Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It

Before 1988, I had never watched any film that could be called a “documentary.” I used to work at a TV station, where I participated in the production of a few “special topic films” (zhuantipian) on organizations or individuals. Back then, my peers who were making these kinds of feature shows felt like they were car racing in hutong alleys. Some producers flaunted their creativity and portrayed their protagonists in a lyrical and abstract fashion. As a result, the term “television essay” was put forward, something I myself put quite a lot of effort into. Before and after attending college, I had my “young literary man” phase for a while.

Later I realized that, in making television programs, I was giving what pitiful literary talents were left in me to television.

When I was filming Bumming in Beijing in 1988, I had no idea how to define or make a documentary, nor did I have a movie title or script. Tired of the old way of “manufacturing” movies guided by planning and instruction, I wanted my own personal style to be completely free. The most straightforward starting point for me was turning my camera to the people I was most familiar with—my friends around me.

At that time, I was working for some film crews in Beijing. I got to know a few friends involved in making TV shows, like Chen Zhen, Shi Jian, and Lu Wangping. Because we shared the same weariness, we frequently exchanged ideas on how to achieve a “documentary” approach.

Chen Zhen had been to Japan, where he had watched an NHK documentary called Who Does the Land Belong To? that told the story of Japanese orphans who returned to their homeland after being displaced overseas. Chen Zhen has a very good memory, so he recounted the movie to me. I was astonished at one scene: a Japanese orphan from China was job hunting in Tokyo. The camera followed him all along the street, passing people, traffic lights, and shops. When the man eventually walked into a store, the camera just waited outside the building until he came out. It was all one long take, starting only with the back of the man but revealing his face for the first time as he came out of the store—one could see that he was disappointed. Two things in this recounted documentary sequence left a deep impression on me: the authentic site and the uninterrupted process.

The outcome of this impression was an attempt to control myself during the filming of Bumming in Beijing and put myself in the position of an “observer,” who stood to one side and calmly watched what those who were on camera did or said. In order to maintain the “purity of being on-site,”¹ I did not add a voiceover or music to this 150-minute- long film during editing. At first, I ignorantly assumed that I had made something revolutionary. However, when I later watched works that could indeed be called “documentaries,” I realized that I had only just begun to touch upon the most fundamental aspects of this genre.

Now I have watched quite a number of documentaries, some of which are masterpieces. Nonetheless, the aforementioned Who Does the Land Belong To? still remains to this day something I have only merely “heard of” Some critics tell me that they had never heard of this documentary. But I was touched by that long tracking shot: an ordinary person walking along an ordinary street, just like the bustling streets we were familiar with in daily life. People were nothing more than a few fluid symbols of different heights, body shapes, genders, and colors. But when one of these people is observed and followed by the human eye, they reveal, in this instance of the on-site process, the allure of documentary.

When I mention my regrets about a certain film to my peers, I tend to say that the camera was not on-site. For various reasons, the filmmaker could not make it to the site on time or had to leave, so as a consequence they missed the most important material. Japanese documentary producer Ogawa Shinsuke said that when this happened to him, he was ready to kill himself. Since he didn’t actually want to kill himself, he instead moved with his crew to the village of Sanrizuka when filming his documentary of the same name. It was in 1967, and the villagers were defending their land by resisting the policemen who asked them to relocate to make space for the construction of Tokyo Narita Airport. The resistance lasted until 1972. Throughout those five years, Ogawa continued to record this event, meaning that his camera “remained there.” As such, he completed a “documentary with a record of its own recording.”

Watching Ogawa's documentary films, one can feel the shock of the “on-site scene” at any time because the camera is “on-site” from beginning to end. The site witnessed by the camera cannot be replicated, restored, or described clearly through recourse to language. Like many others, I like watching documentaries too, but none of the works I’ve watched convey the kind of emotional intensity I get from Ogawa's documentaries. When I watch feature films, I know these are fictional scenes woven from the understanding and imagination of screenwriters and directors. These are scenes, and not on-site. An excellent feature film, I think, aims to create an alternative life beyond our imagination, or in other words, an alternative truth, a cruel truth beyond verifiable experience and within sensorial experience. The age of film today witnesses paramount masters in drama films passing away one by one, while those who work in this industry are crammed against each other under all kinds of circumstances. Under siege from the commercial market, films increasingly degenerate into “dream-making” or “money-making” tools. We sit in a dark cinema and enter the “lives of others” through the only space in front of us that is lit up. There, we forget all the frustration, annoyance, and even pain related to family, work, personal, and public matters, which we felt before coming inside this dark cinema—even if this is only for an hour or so, and even though after an hour or so we must leave this space and face the reality outside its doors.

