Ecocinema and Chinese-Language Documentary Films

• In Event: Eco-Media in China: Environment, Media, and Politics

Abstract

This paper is a study of contemporary Chinese-language documentaries with a strong environmental and ecological consciousness. It lies at the meeting points of several interrelated emergent fields: ecocinema, documentary films, and an environmental turn in the humanities and social sciences. Chinese-language documentaries include films made not just inside mainland China, but also in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and the Chinese diaspora. The candid camera eye is particularly effective in revealing the brute truth of reality. There seems to an ethical imperative for these filmmakers to participate in the creation of a functional civil society, to intervene in the national and global public sphere. The themes of their films include migration and dislocation due to large-scale public work projects, environmental destruction, pollution of soil, water, and air, social injustice, and the relationship between humans and animals. Overall, the filmmakers strive for an understanding of planet earth from a non-anthropocentric perspective. While touching upon a number of such documentaries, the paper focuses on the documentary My Fancy High Heels (directed by Chao-ti Ho, Taiwan, 2010). The film traces the global chain of production and distribution of leather shoes and the affective aspects of labor and consumption. The documentary examines the relationship between humans as consumers and animals (cows) as raw material (cowhide for leather shoes). It probes into the mechanism of globalization, in which nature, animals, factory workers (poor migrant workers in China), and middle- and upper-class consumers in the metropolitan centers of the West are locked in an uneasy relationship.

Author

• Sheldon Lu, University of California, Davis