Notes from Beijing 京城散记

Dirs. Wang Zijun, Sun Yongsheng. 1988–91. China. 175 min. In Mandarin with English subtitles. Filmed simultaneously with Tiananmen, Notes from Beijing likewise records the Chinese capital from 1988 to 1991. Yet where Tiananmen approaches Beijing expansively, Wang Zijun’s film begins from an intensely personal premise. Part memoir, part city symphony, Notes from Beijing traces the lifelong Beijinger’s path through streets and neighborhoods whose physical appearance and social character were already beginning to change. Wang weaves first-person reflections, on-the-scene interviews, archival footage, and observations of everyday life into a diaristic meditation on memory, history, and home. The result reflects a broader preoccupation among Chinese intellectuals of the period with parsing individual memory and lived experience from official narratives of history. Seen now, the film also records a Beijing poised between distinct historical moments: the cultural and intellectual opening of the 1980s, the rupture of 1989, and the accelerated redevelopment and commercialization that would reshape the capital during the following decade. Notes from Beijing transforms the city into a conversation across time, where echoes of the past continually enter contemporary life. More than an irreplaceable record of pre-redevelopment Beijing, Wang’s deeply personal work preserves a way of seeing the capital shaped by an intimate familiarity with its physical and historical landscape. Ordinary Live in Extraordinary Times: Chinese Documentaries of the 1980s and 1990s. Saturday, September 12 11 am (Intro) Only One Earth 只有一个地球 (81 min.) 1 pm (Intro) Notes from Beijing 京城散记 (175 min.) 4:30 pm (Intro) Reform School Students 工读生 (142 min.) 8 pm (Intro) I Have Graduated 我毕业了 (92 min.) Sunday, September 13 3 pm (Intro) Tiananmen 天安门, pts. 1 – 4 (210 min.) 7 pm Tiananmen 天安门, pts. 5 – 8 (204 min.) Chinese Documentaries of the 1980s and 90s made by a small group of filmmakers working within China Central Television (CCTV) and Beijing Television (BTV) who began experimenting with a radically different approaches to documentary cinema. Calling their group Structure, Wave, Youth, Cinema (SWYC), Shi Jian (时间), Wang Zijun (王子军), Kuang Yang (邝杨), and Chen Jue (陈爵) turned their cameras away from the expository conventions and official narratives that had long characterized Chinese television documentary. Instead, they sought out individual lives and experiences: students confronting uncertain futures, migrant workers navigating the capital, artists and musicians participating in an emerging cultural avant-garde, elderly Beijingers recalling a disappearing city, and young people living at the margins of society. The late 1980s and early 1990s marked one of the most consequential periods of social, political, and cultural transformation in the history of the People’s Republic of China. A decade of reform and opening had dramatically altered the country’s economic and intellectual landscape, bringing increased engagement with the outside world, an expanding sphere of cultural experimentation, and intense debates over China’s political and social future. These transformations culminated in the nationwide protest movement of 1989, after which Chinese society entered a markedly different political and cultural environment. Economic transformation soon accelerated with the deepening of market reforms, even as the possibilities for political liberalization were sharply curtailed. SWYC occupied a crucial position within this transitional period. Working at the boundary between state television and emerging independent practice, its members produced some of the defining documentaries of their generation (largely unseen and unheralded) and helped lay the foundation for what would become known as China’s New Documentary Film Movement. Viewed together, more than three decades since the inception of their group, SWYC’s films offer both an important genealogy of New Documentary Cinema in China and an unusually intimate historical record of a society undergoing profound change. Many of these works have rarely been screened before this year. This traveling retrospective brings together SWYC’s major documentaries, allowing audiences to encounter a formative chapter of Chinese nonfiction cinema while seeing the late 1980s and early 1990s through the lives, conversations, spaces, and uncertainties of the people who experienced them. This is a truly special 2-day event in which these documentary films rarely screened anywhere will be shown in Gardena Cinema hosted by film critic and programmer Sam C. Mac and by UCLA Center for Chinese Studies.

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