What About China? drifts aimlessly from scene to scene and theme to theme. What About China? is screening at the BFI London Film Festival on October 13.
What about China? Currently forms part of the Whitney Biennial – a prestigious exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. On that basis, it is perhaps best understood as an art piece. Director Trịnh T. Minh-hà, a Vietnamese literary theorist and filmmaker based at UC Berkeley, combines amateur video footage from rural China in the early nineties with folk music and narration to interrogate the philosophical questions at the heart of Chinese identity. Specifically, it examines the concept of harmony as a way of observing and understanding the world, and how it might be found as traditional ways of life in the country’s rural areas are eroded by urban expansion.
It’s easy to imagine it cohabiting with other exhibits in an art gallery, where visitors might take a pew for fifteen minutes and watch it projected onto a blank wall between points of interest. However, it falls short as a standalone documentary feature, clocking in at a not-inconsiderable two hours and fifteen minutes.
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The narration intersperses texts from expatriate writers Xiaolu Guo and Xiao Yue Shan with ruminations on the fluid nature of Chinese culture, but this never coalesces into a coherent thread or even a remarkably concise articulation of the concepts the film seeks to parse. Viewers cannot understand this documentary without at least a basic understanding of twentieth-century Chinese history.
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But even for viewers for whom this is not terra incognita or those on their own quest to discover what China means to them, this is a film likely to try their patience. What About China? drifts aimlessly from scene to scene and theme to theme. Moreover, the use of archive footage doesn’t allow for any of the people shown in the film, from the inhabitants of the 18th-century walled communal houses to those of the cities and megacities continuing to draw people in from the countryside, to speak for themselves. How can one cultivate harmony without a multiplicity of perspectives?
If nothing else, the film serves as an indirect recommendation for Xiaolu Guo’s Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China. It is the all-too-brief stories of her relatives and their experiences of the drastic societal changes that have shaped China as a modern nation that spark moments of genuine interest.
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