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Speculative realism and Liu Jiayins Oxhide II

Zhichun Zhang
Modern Chinese Film and Theatre (MA)

19/04/13









4,421 words


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Introduction
Chinese cinema since the late 1980s and early 1990s has experienced a general trend in the
employment of stylistic techniques associated with cinematic realism and documentary style
filmmaking, made possible by the availability of digital video. From Wu Wenguangs
Bumming in Beijing (1990) to films produced in the late 2000s by directors such as Jia
Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai, filmmakers have attempted in various ways to move away
from the montage style melodrama seen in the works of previous generations (namely in
socialist cinema) as well as differentiating themselves from the lofty aesthetics of
ethnographic films made in the early to mid-1980s in order to modernise Chinese film.
Zhang Yingjin speaks of a spirit of amateurism that has brought a fresh look and a new
aesthetics to cinema in the 1990s.
1
By now, spectators have become used to the long,
lingering shots and objective narration (although this issue of objectivity is a sensitive one
and will be discussed further) of the films of the past two decades or so.
The films of Liu Jiayin (b. 1981), a director who belongs to the most recent generation of
Chinese filmmakers and who some have called the most interesting director since Jia
Zhangke, follow the general stylistic pattern of the so-called sixth generation films. Her
series of feature films, Oxhide/Niupi (2005) and Oxhide II/Niupi Er (2009), belong to this
quasi-documentary aesthetic, or jilu fengge in Chinese, that is so frequently associated with
contemporary avant-garde Chinese film. This paper is an exploration of how she, as part of
an emerging generation of filmmakers, differs in her treatment of style and in purpose from
that of the early documentary style pioneers, how she has taken the experiences of the films
of the 1990s to the next level, and the ways in which her works differ also from films
produced during the same years by established filmmakers like Jia Zhangke. I argue that

1
Zhang, Chinese Postsocialist Cinema, 64.

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what differentiates Liu Jiayins films from those before her and from her contemporaries is
her alternative approach to cinematic realism, one that is related to and an interpretation of
the theories of speculative realism. I will focus on Liu Jiayins second film of the above
mentioned series, Oxhide II, as a case study, examining the deployment of space and time in
the film with the aim of first illustrating the development of the documentary style, hitherto
the most significant genre in the last two decades of Chinese cinema, and secondly, and most
importantly, to try and understand the film within the framework of speculative realism.
The basic elements of the film are made up of one scene, one table, three people, and nine
shots. It was shot in Lius parents 430-square foot main room of their apartment, and the
films cast and crew are Liu and her mother and father, all non-professional actors, with no-
one else involved in the production of the film. The plot is the preparation and ultimate
consumption of a meal by the three members of the family who play themselves. The camera
moves around the single space of the table, and in a steady series of shots from fixed
positions, the camera moves in a clockwise direction around the axis of the table. Most
significantly, each of the nine shots unfolds in real time the time it takes for the family to
prepare, cook, and eat a hundred or so jiaozi (Chinese dumplings usually stuffed with meat
and vegetables). The modest setting, the mundane subject matter, slow pace, and dimly lit
and dreary visual tones of the film make it initially tempting to jump to conclusions by using
existing frames of references to read the film, whether it be as a commentary on the
marginalisation of the artisanal crafts in China (as represented by the opening shot in the film
of the father hand-working leather for his bag business) or on contemporary family routines
and frictions or even as a response or antidote to the pace of change in China today. Upon
watching the film however, we get the impression that it may not be as simple (or as complex
as the case may be) as interpreting it in the ways we are used to interpreting realist films as
a fundamentally political art form. This does not seem to be the case for Oxhide II, and so

