Today I’m speaking on a very practical topic: “Story and Narrative.” I believe that whether you’re making films or documentaries, you actually need stories.

Some people say: “I don’t need stories to make documentaries, just like films – you can make films without stories too.” Documentaries without stories are typically shot in a very poetic way. Japanese documentary master Tsuchimoto Noriaki once made a film called “Traffic Rules.” When he started filming “Traffic Rules,” everyone thought the title sounded extremely boring. So when he was filming, he thought: How can I shoot this with personality and feeling? So Tsuchimoto broke the rules that everyone thought would make it boring and shot it with a very modern feel. After finishing, his boss was very angry, saying “I asked you to film traffic rules, who told you to film this stuff.” “Traffic Laws” was never broadcast. Almost half a century later, when the lab was cleaning up film reels, they found this long-forgotten film and gave it to Tsuchimoto. He was particularly happy. So when he came to Kunming in 2005 to participate in the Folk Documentary Film Festival, he brought this film. I was particularly surprised when I saw this film – it was particularly beautiful, capturing the feeling of Tokyo very well. What does this illustrate? This shows that you can make films without stories like this. This film is personal, breaks tradition, and has avant-garde significance, because he said: “I don’t want stories”; at the same time, he revolted, he subverted, and he also had a story. His innovation illustrates a basic form that appears in narrative.

I read Professor Zheng Peikai’s book, where he believes the most important elements in filmmaking are: first, plot; second, character: dialogue, thought, image, songs. Actually, looking at it now, I don’t quite agree, because thought is ideological stuff, which belongs to the individual creator and is not controlled by external forces. Unless you follow your boss’s ideology to express something, which is another matter entirely. A story without thought can still be a story. For me, I think there are four elements in a story: time, place, plot, and characters.

I recently watched a domestic blockbuster that was very sensational and apparently had good box office results. When I went to see it with several friends, we were all very shocked that such a film actually lacked basic story and narrative – it’s really problematic. So don’t think that being able to make blockbusters is a great thing. To make films, you first need to understand what a story is – having a story isn’t a simple matter. When something happens, your story needs to have characters, and the plot constructed by these characters’ actions isn’t artificially created characters, but requires the shaping of character personality and destiny to constitute plot. Therefore, the key to any film is: characters, characters, characters!

Characters, time, place, and environment – these four elements are actually four unrelated independent elements, any one

element can form another story. When these four elements come together, how do you make them into a story? That’s

where narrative comes in. What is narrative? From a literal understanding, it’s narrating an event, narrating a story. Narrative is like a thread that strings together time, place, plot, and characters to complete the causal relationships among these four factors – that’s called narrative.

The most basic feeling we get from watching that blockbuster is that there’s no narrative, no narrative ability and basic trained narrative standards. Why do I say this? It seems to have plot, but time and place are vague: they’re time and place constituted by what everyone knows, not time and place revealed through narrative. And its characters are conceptual – any person could play that character, the character lacks complexity, lacks the cause and effect of destiny. When I was in America, teachers told us: when a character enters the scene, you must know what they were doing ten minutes before, they must enter with a purpose. So when I just watched “Cockfighting,” I felt there was no narrative, it was particularly chaotic. Why? Last year when evaluating “Cockfighting,” everyone raised a question: what the director wanted to express through “Cockfighting” was very unclear. At that time, Teacher Ying Qiming made a point that our documentaries need some entertainment elements, and he felt “Cockfighting” had entertainment elements, so he let it through. But I think its narrative is problematic. There’s a very well-made documentary that won the Best Audience Award at a British film festival, titled “Man on Wire.” The tightrope walker in the film is very crazy – he’s determined to walk across America’s World Trade Center. When watching this film, I couldn’t bear to watch several times. Their risky actions had no organizational arrangements, no insurance – they just stretched a steel wire across and walked without safety equipment. To get into the World Trade Center, they constantly investigated. If the steel wire moves even slightly, a person walking on it can’t maintain balance. So they had to pull many lines from the side to steady the steel wire. At that time, there was a team helping him do this. They didn’t sleep all night because there were police on duty at the top. He walked back and forth eight times, and the police stood opposite and even talked to the police – that atmosphere, truly layer upon layer of story progression. When filming, the director also used many important photographs, and when pushing the suspense up, there were original filming materials inserted. However, after the protagonists successfully walked the wire, the team disbanded. When interviewing afterward, the wife appeared, making the audience want to know the story that followed even more. The whole film was like a feature film, layers nested within each other. When you find good elements and good stories, you may not necessarily be able to present a good film to the audience, so narrative is very important. I think when “Cockfighting” was about to have its big meeting, there was no buildup – just a car returning, and when the car returned, you couldn’t see any atmosphere outside. What I couldn’t understand most was that you didn’t give me any explanation of time and place – just saying March 3, 2009, but what was the visual image of that place, what was the atmosphere of that location, how many people went, what impact it had on the city – completely unknown.