So, I think it is meaningful to stress the significance of documentary's “on-site” qualities. A documentary should manifest the sense of being on-site; it should reproduce the very people and events observed and witnessed in real life. When the camera is fixed on what is to be filmed, I perceive the “scene” that takes place in that moment in the same way a policeman fulfills his duty at the scene of a crime—he can only protect it, not change or destroy it. The filmmaker is on-site, but he is just an outsider who keeps watching and witnessing. He certainly has his own opinions, his likes and dislikes, but he should hide them rather than show them. Documentary aims for objectivity. Of course, pure objectivity is unattainable, since the filmmaker's choice of subject matter, point of view, use of the camera, and editing already pushes him into a position of “facing up to” something. However, the filmmaker can still, from a relatively objective perspective, express himself by presenting what is “on-site.” In this regard, works by American documentarían Frederick Wiseman, such as Hospital, Central Park, Zoo, and High School, can be considered masterpieces. The titles of these documentaries are direct references to their filming locations; the films’ subject matter is people who pass through those locations every day. Such a presentation shows that there can be really emotionally stunning things taking place in the neglected space of people's everyday lives.

When documentary filmmakers mention movies by Ogawa and Wiseman, quite a few of them would say: this is a kind of “lavish documentary.” What's “lavish” about it is that they “expended” a great number of camera shots on things that seemingly contained the least amount of surprises or thrills. I understand that the two directors were constantly keeping their camera lenses on a “waiting” mode in order to capture an authentically real scene.

In terms of maintaining the purity of on-site, my preferred techniques are normal lenses without distortions, tracking shots, long takes, and interviews uninterrupted by visuals; I reject stylized shots, frequent cuts, commentary, and dubbing.

With respect to these ideas, I also don’t like using the word “director” when talking about documentaries. Although this title sounds nice and impressive, and it represents a certain status, power, or bearing, it only applies to feature films. I think in a documentary, strictly speaking, the manipulation or setting up of people and things is not permitted. The everyday on-site scene is what it is. What's lost cannot be restored, and what has not happened cannot be turned into a real on-site scene. What is most frightening is when a filmmaker intervenes in what is happening for the sole purpose of their own expressive intentions. I myself once set up a scene or altered a site while filming. Rewatching those clips now, I deeply abhor my bad behavior. Hence, now I often warn myself: what you need to do is to go on-site, observe and witness, and follow the original and natural progress of life. I want to maintain this way of doing things, with all the visual and audio materials forming the documented “site,” which I then present to others. I believe that such a faithfully documented “site” carries its own weight. So, returning to the “site” documented by the camera, there should be no “acting,” let alone “directing.” When I talk of my role in a documentary, I prefer to call myself a “maker.”

Furthermore, I do not like treating documentary as a “question of art” the way we talk about directing techniques, character building, atmospheric rendering, or light-and-shadow composition in feature movies. Today, in particular, directors are increasingly packaged (or smothered) by critics through the myth of art, and they tend to forget their purpose in making films. I am willing to steer away from so-called art in order to discuss documentaries the way workers talk about building a house, constructing a railway, or digging a tunnel.

Ogawa, who has passed away, once said that in documentary, as he understood it, time was the primary element. “Time” manifests itself in a documentary through the presentation of an entire temporal unit.

Time manifests through process, which is the actual embodiment of “on-site” and the concrete embodiment of the term “to document.” As I understand it, “process” means the process of moving from one point of an event to another point, or the completion of a particular action by the person being filmed. In my opinion, a documentary's vitality comes from the fact that it has recorded this “process” of people or events onsite. News reports are also concerned with a real-life site, but what they care about is the result, and not the process. This is their biggest difference from documentary.