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the question is posed what is the realism we are confronted with here, and what is the
purpose of its employment?
Bazin and realism
Realism has always been a key notion in Chinese cultural production in the twentieth century,
influenced in part by the ideas of the French film critic and theorist Andr Bazin, whose two
volumes of What Is Cinema? (1967) have been classics of film studies since the Second
World War. His ideas which encouraged filmmakers to depict an objective reality (myth of
total realism) and his advocation of personalism in film were especially impactful in modern
cinema. Ru-Shou Robert Chen argues that we still need Bazin now as much as ever before
and that his affirmation of the objectivity of cinema is crucial in our age of digital revolution.
Chen applies Bazins analysis of European films to the films of Taiwanese directors like Tsai
Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, discussing the ways in which the realism of the latter is
directly indebted to the Bazinian tradition of realism. Chen sees Hous films as applying
Bazins notion of realistic mise-en-scene in his film Boys from Fengkuei (1983) in a scene
where two groups of young men fight each other. At times the figures move off-screen to the
right and left of the frame, however even though they disappear we can still imagine what is
happening outside of the frame where the action continues. For Bazin, the function of mise-
en-scene is to reveal reality rather than to add to reality, writing in Theatre and Cinema
(from What Is Cinema?): The screen is not a frame like that of a picture, but a mask (cache)
which allows only a part of the action to be seen. When a character moves off screen, we
accept the fact that he is out of sight, but he continues to exist in his own capacity at some
other place.
2
This is also an element frequently at play in Liu Jiayins film, in which the
characters walk to areas outside of the camera frame, and often do so because the frame is so

2
Bazin, quoted in Chen, Bazin at work: the concept of realism in Chinese-language films,
61.

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tight and all objects are close-up. Because of this, even when we are able to see objects and
human figures, the edge of the frame physically cuts them off, leaving only parts of the forms
within the frame.
Bazinian realism can also be related to the way time is presented in Chinese film according to
Chen. He relates Bazins discussion of a hunting sequence in Robert J. Flahertys Nanook of
the North (1922), in which the actual duration of time taken for Nanook to lie down and wait
before he strikes is exactly what is shown on screen, to Tsai Ming-Liangs real time
sequences of characters crying, employed presumably to heighten the emotional effect of the
scenes.
3
In fact, this relationship can be even better applied to Liu Jiayins Oxhide II where
the entire film is recorded in real time, or more precisely where each of the nine shots are
shot in real time. Time, like space, is a highly important element in the Oxhide films, and its
deployment is a major part of Lius filmic approach. It is evident that Lius style is derived
from the now established urban cinematic style in mainland China which features long takes
and minimal dialogue. However, Lius approach subtly differs from previous treatments not
only because of her daring use of real time, but also in the fact that a sense of nostalgia
accompanying the passage of time is gone. The issue of nostalgia may seem an arbitrary one
in the case of the film Oxhide II, but this is exactly where the key difference in the depictions
of time in Lius films and those of other Chinese filmmakers from both the mainland and
Hong Kong and Taiwan lies.
In terms of the films produced in the 1990s by Hong Kong and Taiwanese filmmakers, Jean
Ma speaks of the existence of a nostalgic disposition running through many of them. Her
study situates this group of filmmakers under the sign of melancholy, and in films such as
those by Wong Kar-wai, this element is readily observed in the compression of duration by

3
Chen, Bazin at work: the concept of realism in Chinese-language films, 58.

'
means of ellipses or the expansion of time by overlapping and repetition. In Chungking
Express (1994), Ma asserts that Wong creates a stutter in the unfolding of the image that
results in a sense of discontinuous time along with an effect of slow-motion that
paradoxically conveys the accelerated tempo of urban existence.
4
The passage of time is
always being manipulated in some way, and even when real time is used, for instance in the
scenes mentioned by Chen, they are for similar purposes for the creation of a sense of
nostalgia and loss. Chen comments on another scene in Vive LAmour (1994) in which a
character smokes five cigarettes and this action of smoking the cigarettes one by one is
presented to us in real time. Just like the scene of the female protagonist crying, this is
carried out for a certain emotional effect. At the same time, these emotive, sentimental
devices are in turn employed for the purposes of social commentary, and indeed these
filmmakers are often described as painters of modern life in the global city of the late
twentieth century. These are films about society and above all, human beings.
It may seem inappropriate to compare such conspicuously different genres of film in the first
place, however sometimes such comparisons force us to go back to basics to understand the
motivations of the directors and what they reflect about the state of filmmaking and cultural
production in general. What results from our observation of the real time sequence of the
female protagonist in Vive LAmour walking aimlessly and crying on a park bench is an
evocation of the past through our empathy with the character who is reflecting on what has
come to pass and what has been lost. The total absence of any such nostalgia in Oxhide II
hints to us that unlike Tsai, Liu is not employing such a technique for the purpose of moving
an audience, but instead to make a point about time itself, specifically the portrayal of time in
film, and by implication the art of filmmaking as a whole.

