Quasi-documentary, cellflix and web spoofs: Chinese movies' other visual pleasures

Abstract

In China, as elsewhere, new locations and new media have redefined the experience of watching a moving image, beyond the cinematic experience. (1) The visual works that one can view outside movie theatres greatly differ in scope and style. Some explore alternatives to classic Hollywood narratives; others engage with the documentary idea, but they reposition themselves away from realism and, in fact, might offer surreal and even distorted representations of the real. Often crossing the fiction and non-fiction divide, these movies simply fall under the broad category of non-feature films. (2) The producers often embrace the cheaper, more manageable and far-reaching Digital Video (DV) technology and rely on distribution channels as different as television, the internet and galleries. (3) Among non-feature films, Chinese video art and experimental videos have attracted most of the scholarly attention, while much less academic interest has been given to other movies. In this article, I begin to look at these other movies and explore some recent developments of Chinese movie-making beyond the silver screen and outside art galleries, such as the quasi-documentary, the e gao or spoofs, and the cell/DV flicks. I argue that their lightness contributes to establishing a new relationship between movies and pleasure. (4) In my analysis, lightness refers to a self-reflective and often humorous mode of representation, but also relates to issues of production and distribution. Superfluous and often volatile cultural products, these movies are unlikely to be seen as either generating commercial or intellectual capital and thus effectively locate themselves beyond the duality of popular and lite culture