What About China? (review) – ruminations on the fluid nature of Chinese culture

What About China? is screening at 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 taken from rural China in the early nineties with folk music and narration to interrogate the philosophical questions that lie 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 when traditional ways of life in the country’s rural areas are being 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 as it’s projected onto a blank wall in between other points of interest. However, as a standalone documentary feature, clocking in at a not-inconsiderable two hours and fifteen minutes, it falls short. 

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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 builds into a narrative thread or even a particularly succinct articulation of the concepts that the film is trying to parse out. This is not a documentary that can accommodate viewers 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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