3 - From Sidewalk Realism to Spectral Romance: Yang Lina's Post-Socialist Beijing and Beyond

Summary

“Life has taught me to become a feminist.”

—Yang Lina

Abstract

Chapter 3 discusses the films by Yang Lina in relation to her unique career path from a state-employed dancer and performer to independent filmmaker as Beijing was transforming into an unevenly developed global city. Yang's work significantly contributed to the DV Documentary Movement in the 1990s. She attends to her subjects, in both non-fiction and fictional works, with a compassionate camera and feminist concerns.

Keywords: DV, the compassionate camera, postsocialist urbanization, Chinese Dream, spectral realism

In the mid-1990s, Yang Lina, a young dancer in the China Central People’s Liberation Army (pla) Spoken Drama Troupe, moved from a military compound by Wanshousi 万寿寺, near today's West Third Ring, to an ordinary residential area of Beijing called Qingta 青塔. Her move was motivated by many reasons—to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the compound, to seek space for growth, and to move more freely. Yet that relocation inadvertently ushered her into the emerging arena of Chinese independent cinema, as her curiosity about a group of old men sitting on the neighborhood's sidewalks led her to a project that would help precipitate the DV turn in the Chinese New Documentary that emerged in the late 1980s. This chapter shifts to the post-1989 prc and highlights the main threads in Yang's career as an independent filmmaker that interweave the private and the public, the personal and the political, and documentary realism and cinematic spectrality. I explore how these seeming dichotomies are complexly recalibrated in Yang's films about marginalized inhabitants of Beijing, at a time when this erstwhile ‘Third World’ socialist capital city was being transformed into a post-socialist capital and global city. Spanning more than two decades, the multiply-awarded Old Men 老头 (1999), The Loves ofLao An 老安 (2008, hereafter, Lao An), and her narrative debut Longing forthe Rain 春梦 (2013, hereafter, Longing) are significant milestones in Yang’s career as well as in Chinese independent cinema and serve as a cinematic archive of the physical and psychic transformations of the ancient capital. Through these films, we can trace an evolving gendered aesthetic mediated by not only the portable digital camera but also a compassionate Buddhist lens.