China on Video is an ambitious undertaking, a fascinating read, and an original and rigorous work of interdisciplinary scholarship. With extensive command of research literature in film, media, cultural studies, and Chinese art and literary history, Paola Voci challenges these fields' existing boundaries by engaging with an extremely interesting and previously neglected body of smaller-screen movies circulating in China today. Displayed primarily on computer screens and cell phones, these movies cost little to make, circulate mostly online among a volatile community of viewers, and, as Voci shows throughout the book, have distinctly “light” aesthetic qualities and social practices that elude existing analytical frameworks. Drawing inspiration from Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Voci proposes the concept of “lightness” to grasp the ontology, aesthetics, and politics of this cinema. She observes that the conventional categories with which we think about cultural practices – high vs. low-brow, conventional vs. avant-garde, dominant vs. counter-culture – often constitute “enclosed” systems of oppositions that mutually legitimize each other. In other words, they are legitimate cultures, relying on endorsement-giving entities for cultural weight and validation (p. 12). Smaller-screen videos, on the other hand, are “light” cultural practices that do not aspire to cultural weight and validation, and therefore can move more freely between and through ideological and institutional confines. Voci argues that the unbearable lightness of these “genre-defying, category-resistant, media-crossing” (p. 4) films has profound meaning for envisioning an open society beyond the “stipulations of political dictatorship, global capitalism, and intellectual dissent” (p. 202).
The first of nine chapters lays out the book's theoretical ambitions and interdisciplinary approach. The middle chapters treat different types of smaller-screen videos, including documentary films and experimental video (chapter two), animation (chapter three), cellflix (chapter four), spoof or Egao movies (chapter five), as well as political documentaries and subaltern films (chapters six and seven). The last two chapters examine smaller-screen realities in relation to Chinese film culture together with other literary and artistic practices, reflecting on how light cultural practices create public spaces and contribute to an open society.
A long-term observer of Chinese new documentary cinema, which has flourished in the past two decades, Voci begins her exploration of smaller-screen movies with documentaries. The connection between documentary and lighter visual cultures has scarcely been addressed in existing scholarship, and Voci's perceptive framing of documentary as a bridge from an old “film” culture to a more broadly defined “movie” culture makes important contributions. Voci argues that new documentary shares many “light” traits such as amateur productions, subjective perspectives, and open-ended and non-authoritative narratives. She points out that even though observational realism dominates existing works, many documentaries have taken a more exhibitionist, expressive, and performative direction. Paying attention to these lighter and hybrid documentaries helps to foreground documentary's expressive rather than representational capacities, which have been largely neglected in existing studies of new documentary.
From documentary, Voci moves on to discuss animation, a very under-studied area in Chinese film studies. Examining animation videos ranging from depictions of personal experiences during the SARS epidemic, remembrances of a bygone childhood, to digital artist Cao Fei's “second life” project, Voci shows that, while developing China's animation industry has become a state-led and market-driven initiative, smaller-screen animation is altogether different. It questions the concept of the nation, expresses deeply personal experiences, and allows creation of virtual identities to enable personal autonomy and meaningful sharing with others.
The next two chapters deal with portable films and Egao movies. Evoking Umberto Eco's reflections on the “forme brevi,” and conceptualizing portability as articulating the intimate and private within hyper-connected public spaces, Voci discovers in portable movies lively experiments with the medium of the moving image and an “aesthetic of brevity” that offers poetic and pleasurable intermissions from life's everyday routines. Egao movies, or web spoofs, on the other hand, are driven not by poetics but by parody. They poke fun at and deconstruct mainstream narratives, inviting the viewer to discern the constructedness of conventional media and to assume an active way of seeing. Both chapters offer excellent contextual and textual analysis, covering cellflix film festivals, individual bloggers' versatile forme brevi outputs, and the participatory cultures enabled by these light videos.
Political cinema can be light too, argues Voci in chapter six, as she examines “light” political documentaries that do not take a militant and ideological approach but practice spontaneous and individualized disobedience. This chapter analyzes “one-man activism” in Prisoners in Freedom City, a documentary made by Hu Jia documenting his own house arrest and circulating exclusively online, as well as the accidental journalism practiced by people who are not necessarily connected to bigger agendas of activism but who, with their mobile phones and cameras, serve as fortuitous eye-witnesses to social injustices. Chapter seven discusses a number of subaltern video-making programs led by established artists and curators such as Wu Wenguang's Village Video Project and Ou Ning's Da Zha Lan Project. Voci perceptively points out that these programs' success in subaltern empowerment must be “very cautiously evaluated against the dominant role played by the avant-garde that initiated these projects and that ultimately reclaimed them as their own” (p. 161). The “subaltern” videomakers' engagement in humorous and ambiguous acts and over-the-top performances, in this context, allows the subaltern voices to break through the disadvantaged social roles that confine them.
The book concludes by bringing into dialogue the concept of lightness and other fields of vision and experience. The light act of vision has many manifestations beyond new media, argues Voci. Moving from Hamid Naficy's “accented cinema,” to Craig Clunas's writings on different ways of viewing a painting in the Ming Dynasty, from the photo collages in the Young Companion, a pictorial magazine in Republican Shanghai, to The Second Handshake, an example of pleasurable underground literature during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Voci tests out the idea of lightness on a wide array of individualized practices of cultural production and reception. She shows how lightness as an analytical concept could further our understanding of previously underrated cultural activities. She also argues for the political and social significance of the seemingly insignificant: lightness is the ultimate location to preserve and share the personal, bypassing, to a degree, boundaries of social regimentation and definitions.
China on Video is an intellectually stimulating, rigorously researched, and broadly conceived book relevant not only to the studies of Chinese cinema and media, but also to the fields of cinema studies and media studies in general. Of course, the book could have addressed a range of other questions that might have further enlightened the readers. Does the meaning of “lightness” change over time? Can the concept of lightness be further differentiated to account for the differences between lightness in political documentaries and that in web spoofs or cellflixes? Is lightness inherently unstable, and prone to “put on weight,” and how are we to theorize the various ways by which a light practice takes on or resists cultural, political, and economic weight? Future research is eagerly awaited to further explore this interesting and useful concept and its evolution in Chinese cinema and new media.
