A Date with the Censors from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

Tweet

Is it possible to control the culture of 1.4 billion individuals? The Chinese government is trying.

If you’ve been following my work with the New York Times this year, you may have noticed a theme in some of the coverage: censorship. However, behind the censors a greater story is being told. I’m currently working on my fourth video in a series called “Culture and control.” The Times’ explains:

“Articles in this series are exploring the struggle to shape the culture of authoritarian China.”

This has been a very interesting series to be part of — on a cultural level and on a production level. Each article has posed new challenges in storytelling and as the collection builds I hope we have helped shed light on a complicated situation.

There are two parts to this story. One might be looked at as external, while the other is more internal. The external part of the story is about China’s cultural exports. What art, culture and media do people outside the Middle Kingdom see and how do they reflect upon China via that cultural product? The other part is internal: How does the art created in China, shape China’s internal population’s culture? Or more bluntly: How is TV, literature, movies, art and other forms of communication working to shape modern Chinese society?

In many ways, I might describe this complicated situation as a bit of a tug-a-war. On one hand, China wants its cultural products to be exported all over the world. On the other hand, they want to make sure the right products are exported. Therefore, they are trying to control culture from within China and hope that it will both influence its own population positively and be exported to the global stage. But if you ask most artists — controlled creativity is suffocating.

In a speech last October in Beijing, President Hu Jintao said:

“The overall strength of Chinese culture and its international influence is not commensurate with China’s international status … The international culture of the West is strong while we are weak.”

Hu notes on the global stage China’s cultural industries are lagging behind its powerful economic and political influence. In response to this, there is actually significant funding going to the arts in China from the government. However, in trying to shape this culture the Communist Party is taking great measures to help steer artists and culturati into what they consider, a moral and ethical direction.

Word Crimes from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

Reporting on something like this is a bit complicated and thus far, the stories have focused on specific cultural industries examining what the government is doing in those specific areas as a means of control. In each area, we have found one person to help tell a greater story — a documentarian, a writer and a TV executive representing film, writing and television. In an earlier article in the series, Ian Johnson shows how the government is even shaping perception of history at its national museums.

The stories collectively help create a bigger behind-the-wall picture that people in the west and in China might not see. A word taken out of a book, a materialistic tendency squashed from a TV show or even a movie being completely unreleased in China — the censors’ hands and eyes are all over the place beyond the widely publicized and infamous Great Firewall.

Given the enormous population, a lot of people have asked me — Is it even possible to control China’s culture? Last year, in an essay China’s beloved blogger/race car driver Han Han wrote:

“The restriction on cultural activities makes it impossible for China to influence literature and cinema on a global basis or for us culturati to raise our heads up proud.”

And this is where the tug-a-war occurs. In the government’s view — culture needs to be of global significance and also controlled for substance for internal and external purposes. But from the point of view of the artists, restrictions on substance make it very hard to create something that, In Han Han’s words, artists can be proud of on a global basis.

Filming China’s Dark Side 拍中国的黑暗 面 from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

The influence of art and media on society can be of enormous magnitude. I believe the extreme measures the government is taking in China, demonstrate it is clearly possible to control and shape the culture of 1.4 billion people. Regardless of modern communication and a strong counter culture developing, the masses are still largely at the will of the censors.

As China’s global influence grows, measurements like this will start to have a larger global effect and I believe keeping an eye on it as it develops is an important step to understanding China’s future.

– These videos were all co-produced with Times’ reporter Edward Wong. They go with fantastic articles by Ed and Ian Johnson and photo essays from photographers Gilles Sabrie and Chi Yin Sim and portraits from Shiho Fukada. You can see the entire collection on a recently built landing page on the Times’ site here.

Tweet

Using a fat Chinese man, a large backpack, a baseball cap and the hood from my sweatshirt I attempted to hide myself.

I was hiding in between the beefy man and a 35 kg f-stop Satori camera bag on the back of the fat man’s motorcycle. He drove me down a dark dirt road in the middle of the night near the uniquely autonomous village of Wukan, Guangdong Province.

I was hiding from those that might not want attention drawn to this small village of about 13,000 people.

Earlier in the week, pissed off villagers had over thrown their leaders and in mass numbers forced the police out of town. When the police came back, they setup barriers and created a stronghold around their fishing community, only letting in sympathizers.