4
Ma, Melancholy Drift, 2.

(
Speculative realism
The ideas of a recent branch of philosophy commonly labeled speculative realism take the
above analyses a step further. Its theories originated in the mid-2000s, while the term was
only coined in 2007 after a conference held at Goldsmiths College in London which involved
talks given by proponents of its ideas. Although they each disagree on certain basic
philosophical issues, the members (although many refuse to be formally associated with the
group) stand together against the dominant forms of idealism found in much of contemporary
philosophy rooting from Kant, which essentially represent the idea of anthropocentrism
(privileging the human being over other entities). Graham Harman, an American professor of
philosophy and one of the movements founders, has put forward an object-oriented
philosophy, which applies better to my analysis of Oxhide II than any other under the
umbrella of speculative realism. Harman criticizes traditional theories which believe that
objects are too shallow to be the truth: Despite our constant experience of objects in daily
life, philosophy began in the pre-Socratic era as an effort to find a more basic reality lying
beneath all these entitiesthe familiar individual entities of the cosmos are not treated as
fundamental.
5
In his interpretation of the famous tool analysis in Heideggers Being and
Time, Harman asks us to avoid the frequent reading of the tool-analysis as equivalent to a
distinction between praxis and theory, instead arguing that we should in fact see it as a
distinction between the things themselves and our relation with them. He states that in
mainstream philosophy, the object is always perceived as a means, or zuhanden (ready-to-
hand), however he argues that a tools being does not lie solely in its practical use and that
objects should be given back their autonomy and not have them dependent on being freed
from their environment by some privileged feature of humans alone. Harman holds that
objects are comprised of relations between other objects as opposed to the post-Kantian

5
Harman, The Road to Objects, 172.

)
emphasis on the human-world correlate. What is put forth is not meant to resemble a type of
hierarchy but it is emphasized that all relations are equal in significance and on an equal
footing.
6

These ideas are all very well in themselves, but how far can they be applied to art, and more
specifically, film? Sam Ishii-Gonzalez, in a paper given at the Film-Philosophy Conference
in 2011, interprets subjective realism in relation to cinema, specifically Bazinian realism. He
states that it is important to understand film aesthetics in a transformed sense, as comprising
human involvement without being solely defined or circumscribed by it. For Bazin, he states,
the aesthetic potential of the photographic and cinematographic image is tied to the way it
reveals reality. Bazin opposes montage because the cultural significance (or moral
significance in Soviet montage for instance) is the way meaning exists a priori thus we are
prevented from coming to terms with the materiality of the objects placed in front of us,
instead receiving a predetermined structure of meaning that subjects everything to protocols
of human reasoning.
7
According to Ishii-Gonzales, Bazin asks us to acknowledge and
theorize this newness, this strangeness, to see that these are intimately bound up with the
cinemas ability to engage with a reality not exhausted by mans anthropometric tendencies.
Ishii-Gonzales criticizes speculative realist philosophers who resort to the analysis of sci-fi or
horror genres in their application of the theory to cinema (indeed, Harman makes references
to the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his status as an intellectual hero to speculative realist
thinkers
8
), instead aligning himself with Bazins argument that cinema allows us to attend to
the strangeness that exists in the ordinary and mundane. Ishii-Gonzales further discusses
how the renowned critic essentially applied similar theories to his film reviews. For instance

6
Neyland, Review of Towards Speculative Realism, 347.
7
Ishii-Gonzales, Bazin and Cinematic Realism.
8
Harman, The Road to Objects, 171.