I think the importance of narrative lies in: when you have a good story, how do you layer by layer reveal its cause and effect and character relationships to present to the audience. When you don’t have a very good story, but you have very good narrative, it can at least help you accomplish something.

Chen Jinglei once asked me a question in a newspaper: Do you think documentaries are something the masses want to watch? I said: The mass appeal of documentaries is very low because documentaries don’t have much entertainment value. You see CCTV broadcasts documentaries at midnight and claims zero audience. Actually it’s not zero audience – now pirated DVDs also sell CCTV documentaries. I think when making documentaries, constantly reminding yourself about ratings doesn’t necessarily help your work much, because documentaries themselves don’t have much mass appeal. Compared to ratings, what’s more important is finding a good subject and clarifying character relationships. For example, the protagonist in “Cockfighting” is so poor, yet he insists on “cockfighting” – I don’t think this character runs through the entire drama. In the end, this rooster won the fight and got a plaque, but I’m not even clear how this cockfighting was won.

The structure of documentaries is very important. I’ll discuss several typical structures here. Structure participates in the story as a whole, expressing the director’s questioning of the theme through structure. I think a typical example is “Atonement” directed by a British director. It’s a very traditional love story with no particular significance, yet “Atonement’s” theme is completed through its structure. At the beginning, it’s a love story no one takes seriously; as it progresses, the protagonist begins to subvert, and you realize this isn’t a simple love story; then in his imagination, the man and woman meet – this is a beautiful wish, but he subverts his previous story again; when it reaches the end, both the man and woman are dead, and he subverts again – originally there was always an indelible question in his heart, which was that the female protagonist’s sister betrayed this man. His structure directly participated in the plot and the characters’ destiny. This structure completed the four elements of the story, not only achieving the expression of narrative cause-and-effect relationships, but more importantly participating in the creation of the entire story, finally completing a thematic questioning – the questioning of his soul and conscience. Although it’s a feature film, its structure is very worth studying.

There’s a book called “The Foundations of Screenwriting” written by Americans. The whole book talks about how films progress step by step. The book mentioned one point: how do you structure a film? You need to work backwards. After the documentary is completely filmed and you have all the material, you know what this film ultimately wants to express, then you subvert it. For example, I was coming to attend this meeting today, and I finally arrived at this destination. When you’re filming, you need to subvert it: I suddenly woke up this morning and saw that I didn’t sleep well last night, it was already 12 o’clock, I couldn’t make it here in time, so I rushed over hurriedly. A bus happened to come, so I jumped on, but the bus got stuck in traffic. When the bus turned a corner, I saw the subway, so I jumped onto the subway, only to find I was going in the wrong direction. I got off the subway and went back, and when I reached a place, I saw I had to cross an iron fence, so I ran desperately. That is to say, when you want to set what you ultimately want to express, what your story is, what your theme is, everything in front serves the final ending. What does serving the ending mean? It’s setting up obstacles – this is technical.