The New York Times’ Edward Wong described it as:

The outsiders had come to see how furious residents had transformed their village on China’s southeast coast into a temporarily autonomous zone. Their anger focused on two issues: what they called illegal land sales by village officials, and the death on Dec. 11 of a village advocate while he was in police custody. The villagers chased out Communist Party officials, repelled an assault by police officers and barricaded all roads leading into Wukan with tree trunks. The two police stations in the village stood empty. So did the headquarters of the Communist Party committee.

This was not a new conflict nor is it unusual in China. The villagers were protesting illegal government land grabs. And after a village representative was killed in police custody, they had simply had — enough.

Within one week of the Telegraph’s Malcome Moore breaking the story — the stronghold had drawn media attention from all across the globe and eventually landed me at what would be the tail end of the conflict. The international media gave the small village the ability to rage “a propaganda war.”

And while I certainly missed the hot part of this story, I think I may have witnessed the strange part.

It makes perfect sense to me that people would be mad about government land seizures and certainly over the death of a villager — however, what didn’t make sense to me was the “end” of this story.

My video journal above for the New York Times gives a brief outline of what happened, but to me it seemed not much was resolved — given how mad everyone was days earlier.

Minutes after the protest ended life seemed to go back to a pretty normal state pretty quickly.

During my last interview with reporter Edward Wong, the crowd was dispersing from the town hall meeting. While people slowly drifted away, a pancake vendor frantically shuffled his cart out to the crowded street to capitalize on the mass numbers. This was the China I knew. Someone had to take advantage of the opportunity and make money.

The pancakes were delicious …

Ed and I walked down to the ocean to see the fishing port. Fisherman were getting their boats ready and some young kids played on a dock as the sun set over the small town that had made global headlines.

The “ending” to me seemed to abrupt. Its hard to believe it could end so peaceful and so suddenly after what had occurred. And as one villager put it — ““I’m afraid they might come and take people away … The local government always says one thing but does another.” I hope for the sake of this village, this man is wrong.

But for now, it seems the book has been left open …

Video Journal

My video goes along with a written journal by Times’ reporter Edward Wong. See Ed’s journal here.

This package comes out today on nytimes.com and is a bit different than the reporting that has previously been done on the incident. While we give the news, our assignment was for both of us to give a more personal story of what it was like to come to the village and the process in which we watched the news unfold. This falls into the “journal” category of news rather than a traditional “this is what happened” type report.

From a reporter’s perspective this was a bit a media circus. Toward the beginning of the video I show one shot of reporters almost being run over by a minivan with a village leader in it, as one example of the amount of media there.

To see how this story unfolded check out Timess staff earlier reportage on the event:

• Canny Villagers Grasp Keys to Loosen China’s Muzzle
• Demonstrators Who Took Over Chinese Village Halt Protest
• Officials Meet With Protesting Chinese Villagers
• Wukan Protesters Seek Return of Xue Jinbo’s Body
• Wukan Revolt Takes On a Life of Its Own

While I was shooting video for this assignment, I kept a camera attached to my hip with a Blackrapid RS 7-Strap. The photos from this post are mostly taken with one hand while holding a camera rig in the other.

BREAKING NEWS & DSLRS

Although this video is pretty straight forward, on the technical side, if was hard to produce. The video journal (top video) was produced Thursday night/Friday morning Beijing time in between 12:00 am and 5:00 am. However, I had made a news clip one day earlier for TimesCast that also had tough deadlines. Working DSLR’s and breaking news can be very tricky with workflow, especially with file sizes and transmitting times. The news clip above was actually edited from the back of a crammed car in the middle of the night. Transmitting from this type of remote location slowed data rates down to about 15 Kbps which forced me to convert all video down to 720p and quality to below 50%.

One reporter I saw at the scene had a proper microphone attached to — just a cell phone camera with a tiny steady cam on it. Compared to caring around tons of weight, glass and a shoulder rig — this is amazing. Given that the information needs to get out as quickly as possible, if you are put in the scenario where the files will be compressed anyway, this almost makes more sense. It allows reporters to be extremely mobile and transmit and much faster speeds. However, the down side would be if you actually wanted your footage to look good post event …

With my normal workflow, all files out of a Canon DSLR get immediately re-codaced into Apple ProRes to make editing easier and export quality better. This step really slows down your work flow so for the news clip directly above, I skipped it and the main journal at the top of this post, was re-codaced.

While the quality you can get from DSLRs is great, I think they are less than ideal for stories like this that need to be turned around as soon as possible … otherwise, you might find yourself getting very little sleep.

Tweet

Murong Xuecun is one of the least boring people I have ever met.

He is energetic. He is dynamic. He is impressively clever. And in the last year, he has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of censorship in China.

