2091 – Ascension/登楼叹 (documentary 2021 )

spacetime coordinates: early 21st c China

directed by Chinese-American producer & director Jessica Kingdon

produced by Kira Simon-Kennedy and Nathan Truesdell

music: Dan Deacon

“The film follows the Chinese dream (中国梦) through the social classes, prioritizing productivity and innovation.” (wiki)

According to an opinion piece published on Qiushi (the leading official theoretical journal of the Chinese Communist Party), the Chinese Dream is about “Chinese prosperity, collective effort, socialism, and national glory”.

I am going to jot down a few quick thoughts after a fresh viewing of the new immersive documentary made by Jessica Kingdon – as it is one of the best recent documentaries about China. When one sez “China” one should be very skeptical – since the whole topic is now politically and emotionally charged. There are stakes on all sides from a growing quite dangerous sinophobia, discrimination, and racism against people of Asian origin around the world. There are many points of contention and everything feels to add to the previous biases – including accusations of alleged forced ‘sinicization’ of minorities, crackdowns and labor camps for ethnic Uyghur minority in Xinjiang & minority religious groups (especially Moslems), a crackdown on HK (one country two systems), fears over Taiwan, the continuing debate surrounding zoonotic spillover event at the wet market in Wuhan including the Biden’s administration recent military buildup as a response to both Russia & China. One should never make a sandwich out of these separate issues. The most dangerous at the time I think is the old imperial ‘Unipolar Moment’ US-led saber-rattling. Warmongering is hot at the moment, the old frames don’t help and what we are living is not a new Cold War but more of ‘hot peace times’ (as Zizek put it in long-read about the war in Ukraine) where inflammatory rhetoric covers up a much more mundane & business as usual reality. That said, Zizek himself has been a strong critic of what he used to call in an Al-Jazeera interview the (non-)alternative to the English neoliberalism “Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values”. No matter of you call it that or “State-led capitalism with Confucian Characteristics” (as Chinese themselves sometimes prefer), there is a lot more to be said and I don’t think one can have a monolithic position at this shifting crossroad, especially when China is the only contending world power that still believes in some form of multilateralism & noncynical win-win globalism. In the West, it becomes easier and easier to dismiss or ignore the diversity of the contemporary ideological field in China, including its various currents and countercurrent of orthodox or heterodox economical thought that have shaped and continue to influence its policy issues today.

What is clear is that Chinese media is being too easily labeled nowadays as “state-affiliated” media as if the western media is free of any affiliations or strings attached. In response we should label various western media outlets, Twitter now as Musk-affiliated or Bezos-affiliated (Washington Post) media. I find this a ridiculous hyperbole, an example of shameful double standard, a forgetfulness by Big Tech that is trying to rebrand itself as ‘national asset’ in the New Cold War. Apart from a divergence explained by commercial rivalries, there’s a lack of social media overlap btw Big Tech and local Chinese tech companies and platforms explained by the specifics of China’s ‘Ascension’ since the 1970s libéralisation and gradual opening towards today’s economic modernisation. Chinese innovation is thriving today because of this wise divergence in policy – they learned to exist and develop because the Big Tech was regulated by the Chinese state giving local startups a chance in the face of the Californian tech behemoths. So this disconnect has been partially useful and intentional +yet we’re living a cultural-linguistic & EuroAmerican – centric disconnect from the Sinosphere (the online world of wechat, Douyin, Weibo, Bilibili and more) – insuring a lot of misunderstandings and the usual faux pas. Purging the US. academia & technoscience as a response to current strategic realignment & divestment is not the answer (without considering the “role of firms from core capitalist countries in industrial relocation to and foreign direct investment in the PRC“). Not that social media can ever clarify anything, even while it vows to filter disinformation – it’s just that one can only see the big bubble of the others, not one’s own… There are many post-digital folklore anthropologists and social media sociologists and documentarists changing all this and I am grateful to them. While at official levels (policy, diplomacy, politics) there is this monologue about US-Chinese decoupling, ‘new cold war’ dangers, economic nationalism, the ground level transitioning away from a unipolar (US-centered) world requires both artistic & documentarian skills – since there are preciously few bridges. Otherwise, we will fail miserably, being blind to how interconnected things are or what kind of East-West dialectics is there afoot.

