Around China With A Movie Camera

Around China with a Movie Camera conjures a rich and intriguing picture of pre-Revolution China from the outsider perspective of British and European filmmakers.

A travelogue constructed through assemblage, Around China with a Movie Camera (2015) weaves together excerpts from films in the British Film Institute National Archive to form a far-reaching journey across China during the first half of the twentieth century. The original contexts of the films vary widely from travelogues, newsreels, and documentaries to  home movies and missionary films, but all were made by British and European visitors. Accompanying this melange of images of people, architecture, and landscapes, a lively score by Ruth Chan knowingly fuses Chinese and Western music.

Ordered by location rather than temporal instance, the programme drifts from bustling Beijing to the more rural provinces and back to the hubbub of Hong Kong and Shanghai. The images document cultural practices lost to time: cormorant fishing, ivory carving, water-buffalo-powered systems for irrigating paddy fields, and street performers balancing with stacks of bowls atop their heads. The programme closes with what is thought to be the oldest known surviving film shot in China: flickering images of men in traditional dress chatting to one another as sunlight dapples through branches overhead. As the programme motors through time and space, revealing entire lifetimes within seconds of film, the viewer has that strange feeling of the incomprehensible vastness of past lives lived the world over.

The edging Westernisation of the country is evident in the footage. Vaccinations, motors cars, British and German soldiers, and less traditional clothing and buildings are depicted in the later films. This Western influx is echoed in the imperial gaze enacted in the images. Though severed from their original contexts, where this dynamic is at times starker, the British and European perspective of the films is clearly felt. The movie camera operates at a distance to its subjects, gaping and staring, producing images of a culture that the camera’s operator does not belong to. Images rendered in Pathécolour or tinted with jewel-like tones appear as psychedelic, over-saturated holiday postcards, visions rather than representations of the people and places.

This encounter of East and West is deftly reflected in the programme’s score. Ruth Chan melds a blend of Chinese opera, folk music, and traditional melodies with Western classical, jazz, and electronic music. The programme’s title is a nod to Dziga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a seminal city symphony, and Chan’s score follows in the vein of the soundtracks composed for this epic urban documentary. Thrumming beats and building rhythms accompany the busy activity portrayed in the images and contribute to the programme’s sense of movement across time and space.

Around China with a Movie Camera conjures a rich and intriguing picture of pre-Revolution China from the outsider perspective of British and European filmmakers. An amalgamation of varied archival footage, the programme illustrates the value in film as a medium to understand histories of those both in front and behind the camera.