However, he is a writer.

And when New York Times’ correspondent Edward Wong first mentioned he was writing an in-depth feature on Murong, I initially doubted an accompanying video component would help add much value to the package. I did some background research and found articles with pictures of the young writer. Nearly every single one showed the author looking at a computer in some form or another, 3 out of 4 being a silhouetted picture of the back of his head with the computer out of focus or him at an internet café.

The still images I saw were far from inspiring. I imagined a video full of talking heads, with sequences of static imagery that would inevitably go on for too long and drive viewers to click away.

But right before I decided it wasn’t worth making the video, I read this speech Murong had recently given. Words started jumping off the page:

This is castrated writing. I am a proactive eunuch, I castrate myself even before the surgeon raises his scalpel. Our language has been cut into two parts: one safe, and the other risky. Some words are revolutionary, and others are reactionary; some words we may use, and others belong to our enemies.

And just like that, I was hooked. This person was clearly an outspoken agent calling for change and reform in his society. All of a sudden Murong turned from a writer into an incendiary subject on a hot topic. I jumped on board and got to thinking — how do I make a person who is visually boring interesting? And my first inspiration came directly from the same speech. Toward the top of his speech, Murong said:

From my many years’ experience in writing and publishing, I could compile a Sensitive Words Glossary, in which you would certainly find the words “system,” “law,” “government,” as well as a large number of other nouns, several verbs, quite a few adjectives, and even a few special numbers. The glossary would also include all names of religions, all names of important people, all countries, including of course China, and also the phrase “Chinese people.”

On the backend of the speech, the author continued:

If there really were a Sensitive Words Glossary, I hope that it could be published; in this way at least we could all save a lot of time, and reduce the possibility of unwittingly committing “word crimes.”

Sitting in a small airport in Burlington, Vermont on my way back to China I thought — maybe I can help him publish this list of sensitive words. I dreamed up a bunch of scenarios of how I could visualize a list of words and eventually came to the conclusion that I should let this man say the words that ordinarily he can’t say.

This train of thought continued to a greater concept on voiceovers vs subtitles. While most international news videos get a voiceover treatment, I started thinking it would be completely ironic to mute the man, when he is in fact, talking about words which he can not use. I decided subtitles were more appropriate which then opened up more doors for cinematic storytelling and made it a little easier to justify adding music to a news piece. Although I was excited to make the piece, I was still a bit worried about keeping it moving and wanted the music to keep the piece from drying up.

Now, regardless of the man’s profession, I had a hot subject and an idea for a snappy intro. I had music to help move the piece in a rhythmic narrative and a logic behind how I would represent his opinions visually.

And while I knew I had to shoot him writing or at the computer, I also knew I wanted to get him out of the context where we are used to seeing writers. When you get stuck shooting a “boring” person (or one, who doesn’t do anything visually exciting) I think this is a great exercise to find a new physical environment. Simply, get them out of the physical environment where they normal are or where we expect to see them. It doesn’t matter where — just someplace else. I wanted to see him interacting with people, and when I found out he was going out to dinner with some journalists and human rights lawyers, I was ecstatic when I got the invite to tag along.

This was the trickiest part of the video — both visually and narratively. How to link the home interviews, the writing visuals and a bunch of guys at dinner. With some thinking, it was easy enough to have narration lead the story into the restaurant, but shooting this was much more tricky.

There’s a Zoom H1 hidden on the table near the bear drinking, cigarette-smoking intellectuals. I have a 60D switching between a Gorilla Pod, a tripod and the in-table lazy susan. In addition, I had a 5DMII on a shoulder rig. And while I didn’t leave a camera rolling the entire time, I did leave the audio rolling. When I got back, I synched all of the audio with the video clips I had, and although I had tons of great dialogue, in the end I just grabbed one meaty quote that allowed me to jump from frame to frame anachronistically. Had I used multiple quotes or too much back and forth dialogue, I would have been forced into using more real time footage. Using just one quote allowed me to use some of my favorite visuals from the entire night.

With the intro set and multiple environments in the bank, I just needed to shoot the interviews. Knowing that I was at risk of having a boring video, I kept two cameras rolling continually during the interviews so when it came time to cut, I could keep all my frames short and bounce between a Canon 50mm f/1.2 and a Canon 24mm f/1.4.

With the credit roll, intro and title sequence, the video came out at 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Keeping voiceover out, adding music, using multiple environments and multiple cameras rolling during interviews, I hope I succeeded in making a visually “boring” person interesting.