Including “Red Runway,” I also told Gan Chao at that time, the same road, set up a series of difficulties in front, your

speech, no matter how hateful a person is, you are the director, you need to see something, you need to see their lovable side, otherwise that person just stands there and you have an ideological judgment. I think when filming documentaries, you need to peel a person layer by layer – whether this person is good or bad doesn’t need the director to judge, the audience should judge. I don’t need to watch films with particularly clear ideology. When you show people this stuff, you want them to think for themselves. Kafka once said: What is creation? Creation is a form of prayer. I think this is what documentaries are about. I think once you’ve decided to make documentaries, you need to have a kind of devotion. Kafka also said that when you create something, it doesn’t grow from bottom to top like a tree, but grows outward from the soul. Your characters must first move your own heart – no matter what kind of person, you need to see their difficulties. Even if the female teacher in “Red Runway” is usually harsh to the children, one night she took two children to set off fireworks. She asked the child what he was thinking, and the child said, “I miss my mom.” The child’s head naturally leaned on the teacher’s shoulder, and you’d feel this teacher also has a maternal side. In “Cockfighting,” they filmed that the cockfighting owner’s awards have been there for twenty years without being moved. I don’t understand why the director didn’t shoot a close-up. The director didn’t wholeheartedly express the price the protagonist paid for cockfighting, his difficulties, etc. He just easily skipped over all the details. I think filming documentaries this way is very dangerous. What does this show? The director didn’t see. Documentaries are cruel – no matter how good your theme is, if the director doesn’t see or hear, it’s useless even if the cinematographer sees it. I think when you film documentaries, you need to make yourself very sensitive, very neurotic – you need to see what others haven’t seen first. So Kafka said when engaging in creation, you are the most vulnerable one. You must see first what others haven’t seen.

I just mentioned “Atonement” as one structure. “La Vie en Rose” is also a structure – a parallel dual-line structure. When the old singer reminisces, events happening in old age continue to progress, while the childhood line also moves forward simultaneously. We don’t have such films in China. When I watched it, I felt its direction wasn’t confusing at all. Every time it turned a corner, I somehow followed the turn, and finally I discovered it turned through lyrics, so I think its structure is very beautiful. “Man on Wire” also uses this structure – the tightrope walker reminisces about how he walked the tightrope originally, but when he’s speaking now, it’s very vivid. While speaking, he also hides behind the curtain, feeling like he’s acting and also in present tense. This is a relatively common way for documentaries to handle memories now. While reminiscing, there are visual images behind, so you easily feel it’s a feature film. I think the highest realm of documentaries is to film like feature films, while the highest realm of feature films is to film like documentaries. When I watched “Iron Man” this time, I thought it was filmed very well, and the director was very clever to use black and white film for Wang Jinxi’s past – the documentary feel was particularly strong, and using current people as contrast made the story easy to enter. I think this is a type of structure. “La Vie en Rose” is also like this, switching eras through sung lyrics.

This is the second type of structure. There’s another structure like “Babel” – five lines entering simultaneously, then using one story to tell. We were all dumbfounded watching, and the problem is when five lines enter, the audience isn’t confused. You’re very clear about which line you’re on now, what kind of line you’re watching this story on. Relatively close to it in multi-line structure is “Babel” with four lines structured simultaneously. In the middle of the structure, there’s something supporting them: a prop – a gun. That gun completed the entire story’s narrative framework. Finally, through these four lines, it very sharply pointed out racial issues. I was stunned after watching this film – Hollywood films are sometimes just that powerful. Later when I filmed “My Strong Little Boat,” I used three completely different lines to structure this film, and finally like “Babel,” all three lines converged together. Later, during a competition, all three children walked past each other – they might collide, might get to know each other, might not

know each other. When I structured “Little Boat,” I very much wanted to subconsciously learn this structure. Of course, my work was much simpler. Even so, when explaining to investors, I felt very humble, with a sense of humiliation.

