ALL ARTS Documentary Selects

Snapshots: China - The Pursuit of the Self
This series charts the work of photographers in China, India and Russia who explore their countries through their lenses. Because of the keen observation that photography requires, the artists are perceptive witnesses of the societies they inhabit.
TRANSCRIPT
♪♪
[ Car horn honking ]
♪♪
Narrator: The upheaval that is occurring in China
is unprecedented in the history of humanity.
How can this unheard-of disruption best be portrayed,
and where should we begin?
To understand the crucial period
that China is currently going through,
these films let photographers speak,
for they alone get up close
and capture those decisive moments of mutation
that are too sudden and devastating
for the naked eye to grasp.
Their images create both a rampart against oblivion
and a window onto a world in transformation.
Thanks to them, awareness is raised,
and a Chinese way of seeing begins to take shape.
♪♪
♪♪
[ Upbeat music playing over speakers ]
Hoo, hah.
♪♪
[ Computer dings ]
Zhipeng: [ Speaking foreign language ]
Woman: [ Laughs ]
♪♪
[ Speaking foreign language ]
Interpreter: For a long time, I had a recurring dream.
I was lying on my bed,
and suddenly, I was flying, like on a magic carpet.
I'd go out the window
and fly over the roads, the forests,
the skyscrapers, the crowds,
until I arrived over a huge field near a lake.
It was a really pleasant dream.
It gave me a huge amount of pleasure.
I always wanted to keep on
walking around without being disturbed,
and to share what I experienced, I needed a camera.
[ Camera shutter clicks ]
[ Laughing ]
♪♪
Narrator: Strange times,
even when paradise is privatized.
Is the communist ideal of sharing everything
no longer the dream of young Chinese people?
Yet, those who grew up in the 1980s
remember a community lifestyle
in which individuality stayed in the background
to benefit the collective,
just as things were in the days of Confucius.
But they particularly remember a joyous time
when great economic reforms stretched the borders
of possible leisure and pleasure.
Those were the days of only one child --
a little emperor, the center of attention.
But while growing up, people changed, consumed,
went on vacations and business trips,
and money enabled people to completely reapprehend
that which previous decades had repressed.
That was the China of the '90s --
permissive and corrupt through and through.
In the capital, some only listen to jazz.
Others, only to rock.
Fashions change.
People mix or tempt fate.
It's an age of experiences, of performance art,
and a more and more personal rebellion.
♪♪
Society as a whole jumped on the bandwagon
at the dawning of the new millennium
with the Internet revolution.
Thanks to this new tool,
individuals could start forging their own opinions
and expressing themselves.
But they also faced themselves alone
in an exponential urban space
that both excites and disorientates.
While the modernization of China is all the rage,
youngsters are frenetically connecting to the virtual world
and take on the mantle of their favorite manga characters.
The photographers in this episode were born here,
in cities that grew faster than they did.
They have all had dreams and nightmares
which have inspired their work,
and they all seriously question
whether one can be happy in a disenchanted age.
Who better to tell us about it
than the most sensitive of these children?
[ Both speaking foreign language ]
[ Camera shutter clicks ]
[ Distant chatter ]
Tao: [ Speaking foreign language ]
Interpreter: We both graduated in 2000.
Then, he went off to study in Britain until 2004.
We were often in touch on Internet,
chatting about photographic equipment.
I'd send him photos saying, "Take a look at this!"
And we'd discuss it.
Then he'd send me photos of London.
"Check this out."
I'd reply, "Is that what London looks like?"
[ Laughs ]
I know every inch of London he discovered.
I did the same. I showed him Shanghai.
It made him want to come home.
It's his hometown, after all.
[ Laughs ]
Mm.
And then, in 2004, we started working together.
[ Sighs ]
[ Cup clinks ]
Narrator: In choosing their hometown -- Shanghai --
as their photographic playground
and as a reflection of their own youth,
the duo, Birdhead, have never stopped shooting.
♪♪
They had to capture the chaos of a city
thrust into consumer society.
After all, they were 20-somethings
in a Chinese metropolis looking for a way ahead.
♪♪
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[ Laughing ]
[ Zipper zips ]
[ Train wheels clacking ]
[ Brakes squeal ]
[ Stirring music playing over speakers ]
Man: [ Singing in foreign language ]
♪♪
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Tao: [ Speaking foreign language ]
Interpreter: Maybe we're just idealists.
In fact, we're trying to find out who we are.
♪♪
Which presupposes the question,
"What is the world?"
[ Singing continues ]
However, if we can work out who we are,
the world can just keep on turning.
But that's pretty idealistic.
[ Singing continues ]
♪♪
We both grew up here.