Two of the documentary film “makers” I most admire, Ogawa Shinsuke and Wiseman, are both obsessed with documenting the on-site process. In Ogawa's Sanrizuka, there is a four-minute-long, motionless shot: a female farmer and her daughter sit on the ground next to a tree, using iron chains to lock themselves to its trunk before authorities forcefully remove them. It is raining, scrambling feet constantly scurry around them, but the mother and daughter look calm. “It's very cold,” says the daughter. The mother then puts some clothes on the daughter. My eyes brim with tears every time I watch this scene. In another sequence from the same movie, a countrywoman stands on one side with a line of policemen with shields and helmets on the other. She tells the policemen, “Go back. Don’t you know that this is a place where we have been living for years, so we cannot leave it Don’t you know?” The countrywoman repeats these sentences. The policemen remain silent. This shot continued for more than four minutes without any motion. When I watched this movie at Ogawa's studio for the first time, Peng Xiaolian, who was a classmate of Tian Zhuangzhuang's, was there as well. She came from a background of feature films, and she helped me with translation. During the countrywoman's dialogue with the policemen, she couldn’t continue reading the words since she was choking up. In this perfectly preserved space of an authentic on-site scene, there were confrontations between flesh and iron, enthusiasm and cold-heartedness, words and silence, hope and resignation, and from all of this we could read the unspoken between the lines. I cannot imagine any repetitive camera cut, dolly zoom, close up, or any other technique that could convey this kind of weight. And that is because I like to maintain the complete, authentic on-site scene that can be seen from a pair of human eyes.

If the abovementioned moments from Ogawa's movies serve as examples of how the background to an event can still contain theatrical elements, then Wiseman's works are mostly filled with the detailed processes of everyday life. Examples include the conversation between a teacher, a student, and his parents in High School and a discussion about a surgical operation between several doctors in Hospital. These conversational scenes are completed without interruption so that you can assume the role of a bystander and listen to those around you who are talking without worrying about being deceived or misled. Wiseman is a documenter who is sincerely fascinated by the detailed processes of life. […]

Discussions about documentaries should focus more on how to work on-site; documentaries in China have long been too distant from our lived realities. So distant in fact that producers no longer grasp what it means to make documentaries, while audiences have gradually forgotten what their point is. The reasons for this vary, but include the fact that our documentary film makers have failed to face up to our lives, or to honestly go on-site to document the process of our lives. For this reason, we [the documentary film makers] feel ashamed of ourselves in front of the audience; and for this reason it is necessary to stress documentary's “return to the site,” as well as to redefine its true position. If we consider the “site” the documentary's “home,” then we can say that we are slowly looking for a “way back home.”

I am often asked the following questions: Do you have any plans to make feature films? Will you ever make feature films in the future? In these questions I only hear one single assumption, namely that feature films are considered the ultimate rationale for film and television.

Let's take a look at the film-and-television industry. Feature films resemble a big vibrant farmer's market, while documentaries resemble a narrow, zigzagging alley with only scattered footprints. It's the same for this industry all over the world, but we always hear that, in a loud, disorienting world that is constantly being turned into a fiction by all kinds of media, some people keep documenting the original images and voices of real life. Among these people we find Ogawa and Wiseman.

An extreme comparison often occurs to me: in one hundred years of film history, it is rare for feature films to survive as masterpieces with artistic value, while a documentary by an unknown filmmaker will still be effective even after a hundred years because it stays authentically true to history.

“Being on-site” is intrinsic to documentary. Everyday life is lived on-site with confidence and courage, and so the question is whether we have the confidence and the courage to examine our lives, and ourselves. I imagine a type of documentary that not only is disseminated through television signals but can also be screened in the cinema, the “home” of feature films. There, the audience sits in darkness, watching life unfold on the lit-up screen in front of them. This process, however, does not lead them into a dream, or to some faraway place, but to their very own lives, which they must stay committed to facing and examining. At that moment, a voice echoes through the cinema: “Stop! You must not run away!”

Translator's Note: Translated by Lily Sun. Originally published in Chinese by Wu Wenguang, “Huidao xianchang: Wo lijie de yizhong jilupian” [“Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It”], Dongfang [Orient], no. 5 (1996): 91–93.