Another successful structure is like the structure in “Crash,” where every fragment is scrambled. For example, it starts with a family, then pulls out five lines of siblings and parents – it’s scattered social elements that finally complete in one story. This structure is used by many films because it gives you massive amounts of information from different social levels. Because story rhythm is getting faster and faster, if you simply complete one story within one story, people aren’t satisfied.

There’s another particularly strong structure called “No Man’s Land,” which concentrates all people in trenches. Regarding war’s cruelty, when you watch war, you can no longer see heroes – it nakedly reveals the irreversible destruction of humanity that war brings. So the process of story and narrative relationship is structure. I think structure particularly tests a director’s intelligence. Structure must be very carefully considered. When you have characters and plot, you need to know how to structure a good film. That is to say, if you have very good structure, even if the plot isn’t great and characters might be thin, this structure will add points for you. Looking at “Little Boat” now, I still think the story is relatively thin. Our purpose was also very clear at the time – to make a main melody film. So we thought about how to complete this film through structure, and structure helped us tremendously. When story and narrative have good structure, the most important thing is to express a character’s destiny, peeling it layer by layer like an onion, revealing the character’s personality and individuality. When you write out a person’s layers, one person’s destiny can connect with another person’s destiny. Everyone can watch “Somers Town” – this film is shot very much like a documentary, the entire film was completed in ten days. The director made a feature film like a documentary, and the grasp of details is very accurate.

So the story has structure, then what? When I read the American book “The Foundations of Screenwriting,” it drew a diagram divided into four sections. The first section is the opening – the most important thing is to first raise the question, directly entering what the story wants to tell. This is the first chapter. He divided the film into 100 minutes, thinking that at 25 minutes you need to highlight this directly. Feature films enter by highlighting the story’s theme when the opening credits appear. When “Babel’s” credits appear, police are already chasing the Moroccan children. The problem emerges – it’s no longer like books say 25 minutes, but 3 minutes into the opening credits. The second and third sections show development process with a wave line, the fourth part is the ending. For example, I finally made it here and greeted everyone saying something – actually this part everyone doesn’t need to watch, once you reach this point the story can end. When he divided these four sections, I thought of the Chinese: beginning, development, transition, conclusion. In the beginning section, you need your main characters to appear, and when they appear you need to set your time and place. Characters must enter with drama. I often flip through this book again before filming each movie. Every time it’s like reading from the beginning. Character backgrounds, character future history, their direction, details in their hands, props they hold, impact on later events – all very detailed. From this book I think about how my later scenes should progress, what my focus should be in them, so it gives me a very good sense of direction.

Narrative rhythm is also very important. When you can’t grasp narrative clearly, you have no rhythm. The “Cockfighting” just mentioned has no rhythm. Cockfighting is very tense – when two roosters face each other, you shouldn’t be nervous. If you’re nervous, you’re not grasping your film language accurately. When he switches, he breaks the entire tense atmosphere. Your rooster doesn’t move, when the rooster goes up it’s still fixed there, watching them fight. When they fight to a certain extent, the roosters engage. Without rhythm, even if you find a good story, have good narrative structure, and know where beginning, development, transition, and conclusion are, if this shot has no rhythm, you’ll fall asleep watching.

Ogawa Shinsuke’s documentaries are different from the documentaries I make myself. When I make documentaries, I insert archive footage about wars into this person’s speech. But Ogawa is a very strict documentary director who doesn’t like using these things. When I edited his material, I sat in the library desperately watching his films. I think good editing should edit out the director’s style – you need to cater to his approach, not follow your own personality. So at that time I desperately watched films Ogawa had edited. When he filmed character interviews, he had to be very familiar with the person before interviewing. He was very cautious about interviewing people, so when he spoke beforehand, he spoke very well. From beginning to end, that camera stayed on the ground without moving, but he spoke so well you’d follow along. Ogawa’s most impressive words to me were: When you’re not prepared, don’t carry your camera out the door, because the other person is using their life to narrate to you.