*
in Bazins review of the Roberto Rossellinis Germany Year Zero (1948), the refusal of the
director to anthropomorphize the child protagonist (played by a non-professional actor who
was in fact a circus performer) is what is noted, with Rossellini avoiding the viewers desire
to see the world as a mere extension of our concerns.
I believe that it is possible to similarly read Liu Jiayins Oxhide II from a speculative realist
perspective. The film can be explained as a non-anthropometric treatment of reality in that
the human condition and the human in relation to society is not the main exploration. The
director has expressed that she is concerned above all with how her films are made, and with
developing an original filmic approach, rather than focusing overly on their content.
9
This
preoccupation with method and technique explains her unusual use of the camera in almost
every sense from the 1:2.35 aspect ratio to the extreme close-ups of objects to the cropping
of frames and cutting off of characters faces. Even in the times when we are allowed access
to faces, it is not for the intention of revealing very much to us in terms of emotion or thought
because they look away from the camera, often down at their task of food preparation, their
mouths hardly moving to speak. It is only in one of the final shots of the film when the
camera startlingly decides to film the characters from the shoulders and above. This neglect
of the table, an object we have been so accustomed to intently observing throughout the film,
suddenly leads the spectator to focus in on the verbal dialogue of the characters. Such
techniques are symptoms of a highly structural film, with its lack of depth of field and the
fixed camera position in each shot as if camera has just been left in the room. Liu, in keeping
with the handicrafts theme of the film, employed a construction paper mask to create the
cinemascope format within HD video. Filmmakers usually employ the wide frame for

9
Liu Jiayin in Cornell, Interview with Liu Jiayin.

"+
expansive, usually outdoor, spectacles here however, the horizontal stretch further
emphasises the table, almost as if it were the main character of the film.
Inanimate objects stand out in the film and seem to be on an equal footing to the human
characters. Objects like the sewing machine, table, and lamp take up more or less an equal
proportion of the camera frame as the human beings. Although many of the objects are being
used precisely as tools because of the fact that the characters are preparing a meal (thinking
of the Harman and Heidegger analysis), there are also other inanimate objects that are merely
present on screen with no obvious use. For instance, the lamp attached to the edge of the
table, described by David Bordwell as a massive outcropping in a micro-landscape
10
, is
consistently present in almost all of the shots, no matter which angle or direction the camera
shoots from. Moreover, the lamp takes pride of place in many instances, to the point of semi-
blocking our view of the table and the goings-on of the dumpling-making; in figure 1, the
lamp is placed centrally in the frame and divides the left side of the frame where the mother
is picking chives, and the right side where the father prepares the dough. Here, the material
arm of the lamp seems to mirror the human arms of the mother and father within the frame.
Such placements are no accident, as the director has herself commented in an interview: We
did a lot of rehearsals, including making decisions about where to put what; for example for
the third shot where we are cutting chives on the table, there are exact places to put
everything because if you put it in the wrong place you wont be able to see certain things
that happen afterwards.
11
At other times, its position on the edge of the table echoes the
positions of Liu and her parents, as if it too were taking part in the preparation of the
dumplings, or at least an observer of it all; in the final shot of the film when they sit down to
eat the dumplings, once again the lamp, along with the enormous jar of vinegar, are in the

10
Bordwell, Wantons and wontons.
11
Liu Jiayin in Rist, Interview with Liu Jiayin.

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foreground right in front of the camera as if they were also guests at the dinner (fig. 2).
It is not only the inanimate matter, but also the people that are represented in this non-
anthropomorphic way. By the end of the film, they succeed in retaining a sense of mystery in
terms of their relationship with the spectator. This is partly due to the fact that, apart from in
the seventh shot, they are mostly on the periphery of the frame, so that instead of seeing the
human characters, we see the table and the dumplings. However even if we were offered
clearer shots of the characters, things would not change as there is simply no attempt on the
part of the director leave the spectator with any psychological insight into the characters. The
director is unconcerned about our desire to contemplate ourselves in them [the
characters].
12