This park was designed
for neighborhood people to come and relax,
soak up the sun, take it easy, and kill time.
When I was a kid, I lived in that apartment block.
It hasn't changed. It just got older.
After 20 years, it sure has aged.
[ Whip cracks ]
[ Whip cracks ]
[ Whip cracking ]
[ Indistinct chatter ]
[ Distant singing continues ]
♪♪
We don't go looking for special things to photograph.
No way.
That's probably why
we would never take war or riot photos.
We photograph things from daily life.
For example, that laundry hanging on the line.
There's a handkerchief attached with two bamboo pegs
hanging on a wire covered with blue plastic.
The handkerchief is wafting in the wind.
I'd photograph that for sure.
[ Distant music continues ]
[ Birds chirping ]
[ Indistinct chatter ]
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Interpreter: Compared to the time in the Cultural Revolution,
things are less strict, right?
Interpreter #2: Yeah, we're lucky.
We were born into a period that's a lot less oppressive.
Or, at least...
it's a different type of oppression.
Let's put it this way...
a pizza on a plate.
You cut the pizza into six portions.
One represents sex and violence.
The next, feelings and tenderness.
The next, the fight for survival.
The next, thought.
We're not allowed to eat the sex and violence portion,
so we leave it alone,
but we still have five portions to eat,
so we can express ourselves.
Narrator: For the past 10 years,
Birdhead have been totting up photos of Shanghai.
Their melancholic vision of this fast-forward fracas
has found its place in Chinese contemporary art.
Their thousands of photos regularly travel the world,
from MoMA in New York to the Shanghai Biennale.
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[ All speaking foreign language ]
Weiyu: [ Speaking foreign language ]
Interpreter: Little by little, you grow up and mature.
Now we want to express
our personal feelings through nature.
Tao: Once you reach a certain age,
you realize people from back then
and from today are the same.
People are confronted with death, love,
ancestors, history,
and they must also work out their own future.
But it's like I said earlier.
It all originates in how you see yourself.
We basically need mirrors.
♪♪
Narrator: In the first decade of the 2000s,
Chinese youngsters deal with reality
by dreaming day and night of leaving.
Their elders flew a little too close to the sun
on Tiananmen Square,
and the fledglings are now finding it hard to fly.
For them, the camera is a mirror
which tells them they are truly here,
feet firmly on the ground.
It helps them in their interior travels
and gently lands them in an existence
where intimacy no longer needs to be hidden.
On the contrary, it even becomes a statement.
[ Camera whirrs ]
[ Peppy music playing over radio ]
[ Speaking foreign language ]
[ Music continues ]
♪♪
[ Speaking foreign language ]
Interpreter: I started doing this in 2004.
A friend left a message on my blog
asking if I could photograph her.
I said yes.
The second time we met,
I did a series of photos with her.
It was that series that led me
into doing the kind of photography I do now.
I thought, "Why not photograph friends and acquaintances
to develop a real work method?"
That was the easiest way to go about it.
Plus, it meant I could take the photos that I wanted.
So I posted some messages on Internet, saying,
"If you're interested, I can photograph you."
Then, two weeks ago, on Weibo,
I offered to photograph gay couples.
I wondered how many people might be interested.
Well, actually, quite a lot.
After two weeks, just over 50 couples
said they'd like to be photographed.
I guess most people want to keep
a kind of souvenir in images
of something which is different to their daily lives --
of them in situations they've never been in before.
Maybe they also find in my photos
things they aspire to...
things they'd be incapable of attaining
if they took the photos themselves.
They're looking for a form of freedom,
a different kind of visual sensation.
I think a lot of people come to me with this in mind.
[ All speaking foreign language ]
[ Plastic film tearing ]
Zhipeng: [ Speaking foreign language ]
Interpreter: I see photography
as a witness of my own personal development.
My pictures are a kind of retranscription
of my path to maturity.
[ Distant banging ] [ Indistinct chatter ]
"Photography gives you more solid memories,
allows you to see through the light of emotions
to completely understand people and objects
in a precise moment in time.
Thus, we travel to remember things better,
and it's through photos that memories exist."
♪♪
Narrator: 223 is tattooed with several coded passwords.
He took the name of the official number
of the cop in Wong Kar-wai's cult movie "Chungking Express,"
making the enigma of self a premise.
This spotlighting of the self has won over young men and women
who also want to stand out from the crowd,
assert themselves, and exist more intensely.
♪♪
Zhe Chen left her adoptive California,
stopped off in Beijing -- her hometown --
then traveled to Yunnan Province in southwestern China.
She's an intrepid, yet fragile young woman,
like many a true traveler,
and she's also a photographer
who crossed the ocean early in life
in order to distance herself
and turn her private pain into a healing process.