I interviewed old writers and creators. What I wrote was about an old writer arriving in Shanghai, not recognizing anyone when he got off the train. He asked, “Excuse me, is there someone surnamed Wang here?” The old lady asked, “Which Wang?” Later the old lady said, “You must be the second son,” and only then did that person call out “Mom.” He didn’t even recognize his own mother. We had our camera positioned there, and I knew at that moment you absolutely couldn’t move. The old man turned around, and you just watched his tears flow down. Your camera still stayed there without moving, because the audience wants to see that scene clearly – you’re reminiscing with him, walking together. I interviewed Wang Xuan. Everyone said Wang Xuan was incredibly good, and I said, “Can you tell me a story?” They still couldn’t tell one. They just said he was particularly sincere, particularly kind, always considering others. They just felt this in daily life but couldn’t see it – they didn’t know how to express it. So I asked his niece, “What memories do you have with your uncle from childhood?” She said, “I always remember when I was young, my uncle and I went to see a doctor. My grandmother watched him. My uncle’s health was particularly poor. When we walked to the bus station, he couldn’t walk anymore. Back then it wasn’t like now with seats. We saw a wall behind us, so I was told to put a pillow there, and my uncle leaned against it.” When a person can tell such details, that character becomes vivid. Coming back to my point about editing Ogawa’s documentaries – those farmers he interviewed wouldn’t tell these things. They wouldn’t speak about character destiny as wonderfully, talking endlessly like that. What do you do? I think this is rhythm – it depends on how you grasp it.

I think documentaries are much harder than feature films. Feature films can be designed first, but documentaries can’t. So when it comes to spatial transitions, you need to be very careful. You can’t just follow the story whimsically – if you follow the story, you’ll lose the rhythm. Why is “Red Runway” good? It doesn’t just film life inside the runway, but also life in families behind the runway. This brings life to the sports stadium, and you see a group of very vivid people. There’s a great detail – they filmed a close-up of a little turtle poking its head out of a schoolbag to look around. Then you can see that children’s innocence remains intact, carrying little turtles in the sports stadium. When the turtle falls, you cut to children exercising there. The audience will connect the children with the cute little turtle – that kind of vivid, adorable scene is rhythm. So rhythm isn’t just fast and slow. Fast and slow is speed; rhythm is visual, detailed, and personal. You must grasp this very precisely, so your story becomes very vivid and completes beginning, development, transition, and conclusion.

Later, because I went to film Wang Xuan, if I made a feature film I’d want to make Wang Xuan’s feature film like a documentary, but when I made Wang Xuan’s documentary I wanted to make it like a feature film. I would bring out photographs to return to Wang Xuan’s childhood, and I interviewed his friends. I asked him why Wang Xuan became so successful. He said because Wang Xuan had a happy family. I think people are like this – whatever environment you grow up in shapes your character and mindset. Growing up in that kind of happy, hardworking intellectual family, Wang Xuan emerged as someone different from others. Later I thought when I make feature films, I’d return to the shikumen house, then his father particularly loved singing Peking opera, so I’d have Guan Dongtian play his father. This is what Wang Xuan particularly loved – you’d see this family was particularly cultured, and this cultural inheritance’s contribution to imagination was very comprehensive. I still looked at lots of materials and wrote scripts for both documentary and feature film. When you grasp story rhythm well and set the trajectory of beginning, development, transition, and conclusion, then you find the most beautiful framework. When you create this framework, you must have one consciousness: this framework is unique to my documentary, with no better substitute. This is most important – it can’t be “this works or that works too.” You must find the most unique one. My cinematographer said he doesn’t like filming with mainland directors – shooting from this angle, then that angle. He asked if all Beijing Film Academy graduates film like this. He told me that when filming a person, there’s only one best angle. He said to look at world masterpiece paintings and memorize them. So when filming in Hollywood, key scenes all use single-camera shooting, because multi-camera shooting requires large flat lighting. Only single-camera can make actors look beautiful. So when structuring, you also need to consider this is the unique structure to clearly express this narrative. After your beginning, development, transition, and conclusion, what climax do your characters, time, place, and destiny finally reach – accuracy is most important.

