Thanks to my Chinese Cinemas lecturer two days ago I had the chance to see one of those films that will be very difficult to find anywhere else.
The screening was at KCL and the chosen film was Disorder, montage documentary by Huang Weikai.
The film won the Chinese Visual Festival Jury 1st Prize this year accompanied by this comment:
"Disorder is an exciting and anarchic revival of the city symphony documentary that reveals the cruel energy of China's social transformation."
"There meaning and methos to the madness, and Huang creates a montage laden with meaning by playing off unrelated scenes of fake traffic accidents, police action and rampaging pigs with shots of everyday people simply going about their lives to suggest imagined narratives and shared experiences."
I found the film extremely interesting not only from a formal point of view, but also in terms of ideas and concept. It had the incredible quality of resembling human stream of conscioussness suggesting an association of images to the audience, whose responsibility is to connect all the pieces and understand the content hidden behind the form.
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Since it is very interesting and the chance of finding it online is quite rare I will write the interview with the director contained in the event's handout.
James Mudge: Amongst other things, the film's title suggests chaos, and this definitely comes across very strongly when watching it - what message or themes were you trying to convey?
Huang Weikai: My film showed the absurdity of city life. The news we read every day is always more "amazing" than a novel or movie. Sometimes we can't help asking whose city this is. We choose the cosmopolitan living lifestyle, while it brings us a lot of things that are unreasonable and unpredictable. Therefore we need to reflect on it.
JM: Can you tell me a little bit more about how the film was made? I believe it was pulled together from thousands of hours of footage - who shot this and how did you go about editing it together?
HW: Between 2008 and 2009, I collected various footage shot by amateur cameramen. I watched around 1000 hours of footage, then decided to make a city symphony of my own. None of the previous city symphony documentaries made before seemed to feature the voice of reality, like Walter Ruttmann's Berlin Symphony, Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and Godfrey Reggio's Life out of Balance. The first two films were made in the silent film era, and the last one uses electronic music. This time, now in the DVD era, I told myself I could not use a soundtrack. Now the city symphony is mixed with various sounds and episodes. I knitted them together like knitting a sweater, with the design and style of the current age.
JM: The black and white look is very distinct - why not colour?
HW: There are two reasons. The first is because the footage came from different cameras, the quality and colours vary and therefore they need a unified style. Another reason is I used to learn Chinese ink painting and therefore prefer presenting pictures in black and white. I made quite a lot of adjustment in the black and white pictures as well. For example, I enhanced the contrast and turned almost all the skies in the city into pure white. Some of the original footage is grainy and some is not. I turned them all into the grainy ones in the final film.
JM: It's a radical approach that's very different to other Chinese documentaries, and which makes the film really quite unique - why did you choose to make it in this way?
HW: The feetless bird in Wong Kai Wai's Days of Being Wild initially came from Godard's Bande à Part. Two novels from Latin American were published on the similar subject before Alain Robbe-Grillet made his L'Année Dernière à Marienbad. Quentin Tarantino could not have made his Reservoir Dogs without watching Ringo Lam's City on Fire. No matter how original a film looks like, it must have its elements from some work which came before. I want to just try something a little different with each one of my works.
JM: Are there any other artists or directors, from China or around the world, whose works you admire or who have influenced you?
HW: I like Godard and Wong Kai Wai's films. However, I would like to quote a Chinese writer, Yu Hua's words to answer this question. He said: "The predecessor writes influence to those after them is like sunlight to trees. A tree will grow under the sun, but more importantly, it will grow up like a tree instead of like a sun. All writers' growth will be healthy and they will be themselves instead of like someone else." Directors are the same.
JM: What's your opinion on the modern Chinese documentary film making scene and how it has been developing in recent years?
HW: I am just one of the filmmakers and I admit my vision is not wide enough to see the picture of the whole Chinese documentary making world. However, I notice many of my friends begin to get interested in documentaries and many start to film by themselves. I believe more and more will join in the group.
JM: I know you've been invited to be a visiting scholar in New York, and have taken Disorder to a lot of different film festivals around the world - how different is it making films in and about China?
HW: I only know about independent documentary making in China. When most people start filming, they usually would ignore or care little about sound of the film and would just focus on the subject of the film. I witnessed documentary making in the US just once or twice but I hardly know enough to comment.