To take this a step further, the films treatment of time also reflects a degree of speculative
realist approach, albeit in a looser sense of the term. According to Harman, everything is an
object, whether physical or abstract. If time is taken as one such object then, it is not cut, but
left to flow at its natural pace; time is in fact highly stylised in the film, but in a different way
to its stylisation in the films of Tsai, Wong or Jia. Oxhide II shatters the idea that intimate
dealings with time in film must have something to do with any aspect of the human condition.
Here, we are in real time there is no reference to time past or time ahead, and there are no
memories and there are no expectations. We take each second, minute, hour as it comes.
The director has stated in an interview that the mundane details of life are the subject of the
film, and not just the backdrop she notes that cooking scenes in films are often used to
express that a couple are happy together or to say something about a family, but they are
hardly ever about the actual cooking or eating: these are the details of life that I think are
interesting but that are often overlooked, especially within films, so I make a special effort to

12
Bazin, quoted from Ishii-Gonzales, Bazin and Cinematic Realism.

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film them.
13
Liu finds problematic the concept that boring or empty moments need to be
cut out; every moment and every thing is of equal value. Through her treatment of time and
choice of subject matter, we can see that it is the directors conscious effort in what and how
she films that is key. That is not to say other film directors are less concerned with technique
or fall into some kind of trap by conforming to focus on conventional subject matter through
more conventional representations of time. It is more that here, we can see that this is what
Liu is above all concerned with film as a technical and aesthetic experiment, and her desire is
to make a personal statement about filmmaking. This is what brings about a certain
connection with the speculative realist movement, the basic thought process that what is
considered secondary (inanimate objects, uneventful time) should in fact be given the same
perceptual prominence as what is considered primary (human to human interaction). To
speak rather generally, subjective realist philosophers on a certain level affirm the world in
all its richness, complexity, and strangeness. The world exceeds all our attempts to
systematize or rationalize it and it is precisely this excess that serves as a stimulant to thought
and to wonder. As Ishii-Gonzales explains, it is called speculative realism because our
grasp of reality can only be provisional, contingent, a matter of speculation. A new way of
filmmaking can become a new way looking at the world, and vice versa, and this is at the
heart of Liu Jiayins realism.
Conclusion
In this way, the realism of Oxhide II differs in a striking way to the jishizhuyi or on-the-spot
realism of the films made in the 1990s. As Chris Berry notes, in terms of style the jishizhuyi
films give a voice to the ordinary people through their unscripted spontaneity, which was
one of the most striking aspects of Wu Wenguangs Bumming in Beijing, a work that then set

13
Liu Jiayin in Cornell, Interview with Liu Jiayin.

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the president for many of the succeeding documentaries of the decade.
14
Other
characteristics of this style are the handheld camera work, technical lapses and flaws
characteristic of uncontrolled situations. Oxhide II on the other hand is very much a scripted
production, with each line and placement pre-rehearsed. Neither does Lius film remind us
of films of other directors produced around the same years. Regarding mainland Chinese
films of the late 2000s, Eddie Bertozzi has suggested they contain elements of magical
realism, which stands them apart from the works of the earlier urban generation. He
argues that in Jia Zhangkes Still Life (2006), although it retains many expressive devices
typical of jishizhuyi cinema (location shooting, natural light, long takes, non-professional
actors), there is a sense of the limitations of the documentary gaze and that what is shown or
said on camera is sometimes not enough. In an attempt to overcome this gap, Jia uses
techniques like shifting the cameras focus from sharp to dissolving blurredness, swinging
between documentary observation and poetical reflection.
15
It is clear that in recent years
both new and established filmmakers like Liu and Jia are attempting to build on and develop
the documentary approach made popular in earlier decades, but ending up, and rightly so,
with quite different results.
It is clear that Chinas obsession with the investigation of the real, to use Bertozzis words,
remains live and well.
16
The critical difference between Lius work and that of other Chinese
realist directors is that there is a higher degree of social commentary underlying those films,
they are films that tend to speak for a particular group, whether it be migrant workers in the
city, or rural inhabitants on the verge of industrialization, or wandering artists. Oxhide II on
the other hand does not speak for any group but rather it is a commentary on film itself, or

14
Berry, Getting Real in The Urban Generation, 122.
15
Bertozzi, Magical Realism, 164.
16
Bertozzi, Magical Realism, 157.