♪♪
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Chen: [ Speaking foreign language ]
Interpreter: I'd call it a "Dear Diary" series.
When I took these photos,
I didn't do so as a photographer.
It was more of an experiment on the self.
I'd been having certain feelings
and found myself in a particular state of mind.
It was this state that drove me to self-harming my body.
Back then, I always had a camera at hand,
so I'd take photos and save them on my computer,
but forgetting where.
Much later, in 2010,
I realized I had a huge number of photos
and that I could turn them into a series to tell a story,
because there was a potentially interesting link between them.
♪♪
Narrator: This first series, entitled "The Bearable,"
was born in America, far from home.
Using a foreign language
and through continued exchanges
between her teacher and his students,
words began to come more easily,
taking her out of her silent anonymity
and unleashing not only words, but also pictures.
She had become a photographer,
her first work exploring the boundaries of the bearable
to keep them at distance and to cross them no more.
♪♪
Interpreter: My first series was like a mirror.
I was looking at myself.
The second was a window.
I looked through it outside towards others.
♪♪
[ Engine rumbling ]
♪♪
A lot of my preparation work is done on Internet,
on forums, social media, and in online communities.
At first, I didn't join communities
with the idea of taking photos.
I already belonged to some.
And within these groups,
people swapped advice and helped each other out.
They also talked of their state of mind.
Then, I started sending them invitation messages.
I'd start by introducing myself
and explaining what I was doing.
Then, I'd talk of the psychological incidents
of the previous few years
linked to the injuries I'd inflicted on myself.
And, if it was important,
I'd explain what I'd experienced
and what I thought of it now.
At the end of this first paragraph,
I'd include a link to my first series,
"The Bearable."
That way, people could check out the photos
from my period of self-harming.
In the second paragraph,
I talk about how I saw my new series,
and I'd finish off by asking if they'd agree to get to know me
and let me into their life.
♪♪
Narrator: With this new series,
Zhe Chen sought to put faces
to what she affectionately calls a community of vulnerability,
thus calling into question the fixed image society has
of a group of people, each with his or her own story.
♪♪
Explosive work in a country where traditional social order
still requires sons to obey their fathers
as subjects did their emperor,
and where mind control therefore begins
inside the family unit.
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Interpreter: This generation had very early contact
with the West.
Like Zhe Chen, who studied there,
and therefore has a Western background.
Their visual experiences
and their experiences of life and society
have moved on a lot compared to those
of the previous generation.
It's even possible that there has been
a complete split between them.
Chinese conservatism,
which is a direct product of traditional culture,
seems to be more and more broken apart.
And in my opinion,
this has led to the breaking of taboos.
[ Both speaking foreign language ]
[ Laughs ]
[ Laughs ]
Chen: [ Speaking foreign language ]
In China, people have typically Asian reactions.
Here, everyone thinks that your skin,
your eyes, and your body come from your parents.
That means your whole body is a gift from them.
So, mistreating your body -- harming it --
is tantamount to being ungrateful towards your parents,
and this is considered a lack of filial respect.
In ancient times,
that was the worst thing you could possibly do.
This tradition lives on in Chinese minds.
They believe you have no right to self-harm your body.
That's why, when the series was exhibited,
a lot of people found it hard to accept.
They questioned how someone could treat their own body
in such a way.
♪♪
♪♪
Meng: [ Speaking foreign language ]
Interpreter: In photography, since the year 2000,
we're seeing more and more personal forms of expression.
In my mind, there's a clear link
between the time we're living in now
and the internal changes Chinese people are undergoing.
With this way of expressing things
in the first person, youngsters are seeking
to establish links with the world, with society.
That's how I see things.
Some may think that this type of self-expression
traps youngsters in a kind of narcissism
and exacerbated individualism
which lacks an objective criticism and sociability,
but I think, on the contrary,
that it's the way youngsters have found to enter into contact
with society and the world.
Overall, this generation doesn't ask too many questions
about what the previous generation did.
I think that's positive.
They're progressing in their own way
and at their own pace.
♪♪
Narrator: Maybe China's a bit like Zhe Chen --
it's still a young, fragile country, in a way.
California dreamin',
trying to understand itself and free itself.
It's now up to the young generation
to forge an identity of its own in which the individual
will have an increasingly bigger place.
♪♪
Of course, there will always be paths
to make people believe "life might lie elsewhere,"
as Milan Kundera wrote in a novel
that remains renowned in China.
♪♪
And before getting started and reinventing everything --
reshaping the world in front of a screen or in a karaoke --
Chinese youngsters are dreaming and having fun like any others.
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