And while I can’t answer that question for you, I can say the greater lesson I took away from this project was the potential assets we gain from simply researching what our subjects have to say, have said and what they might want to say.

MORE ON MURONG XUECUN:

• Read Edward Wong’s story “Pushing China’s Limits on Web, if Not on Paper”
• An Excerpt from ‘Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu’
• More on Murong: Words We Can Use, and Those We Can Not

Tweet

In the summer of 2011, New York Times reporter Edward Wong bought a cap in the North Korean special economic zone of Rason. A month later this cap ended up in my office. Today, that cap is on The New York Times’ home page.

So what is significant about this cap?

While I don’t believe the video (or hat) are anything groundbreaking, from a visual journalist’s point of view there’s a little bit more to it than what you might first see.

First, let me clarify: this video was shot in North Korea by Ed Wong. When it appeared on my plate, I was asked to edit Ed’s video for the New York Times.

I edit (almost) all of my own work. However, relatively rarely do I take on an editing job that I didn’t shoot. This footage, out of North Korea was of enough interest to get me out of bed. However, what I thought would be a fairly easy exercise actually turned into a good learning lesson.

Ed, known in the Twittersphere as @comradewong, is a reporter — not a visual journalist. After sorting through all of Ed’s footage I had a big think of how I could make his hand held footage shot with a consumer video camera, tell the best story possible, to supplement his written story, while also offering another view of the area. Often in this situation, I go look at what other people have done first. Looking at wire stories to find the basic model and then looking further to what other people have done.

Our initial plan was to mix Ed’s footage with AP, Reuters and AFP footage to create a basic news report on North Korea’s nascent capitalism. But after looking at what had been done — it didn’t seem very possible to make something different than what had already been done. After talking to Ed about his experience, we decided that his experience might actually be more interesting to the average viewer than the actual news item, given the context of what media on the subject already existed.

Reporter’s Notebook

This form of journalism is often referred to as a reporter’s notebook: a personal account of reporting on a subject. Telling the story, through the eyes of the reporter, rather than the pen. The audience receives the news item (in this case, DPRK trying out capatalism) but with a literal more human emotion in it to add flavor. Normally, you see broll of the story with a voice over from the reporter explaining the story. However, I wanted to take it a step further and actually added Ed into the film.

I did this in attempt to create a visual dichotomy between Ed’s footage of North Korea and my in-studio footage, making two unique visual environments that are about as opposite as you can get. One in the studio, shot with HDDSLR and the other in the secretive, authoritarian state with a shaky consumer grade camera. I thought this would emphasize the unique environment the reporter found himself in. To highlight the intrinsic, yet subtle weirdness of the area.

A landscape with no commerce, a road with very few cars on it or a scary children’s performance — I hoped these would all seem more weird after the visual comparison of the dry, calm and normal studio interview with Ed.

Direct to Camera?

One question came up whether Ed should be talking direct to camera or not. There are two cameras rolling (a Canon 5DMII and a Canon 7D) in the studio, lit with two softboxes and a red fill on the black backdrop. In a basic news report, the reporter would be talking direct to camera. In a documentary, the subject would be speaking off camera — to the unseen documentarian.

In a small way, I felt like we were making a mini-documentary about Ed’s experience in North Korea. Ergo, he would be talking to the documentarian (me) off camera. I’ve received some feedback that people think this is strange and he should be talking direct to camera. I still haven’t made up my mind which would be more interesting and what the appropriate thing to do is; however, I do feel like we have expended on the traditional, reporter’s notebook model by removing the viewer one step back to where the post production is actually being done. An additional environment — physically and mentally.

The Cap

About four minutes into the video, Ed puts a stereotypical communist cap on.

Ed had the idea of showing the audience a cap he had purchased in a store that would not allow him to film or even bring a notebook in. When I thought about the idea I was initially against it because I thought it would just simply be cheezy. However, its always good to let an idea play out and see what happens before quashing it. So I filmed it and looked at the result. While I had a bit of anxiety about the idea, in the end I actually thought the result added something significant to the piece.

The result is definitely weird and (I hope) definitely a bit out of left field. Something that viewers aren’t expecting. We change camera angles as Ed puts the cap on (direct-to-camera), and we hold the frame for a couple awkward seconds in dead silence. I hope these couple of seconds denote the reporter’s sense of humor in this situation; however, I’m not sure if people will get the tongue and cheek bit or simply watch it and say — “that was stupid.”

I do hope it will make people grin a bit and help transport some of the oddity of North Korea and into people’s homes.

