Fear of arrest meant Ai Weiwei couldn't come to Rotterdam, but the artist did send a couple of new films in his place. By Ben Walters
While no film festival is without its problems, IFFR filmmakers and audiences can at least expect not be raided by the police. The same cannot be said for China’s small and vulnerable independent filmmaking community, as Rotterdam programmer Gertjan Zuilhof recently discovered on a trip to Beijing. He was in a café – a typical venue for screenings that are often announced at the last minute without permission from authorities. “It was the opening film of a small festival and 20 policemen walked in. They weren’t violent but they were there, they were the police, and they said it’s over,” Zuilhof says. “It can happen any time.”
Hidden Histories
Such experiences were the inspiration for the Ai Weiwei Café, a specially created venue next to the year-round IFFR headquarters on Karel Doormanstraat that forms the hub of Hidden Histories, an IFFR 2012 Signals strand dedicated to independent Chinese cinema programmed by Zuilhof and fellow IFFR programmer Gerwin Tamsma. “I did a very Chinese thing,” Zuilhof admits. “I pirated a café from Beijing – even the red drapes and the sofas. I just gave our production staff pictures and they recreated it.”
Airily dominated by a pair of two-storey white tree trunks adorned with moss and flowers, and a handful of ten-foot potted bamboo plants, the Café also has a big-screen TV with seating for twenty, on which visitors connected to Hidden Histories present unprogrammed films every day at 2 pm. “This was inspired by the underground scene in Beijing,” Zuilhof says. “We asked Chinese filmmakers to bring a DVD of a film they thought is important.”
Eight sofas are arrayed around four TVs, showing on loops the filmed work of an artist who has become synonymous with issues of state control in the new China: Ai Weiwei. These works document – at considerable length and in considerable detail – Beijing’s social topography, systematically surveying ring roads and boulevards. We sit in front of the screen showing
Beijing 2003, a 150-hour tour of the city’s streets. Zuilhof admits he hasn’t watched it all: “these are more like gallery pieces, though Ai Weiwei says he also considers them documentaries. It is a document – already there’s much more traffic in Beijing and almost no bicycles.”
Travel is, of course, a more contentious subject for Ai than he could have imagined a decade ago. The artist is currently under house arrest after being held by authorities for more than two months last year. During his dealings with Ai for the IFFR, Zuilhof got to see a little of his life. “He has a huge compound where he works with a team of about ten people and he’s not allowed to leave the building, though he walks to his neighbours and picks his son up from school, that kind of thing. I invited him to a small exhibition of some of my drawings about half an hour away – he asked the police and got permission.”
Did he invite Ai to Rotterdam? “Of course, I asked. He said, ‘Impossible’. They live with permanent insecurity and fear of what might happen. Every now and then a collaborator is arrested. They come up with new charges all the time – the latest one was that a cameraman was arrested for pornography. There will be maybe five or six cases against him, for tax fraud, all kinds of charges – never [overtly] political.”
Beyond Ai’s work, Hidden Histories also contains eleven recent films (ten of them documentaries) dealing with the strains of China’s rapidly changing society, often filmed deep in the provinces over months or years. “They document a way of life which is left out of the official picture, which is all about progress and everybody getting wealthy,” says Zuilhof. “Go five minutes out of the centre of Beijing and you see incredible poverty. Many of them follow one person who stands for a way of life shared by millions.”
Freedom to do
Compared to conceptual pieces such as
Beijing 2003, Ai Weiwei’s recent work for the camera is more explicitly concerned with the power of the state.
Disturbing the Peace (2009) deals, with absurd humour, with police obstruction of the trial of a civil liberties activist. “It’s reportage, showing how things work,” Zuilhof says. “And he’s in the films, approaching people, scolding policemen. I have the feeling it’s also documented for his safety: if there’s a camera around, the chance that he’ll be hit is less.” Ai has been severely beaten by police in the past. His camera is often incidental to a larger process – the means of racking up hundreds of hours of documentation of political or artistic actions. “The goal is not even to make a movie,” Zuilhof notes. “He has several of these kinds of unfinished movies. So when I talked to him about this programme, on the spot he said, ‘Maybe we can finish this one or this one for your festival’.”
Those the artist did complete for IFFR are 'So Sorry' (about lethally shoddy building practices) and 'Ordos 100' (about a grand architecture project in Mongolia). Ai’s focus is mostly local now. “I don’t think he’s very interested in festivals,” Zuilhof suggests, though “he’s very easy and generous in showing his works and he’s interested in the internet.” The films from the Café will be on the IFFR YouTube channel. “YouTube is forbidden in China but some people can get around that, especially students who are computer savvy – so maybe a million people in China can see the works online and I think that’s interesting for him.”
No surprise, then, that the artist left the logistics of the Café and his films’ screenings entirely in the IFFR’s hands. “He’s not the kind of person to give detailed instructions,” Zuilhof smiles. “His approach, on many levels, is that you should have the freedom to do things.”
More about the Ai Weiwei Café here.