In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chinese documentary filmmakers made concerted efforts to break away from the socialist realist tradition and to seek new ways of representing social realities. Since then, a “new documentary cinema” has transformed Chinese visual culture with its realist aesthetics, personal point of view, and commitment to social critique. As the first English-language book devoted to the study of this cinema, The New Chinese Documentary Movement: For the Public Record is a timely contribution to this under-studied field. Written by leading scholars, many of whom have been long-term observers and critics of Chinese cinemas, this book provides analysis and historical contextualization to better our understanding of the aesthetics, ethics and politics of this exciting genre. Supplemented by a comprehensive bibliography, as well as meticulously compiled biographies of key documentarians and their works, this book will become a foundational resource for the field.

The first part of the book provides a historical overview of this cinema's emergence and development. The new documentary has been deeply shaped by China's political history, argue Chris Berry and Lisa Rofel in their introductory essay. As the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 foreclosed possibilities for public forms of opposition, and as Deng Xiaoping's “Tour to the South” in 1992 promised deepening market reform, the new documentary movement became the central place where social critique persisted in the form of observational cinema and on-the-spot realism, and where new subjectivities arising from social transformations found expression. Having coined the term “New Documentary Movement” in her Chinese-language book of 2003, Lu Xinyu here locates the emergence of the new documentary as part of the post-Cultural Revolution search for new ideals and meaning. As a counterpoint to these historical treatments of the genre, veteran documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang gives a personal account of how the availability of DV and the influence of international practitioners such as Ogawa Shinsuke and Frederic Wiseman inspired him to treat filmmaking not as a profession nor a market behaviour, but as a personal endeavour and a way of life. Together, these three essays introduce three aspects of new documentary explored throughout the book: new documentary as a social practice, as an aesthetic orientation and as a personal, ethical choice.

In terms of the new documentary's social practice and political potential, Seio Nakajima's study of documentary reception in Beijing's film clubs emphasizes the genre's capacity to enable counter-discourses and open public spaces. In their essay, Berry and Rofel develop the idea of “alternativeness” to describe the co-existence of new documentary alongside official media, and the documentary filmmakers' historiographic ambition to build archives of alternative histories. In her reading of Wang Bing's West of the Tracks (2003), Lu Xinyu focuses on the camera's capacity to register the broken dreams and disorienting experiences of a generation of steel workers. For Lu, the capacity to document emotional and experiential reactions to social change among the socially disenfranchised allows documentary films to intervene into collective memory, class consciousness, and historical discourse.

Another line of inquiry in the volume focuses on characterizing the aesthetics of on-the-spot realism. Luke Robinson examines how profilmic contingency is handled in new documentaries. He insightfully observes that on-the-spot realism involves a shift from a metonymic or metaphorical mode of representation to one that prioritizes the particular and the contingent. This shift has deep implications, as negotiating between the generic and the particular necessarily poses questions about objectivity vs. subjectivity, the “self” vs. the “society.” Bérénice Reynaud interprets silences, noises, unintelligible utterances and missing subtitles in Wu Wenguang's films as creating ruptures and ellipses between subjects and language, destabilizing communication and conveying the distance between the filmmaker and his subjects. Both essays add richness to our understanding of on-the-spot realism as an open form that resists fixation of meaning and allows for reflexivity. Paola Voci extends the analysis to experimental, performative and hybrid documentaries representing the city of Beijing. Using the metaphor of the “twilight zone” to describe Beijing's margins as well as the documentary lens itself, Voci argues powerfully for a contested documentary realism that is unabashedly subjective and partial, yet also critical.

The third aspect of the genre that the book addresses involves the filmmaker's relationship to his/her subjects and questions of documentary ethics. Yiman Wang analyses two approaches taken by filmmakers as they relate to their subjects as intimate insiders or collaborating outsiders, arguing that a humanist discourse is at the centre of new documentary's navigations through dilemmas of intrusion vs. intimacy, objectification vs. representation. Defying official ideology and market logic, this humanist discourse bears utopian imprints from the past and aspires to build communities based on egalitarian, sympathetic and collaborative ideals. Two other articles complicate these ethical issues by bringing gender politics and authorial aspiration into the mix. In her study of women filmmakers' portrayals of lesbian experiences, Chao Shi-Yan contrasts the visible constraints of a film made by an “outsider” filmmaker with the more spontaneous, open and public expression of gender identity of one made by an “insider” filmmaker. Examining intrusive and confrontational camera usage in documentary, Yomi Braester argues that this style highlights the theatricality of the encounter between filmmakers and their subjects, positioning the documentary director as a proactive auteur. These three articles provide insight into the complexity of relationships between filmmakers and their subjects, and how the figure of the filmmaker is thus conceived.

As the first volume of its type within a relatively new field, this book does an admirable job laying a foundation, sharing resources, and stimulating multiple directions for future research. The volume might have benefited from further problematizing of some of the words in its title. One cannot establish how “new” this cinema is without an understanding of the documentary tradition from the Mao era. This calls for studies with a longer historical horizon. To understand this cinema as a “movement,” researchers need to look closer at the production, circulation and reception of these films, as well as the film cultures created by them. This will require more anthropological and sociological research similar to the approach taken by Nakajima in this volume. While Voci's article discusses works not normally classified as documentary, more analysis is needed to examine how “documentary” is defined, and how it relates to other cinematic genres and digital media. Moreover, in today's globalizing world, how is this cinema “Chinese”? More research is needed to understand its interactions with discourses of globalization and nationalism, and its representations of ethnic minorities, Chinese diaspora and other cultures. Finally, there are echoes between articles in the book that are not obvious from the grouping of the chapters. Perhaps more guidance in the introductory chapter would have amplified dialogues between this set of extraordinarily rich articles. In view of the solid groundwork this volume has laid, however, these quibbles are “picking bones from an egg,” as the Chinese saying goes. This is an extremely insightful book. Any student of Chinese cinema will benefit tremendously from it.