Fin

In the end we hopefully have created something a little more out of the ordinary, that may have otherwise been dry. We expanded a bit on the reporter’s notebook model, added a bit of humor into the piece while hopefully still giving the audience the information from the actual news item.

To read Edward Wong’s print article “Tending a Small Patch of Capitalism in North Korea” click here.

To see our video “North Korea Opens for Business” on the New York Time’s web site click here.

Tweet

NOTE FROM JONAH: This post was originally written for Dan Chung’s DSLR News shooter blog.

On a recent assignment for the New York Times I was tasked with filming a filmmaker.

I’d taken portraits of photographers before, but I had never filmed a filmmaker. Its hard not to have a little bit of anxiety when you know the person you are filming not only knows what you are doing, but has their own opinion on how to do it.

The idea was to create a behind-the-scenes video that describes how Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang makes his films.

The first step was getting my hands on his films, which wasn’t the easiest thing, given his films are not available in China. Your first question might be — why aren’t Zhao’s films available in China? If you get your hands on one of them the reasons for their unavailability will become pretty clear. For the most part, the content of Zhao’s films is not exactly the type of material the Chinese government wants you to see.

I have discussed previously that I am not necessarily a documentarian, but as a visual journalist working with cinematic storytelling the two fields are certainly not too far off. Regardless of how you work with video, I believe Zhao’s films can teach us all something.

On my first screenings, I though Zhao’s films didn’t necessarily have “beautiful photography”. Even from the samples of the films I used for my video, you can tell most of his films are not multi-million dollar productions or maybe not even multi-thousand dollar productions. These are truly grassroots-style productions that often use gorilla-style photographic techniques.

While the photography isn’t necessarily beautiful, it is in fact extremely powerful, which in itself, I would consider beautiful.

As an image maker, I spend so much of my time trying to compose beautiful images that I had to spend some time thinking about why I felt these images were so powerful. I think the answer comes in the relationship between your content and your images.

Zhao’s films show a truthful view of China, rarely seen. The raw video footage makes the truths and injustices he reveals even more real. Let’s say that Zhao was about to use jibs, dollies or even regular tripod use while filming — the visuals would feel way more contrived. There is some tripod use, but a large majority of this footage is handheld and there’s quite a bit of shakiness to it.

These things are a bit counter-intuitive to a lot of us who spend half our day thinking about gear; however, the effect is one that should be applauded. Not only does Zhao let the footage speak for itself in a digital age, the raw nature of the images actually reaffirm the stories he is telling.

I would describe Zhao’s films as having a “slower pace.” He’s not in a rush to tell his stories. You can tell this — even by the mere fact he spent 12 years filming his movie “Petition.” However, I believe the slow pace matches that of his characters’ realities. This pace creates the opportunity for the audience to actually experience the reality of his subjects.

To visualize this Zhao has left in some less-than-exciting images and scenes. However, these images are real. There are seemingly very few contrived scenes which many other filmmakers set up to help tell their story.

Videos with an interesting story, but that have boring or disconnected images are clearly not good. Videos with amazing imagery, but broken storylines are also not good. In video journalism and documentary film making, the relationship between our images and stories is what separates great productions from the pack. Whether this means holding back on production level like Zhao has or going the opposite direction — when our images and stories work together, our videos become infinitely more powerful.

And in a world where gear means so much its refreshing to see Zhao showing us that you don’t need a million dollars to make a film with a million dollar impact.

The New York Times, Ai Weiwei and Zhao Liang

While my portion of this project was a “behing the scenes” look of Zhao Liang’s productions, New York Times reporter Ed Wong’s lengthy profile shows a much different side of making films in China. Wong reveals how many believe Zhao has now “switched sides” in order to continue to make films in China. While Zhao is still very respected, his cooperation with the Chinese government on his recent film Together as well as a decision to pull out his film Petition from the Melbourne film festival has cost him friends, including the controversial artist Ai Weiwei, who only recently was released from prison.

The Times included a video from Ai Weiwei along with mine as part of the Ed’s story as well as photography by Beijing based photographers Chi Yinsim and Shiho Fukada.

For journalists, cinephiles, videographers, photographers and documentarians — the piece is very interesting and I encourage all to check it out.

– To read New York Times reporter Ed Wong’s story on Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang click here.
– To find Zhao Liang’s movie check out dGenerate films web site here.
– To read a follow up to Ed’s story, check out New Yorker writer Richard Brody story “CHINA’S CULTURAL EVOLUTION” here.