Now for the Q&A session:

Audience: Do you think fast-paced editing in documentaries attracts audiences more?

Peng Xiaolian: Fast or slow doesn’t matter – what matters is whether it suits the film and the story. Whether a film is interesting depends on whether the characters you choose are interesting, whether the story you tell is interesting – it has nothing to do with fast or slow.

Audience: You just said documentaries can be made to look like feature films, and feature films can be made to look like documentaries. However, why do I see that many documentaries’ visual styles differ greatly from feature films’ visual styles?

Peng Xiaolian: For example, people say what’s most important in documentaries is that when comparing documentary stories with sound, sometimes sound is more important than visuals. So this depends on what level the subject matter reaches and what state it’s in for analysis. Generally speaking, visual requirements for documentaries are far less than for feature films, because feature film visuals can be controlled, but documentary visuals cannot be controlled – though you should still try to control them. I remember being shocked when watching “Still Life” – its visuals were particularly good. They used PD-150 for filming, and later for interviews, used a large flat light like usual, maintaining perspective relationships in the frame. If you watch “Man on Wire,” it’s like Hollywood filming – wall colors are very deep and rich, then they add dimension, and the three-dimensional quality emerges from the background and plane. So relying only on your own practical experience isn’t enough – you need to watch more.

Audience: If this film is a feature film with documentary style, should the visuals have a rough quality?

Peng Xiaolian: I don’t think it’s necessary. When I filmed “Little Boat,” some people thought filming migrant workers required shooting in dilapidated places. At that time, our filming environment was very dirty, and because the environment was dirty, the incoming light would also be dirty. I bought about eight meters of transparent fabric and covered the top layer, using all reflected light. The lighting was very delicate, the environment was still shabby, but the migrant workers’ children weren’t afraid of the camera and were still performing. Many people asked, “Is this really a documentary? Did you really go down to film migrant workers’ children?” I said no, this was our constructed set. Later when editing “Red Sun Storm,” we cut some shots just to avoid making it too rough and dirty. I think either don’t film, or if you film, make something with professional standards.

Audience: If documentary films use DV and such equipment, does this have some impact on documentary aesthetics and creation, like

Peng Xiaolian: Technological innovation has changed the documentary market. Originally filming with celluloid couldn’t have so many people sitting below saying “We’re starting to make documentaries now” – it’s because equipment keeps innovating that I think documentaries have become popular.

Audience: What about creatively – are there more limitations in filming direction and content definition than before?

Peng Xiaolian: This is inevitable. You see now massive amounts of equipment entering – I know CCTV bought many, and many people are training on how to use RED ONE. I’m even considering whether to use this for filming in the future – it’s all like this.

Audience: When filming documentaries, for plot stories that happened before, do you think using too many reenactment techniques isn’t good?

Peng Xiaolian: For example, “Man on Wire” also has reenactments. I saw reenactments in “The Master” too, very rough – not careful about props, wearing clothes that feel like frantically writing in some old era, placing an ink bottle. I think you can’t do this. Reenactment must have very good conditions. For example, reenactments in “Man on Wire” – when they saw police coming to one place, they took a cloth and filmed behind it, giving you the feeling of proceeding together with the parties involved. For example, I think what was filmed well in “The Master” was Shen Congwen’s part. I think for reenactment plots, you need to research to a point where you’re very confident about it, and your conditions must allow you to reenact.

Audience: When filming, using painting perspectives to shoot – for videography, are these three-dimensional artworks?

Peng Xiaolian: This doesn’t matter. If you’re so rational when filming, by the time you figure it out, the story has already happened and passed. I think this kind of teaching is what Chinese academies produce – first comes two-dimensional, three-dimensional – it doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you feel it looks good or bad. I think what’s most important is whether it can move you. High technology not serving characters has no meaning at all.