasionally encounter media and my assertion that we must take seriously what kinds of media and what kinds of practices are located in the continuum between rural and urban, ICT haves and have-nots. Any investigation into locally produced media in rural, ethnic minority communities therefore demands a critical inquiry into the epistemological foundations of media making as a way of knowing, and participating in, modernity. Such media practices, made possible by specific qualities of digital video technology, cultivate new subjectivities for their producers and audiences while simultaneously constituting local interpretations and expressions of dominant state discourses. In the current period of intense political attention on maintaining social stability and mitigating ethnic tensions, the production, circulation, and consumption of video documentary suggest new forms of self-representation for rural, ethnic minority Chinese and speak to changing relations between media and society in the postsocialist era, as well as to the need to reconceptualize the idea of public culture, beginning with rural ethnic realities.
The rise in rural video documentary practices can be explained in terms of technology and economics: digital video is cheaper, smaller, and thus more accessible than previous audiovisual technologies, and people across China are slightly richer, are more educated, and have more leisure time to develop new skills and interests. Voci has dubbed these emergent media forms, such as online and cellphone videos, as "smaller-screen realities" that are defined by a particular lightness, a term she uses to describe "their 'insignificant' weight in terms of production costs, distribution size, profit gains, intellectual or artistic ambitions, but also their deep meaning in defining an alternative way of seeing and understanding the world." The video documentaries I am concerned with here are also light because they circulate quickly and cheaply on DVD and, more recently, through social media platforms like Weixin/WeChat, but there is more to them than accessibility and affordability. The prevalence and popularity of video documentaries in rural ethnic China, the contexts of their production and circulation, suggest that they are heavy or "thick" with cultural meaning. The challenge, therefore, is to unearth what is social, shared, and personal in these videos and to think deeply about how these practices indicate not only an individualistic desire to preserve but also an impulse to contribute to public expressions of identity and belonging. For ethnic minority communities in contemporary rural China, this is particularly salient because of the links between media, media literacy (including the abilities to read, understand, use, and derive enjoyment from media), and modernization. Understanding the connections between media and modern selves in video documentary practices thus contributes to a conceptualization of rural public culture — modern ways of being rural that are publicly expressed in forms of cultural production and consumption that simultaneously reinforce a rurality distinct from urbanity and insist on its own modernity (first and foremost through the medium of digital video).
I draw on two case studies to analyze video documentary as a response to and engagement with development and modernization, and to demonstrate how these media practices are indicative of rural public culture in ethnic China. First, I discuss the production and sale of ethnic Miao festival, performance, and bullfighting videos in and around the city of Kaili, in Guizhou. I call these documentaries "village videos" because they focus on events central to rural Miao village life and communities, although they are not always filmed in villages. Second, I examine community media and participatory video programs organized by From Our Eyes (known in Chinese as Xiangcun zhi Yan). Initiated in the early 2000s by scholars at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences and Yunnan University and since 2015 a registered independent organization in China, From Our Eyes runs video-production training workshops for cohorts of amateur and first-time rural, ethnic minority filmmakers from Yunnan, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Guangxi, many of whose documentaries have gone on to screen throughout China and internationally.
DOCUMENTING RURAL VIDEO REALITIES
Locally produced media in rural China is not a new phenomenon, nor is it unique to ethnic minority regions in China. There are nationally and internationally well-known examples of organized training projects similar to From Our Eyes. The films from Wu Wenguang's China Village Documentary Project have been perhaps most widely discussed and screened. Starting in 2005 with funding from the European Union, Wu and his team trained a group of ten villagers to use small digital video cameras and edit footage. Over the course of the project, individual villagers directed and produced several documentaries on issues and situations occurring in their home communities, and the films have been shown at festivals, major art museums, and universities across China, the United States, and Europe. Other individuals have also founded rural media workshops, such as IFChina Original Studio, a "participatory documentary center," started in 2009 by Jian Yi (who worked with the China Village Documentary Project). The anthropologist Tami Blumenfield collaborated with Na, or Moso, filmmakers in the Lugu Lake area for many years, and coproduced a short documentary, Some Na Ceremonies, edited from footage recorded by two Na documentarians and museum curators, Onci Archei and Ruheng Duoji. Moreover, Chinese magazines such as DV Da Zhong (Popular Digital Video) regularly report on cases of entrepreneurial villagers using digital video cameras to produce both dramas and documentaries.
