Performing Gender, Performing Documentary in Post-socialist China

In the 1980s and early 1990s the People’s Republic of China saw the fluorescence of independent documentary filmmaking. Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, Zhang Yuan and Jiang Yue launched a wave of documentary filmmaking commonly referred to as the Chinese New Documentary Movement. The movement’s filmmakers generally reject the official tradition of newsreels and
zhuanti pian (literally, special topic films), which are characterized by images compiled in accordance with pre-written scripts, and by directly addressing the audience from a grand, top-down angle (Berry 2007: 115–134). Rather, they highlight a sense of immediacy and an “unscripted spontaneity” (Berry 2007: 122), showing a deep concern for “civilian life” from a “personal standpoint” (Lu 2003: 14–15, 335). Distancing themselves from official discourses, they choose to document the lives of ordinary people, especially those on the margins of society, such as peasants, migrant workers, the homeless, the elderly, the
homosexual, etc.