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Any attempt to understand China's visual culture today must start from an understanding of the New Documentary Movement. This anthology attempts to follow Lu Xinyu's lead into the world of English-language Chinese film studies. So far, significant discussion of China's New Documentary Movement in English has been largely confined to articles and book chapters. This book brings together work by some of the main scholars writing on the topic to create a sustained focus on Chinese independent documentary in English for the first time. Meanwhile, this chapter discusses the significance of the New Documentary Movement by trying to indicate why it has taken such a central role in Chinese audio-visual culture over the last two decades and by considering it in its more recent digital form as a contribution to the debates about what cinema is in the digital era.

This chapter examines the often-noted turn to “private” filmmaking with the arrival of the DV camera. Through analysis of key works, the discussion asks if this turn really means a retreat from the social or whether it is just another way of approaching it. It argues that this embrace of the unexpected represents a decisive break with socialist realism, which in turn has implicit political undertones; but it is a break manifested to differing degrees by documentaries of various different kinds, rather than being exclusive to any one type. Furthermore, these developments are immanent in the earlier stages of the movement, though never fully developed. The reasons for this pervasiveness lie in the cinematic practice to which all members of the New Documentary Movement share a common commitment: xianchang, or shooting live.

This chapter turns to the complicated question of the social and political status of these films. Rather than label them as “oppositional,” “underground,” or “resistance,” the discussion argues that “alternative” understood in a specifically Chinese context is the most appropriate nomination of the movement. It investigates the idea of “alternative” culture to capture the specificity of China's post-1989 culture and explores the New Documentary Movement as part of it. The chapter also examines how alternativeness is manifested in the New Documentary Movement—in its themes, formal properties, spaces of production and viewing, and archiving characteristics.

This chapter considers the representations of transgender and male queerness found in the prolific underground documentary genre, also known as the “New Documentary Movement”. It also explores how the film's reflection on queerness could be seen as parallel to its reflection on realism and how the two embody and foreground each other by focusing on two recent documentary films, Tang Tang and Mei Mei. It then argues that the reflexivity permeating Tang Tang foregrounds the openness of the queer subjectivities it portrays. Moreover, it places the cross-dressing subjects of both films at a time of social transition in order to highlight the ways in which gender-crossing performers negotiate their subjectivity in post-socialist China. Through its reflection on xianchang — an artistic concept and practice rooted in China's post-socialist soil — Tang Tang also writes Chinese postsociality into its experiment with form. Meanwhile, Mei Mei sheds light on other aspects of cross-dressing by drawing attention to formal variations of cross-dressing that are beyond the experience of metropolitan Beijing and are socio-geographically ingrained.

When the mini DV camera was introduced in about 1997, both the New Documentary Movement and its low-cost style received a further boost. The impact of the mini DV was remarkable. First, it changed the mode of filmmaking. The small camera made one-person filmmaking possible. In his chapter, translated for this volume, Wu Wenguang himself celebrates his experience of the DV camera as a personal transformation and even a salvation. This is not because of the technical properties of DV, but because he feels it enables him to break through the barrier between the filmmaker and their subjects, creating a communal experience rather than a hierarchical one. Meanwhile, the alternative appropriation of DV in the People's Republic should alert one to the fact that DV has no single essence, but already means different things in different places according to local circumstances.