Village videos as well as the From Our Eyes documentaries are elements of something larger happening in and about rural China, and they are unique from other types of media practices in China in distinctive ways — if, but not only because, they are focused on and made by ethnic minorities and are sometimes, but not always, directly engaged with issues of cultural heritage. Village videos in and around the city of Kaili (estimated pop. 700,000 in 2017) in Guizhou illuminate how video documentary has been taken up by entrepreneurial locals in response to perceived local desires. My ethnographic fieldwork in Kaili is centered on the local Miao community, drawing on observations at shops, casual conversations with customers and residents, and interviews with shop owners and videographers from Kaili and nearby towns. A range of media material is for sale in most shops, from copies of TV shows, films, and children's cartoons to videos made by local videographers. In Kaili, most local videos for sale feature annual Miao celebrations (such as lusheng [bamboo reed flute] festivals), performances of drinking and courtship songs (videos often commissioned by the singers themselves), or bullfighting (between two male water buffalo), a popular pastime held during major festivals. Bullfight videos, in particular, are often played on TVs in shops at high volume in order to attract passing pedestrians and shoppers.
The videographers who produce these videos are self-taught, and some earn a living through commissions for weddings and other events. A few also run stores; in one location, the husband manages the shop, while the wife produces videos on the side. Local videos of Miao traditions exist alongside a glut of tourism media about the region, which depict Miao cultural performances of often heavily produced and stylized shows, complete with elaborate stages and lighting. At both the prefectural and provincial levels, government bureaus in Guizhou have been deeply invested in promoting rural ethnic tourism as a central aspect of local economic development, and performances and media are key features of this effort. Village videos are distinct, therefore, not only because they depict local, familiar annual events, but also because of their intended audience: they are for "insiders," local and usually rural Miao themselves, I have been told. Village videos typically have little or no narration; intertitles are used to describe place names, dates, and perhaps the name of the festival, but little more. Tourism videos often have voice-over narrations or feature staged shows with emcees who introduce acts in Mandarin Chinese, thus indicating the acts are for outsiders, who by virtue of not being local would require and expect explanation of what has been recorded.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 1
Part I. Infrastructures
1. Video Documentary and Rural Public Culture in Ethnic China / Jenny Chio 35
2. EngageMedia: The Gado Gado Tactics of New Social Media in Indonesia / Patricia R. Zimmerman 54
3. Wei dianying and Xiao quexing: Technologies of "Small" and Trans-Chinese Cinematic Practices / Chia-chi Wu 72
4. Converging Contents and Platforms: Niconico Video and Japan's Media Mix Ecology / Marc Steinberg 91
5. In Access: Digital Video and the User / Nishant Shah 114
Part II. Intimacies
6. MicroSD-ing "Mewati Videos": Circulation and Regulation of a Subaltern-Popular Media Culture / Rahul Mukherjee and Abhigyan Singh 133
7. Documenting "Immigrant Brides" in Multicultural Taiwan / Tzu-hui Celina Hung 158
8. Bollywood Banned and the Electrifying Palmasutra: The Sensory Politics in Northern Nigeria / Conerly Casey 176
9. The Asianization of Heimat: Ming Wong's Asian German Video Works / Feng-Mei Heberer 198
Part III. Speculations
10. Politics in the Age of YouTube: Degraded Images and Small-Screen Revolutions / S. V. Srinivas 217
11. Pop Cosmopolitics and K-pop Video Culture / Michelle Cho 240
12. Videation: Technological Intimacy and the Politics of Global Connection / Joshua Neves 266
13. Staying Alive: Imphal's HIV/AIDS (Digital) Video Culture / Bishnupriya Ghosh 288
14. "Everyone's Property": Video Copying, Poetry, and Revolution in Arab West Asia / Kay Dickinson 307
Bibliography 327
Contributors 349
Index 353
What People are Saying About This
"Asian Video Cultures addresses the continent as an always-emerging formation, rather than just a region. By doing so, it is able to mount a series of powerful, ethnographically grounded theoretical provocations on contemporary media culture. We revisit ideas of participation and the public, the status of mediation in the bioinformatic world, globalization, and work. This outstanding collection helps us put into perspective the overly North American debate on digital media."
"Asian Video Cultures addresses a glaring omission in contemporary Western film and media scholarship in such a rich and imaginative way that it will give the book lasting significance as a fundamental reference across media studies. Featuring rich, thought-provoking essays and a major, agenda-setting introduction, this is a milestone collection."