"%
more precisely the process of filmmaking and what constitutes film ie. what should or
should not be included and cut out. Liu Jiayin has expressed that her purpose is to develop a
filmmaking style that expresses the way that I experience life.
17
The preoccupation with
nurturing an individual style is one that is significant in Oxhide II (and in its prequel), and
indeed relates back to Bazins notion of the auteur filmmaker. That is not to say the film
cannot be considered in terms of what it tells us about modern urban living in China, or the
survival of humane, artisanal economy in a ruthless finance and investment-dominated world.
Films, as with any creative product, cannot be so shallow as to only be able to mean or relate
to one issue. Nevertheless the real concern is the how of Lius filmmaking process, which
in my view strikes a chord with speculative realist ideas about the dispensability of a human-
centered reality, and that all entities, whether they be tangible or otherwise, are equally
worthy of our attention.


Fig. 1.

17
Liu Jiayin in Cornell, Interview with Liu Jiayin.

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Fig. 2.


References cited

Berry, Chris, Getting Real, Zhang, Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema
and Society at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Duke University Press, 2007.

Bertozzi, Eddie, A still life of the wildest things: Magic(al) realism in contemporary Chinese
cinema and the reconfiguration of the jishizhuyi style, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Vol. 6,
No. 2, 2012, 153-172.
Bordwell, David, Wantons and wontons, Observations on Film Art blog, 12 October 2009,
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2009/10/12/wantons-and-wontons/.
Chen, R.-S. R., Bazin at work: the concept of realism in Chinese- language films, Journal
of Chinese Cinemas Vol. 4, No. 1, 2010, 5764.
Cornell, Christen, Fly on the Wall: Interview with Liu Jiayin, Director of Oxhide & Oxhide
II, University of Sydney Artspace China blog, 3 June 2011,
http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/artspacechina/2011/06/the_universal_in_particular_in.html.
Harman, Graham, The Road to Objects, Continent, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2011, 171-179.
Ishii-Gonzales, Sam, Speculative Realism and the World Without Man, Le Sicle de
Lumiere blog, 4 March 2012 (extract from a paper delivered at the Film-Philosophy
Conference in Liverpool, UK, summer 2011),
http://lesiecledelumiere.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/speculative-realism-and-the-world-
without-man/.
Ishii-Gonzales, Sam, Bazin and Cinematic Realism, Le Sicle de Lumiere blog, 9 March
2012 (extract from a paper delivered at the Film-Philosophy Conference in Liverpool, UK,
summer 2011). http://lesiecledelumiere.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/bazin-and-cinematic-
realism/.
Ma, Jean, Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema, Hong Kong University Press,
2010.

"'
Neyland, Fintan, Review of Towards Speculative Realism, Speculations II, May 2011,
346-351.
Rist, Peter, Interview with Liu Jiayin at 28
th
Vancouver International Film Festival,
Offscreen.com, Vol. 13, Issue 12, December 2009.
Zhang, Yingjin, Chinese Postsocialist Cinema, in A Companion to Chinese Cinema (ed.
Zhang, Yingjin), John Wiley and Sons, 2012.


Filmography (in order of mention)

Niupi (Oxhide). Directed by Liu Jiayin , 2005.

Niupi Er (Oxhide II). Directed by Liu Jiayin , 2009.

Fengkuei lai de ren (Boys from Fengkuei). Directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien
, 1983.

Nanook of the North. Directed by Robert J. Flaherty, 1922.
Chongqing Senlin (Chungking Express). Directed by Wong Kai-wai , 1994.

Aiqing Wansui (Vive LAmour). Directed by Tsai Ming-liang , 1994.

Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero). Directed by Roberto Rossellini, 1948.

Liulang Beijing Zuihou De Mengxiangzhe (Bumming in
Beijing: The
Last Dreamers). Directed by Wu Wenguang , 1990.

Sanxia Haoren (Still Life). Directed by Jia Zhangke , 2006.