China is understandably wary of any Western involvement in its internal affairs and has sound historical reasons for that, yet it also tries to diversify its own exterior presentation & identity, while being at the same time busy solving its national (internal) unprecedented problems (slowing economy, aging population, ecological green energy transition, cracking down on tech giants, regulating & curbing the real estate boom + the managing its worst COVID lockdown crisis yet). Whether we understand, empathize or not, 21st c China is in a continuous dialogue with the outside world. China knows what it has to face, no matter what skeptics are saying. It also tries to do something nobody ever tried in the history of humanity, to take seriously all these challenges and not be cynical about it or over-confident. China is not trying to lay low and double down, pretend they’re not there and just let a few reap the benefits of “disruption” or Schumpeterian “creative destruction” (like the 2008 Crisis bailouts have demonstrated again and again).

Ascension – tries to fill this gap in many ways. It shows a diversified, socially ebullient world. It’s full of invisible overwork, myriad supply chains and also of fantastic vistas, and yes a billion dreams, wishes, artificial worlds, constant promotional feeds and the so-called “fan economy” or Wanghong economy of internet fame (like one of the Chinese streamer turned personal brand trainers sez in the docu). Ascension – the title has some religious ring to it – yet this is a very secular bootstrapping effort. It is zooming in on various, very difficult & still evolving aspects (from factory work to leisure, from previous external export orientation to internal markets) without transforming them into nefarious dystopian verdicts or snark remarks. Skills and tutorials seem to pervade this offline to online fluidity – people are constantly speaking into phones, recording DIY ads utilizing a mobile phone & selfie stick, pampering their image, making photo shoots, posting or making product placement, or learning how to promote their personal brand and train themselves into possible jobs and life choices while confronted with immense pressures to be materially successful and be a ‘super boss’ (garner fans) not just a boss (a boss without fans). One can see a much more accelerated version of Western neoliberalism, yet one can also see more experimentation – vernacular digitalisation, tryout of everything available. The movie does not comment or deconstruct. It does not ignore the whole breath of experiences and it also does not try to be exhaustive (how could it be in a billion people strong country?). Everything is spaced out, has a unreal feeling and this whole ecosystem of online Chinese celebs – influencers, gamers and consumer culture leadership seminars might be repulsive or feel oddly hyper-consumerist yet it is only part of the story. It all starts with what is lacking in most accounts of China – its migrant worker population (about 130+ million strong) being called by Foxconn recruiters on buses. These workers are the workers that have been most affected by the current lockdown. Workers doing highly repetitive work in the shop floor of the world, considered extinct (or unacceptable) in the West (old Fordist conveyor belts) while also watching soaps on their phones online.

From amazing (both toxic fume and surreal) scenes inside sex-doll factories to simple plastic bottle’s water filling to thousands of bikes, everything gets some form of coverage. It also records the in between talks of workers & managers, talk about ghosts in factories, fengshui swords, fragments and daily bits of “chit-chat”, people tired, nervous, janitors having small naps during work, getting an electric massage and training to become shock workers or bodyguards or butlers to the new well-off China’s rich. There is an intensity that is hard to convey, and there is a sort of exuberance & non-innocence that seems to go along with ‘working hard & party hard’.

I think it is completely wrong and foolish to focus on China mimesis of the West, this is completely the wrong alley for me. There is something else afoot and this documentary proves it. My deepest impressions are somehow turning around learning (the bad and the good, almost like throwing back in the face of the West its own Western superfluous étiquette or witnessing such a dedication for the basics of Western literacy). The very fact is that the people of China of all classes want internationalism, are becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, and are more than ever wooing the West. Are people in the West doing the same? Are they even putting an ounce of effort or interests to see beyond their ‘big noses’? I don’t think so.

What is important here is that it is not just an individual ordinary effort or state -sponsored or party led one – it is almost a communal effort to enjoy the newfound place on the international world & probe, go crazy with the incredible affordances that it’s hard to match – expanding infrastructure is offering (railroads, trains, IT, AR, online AI assisted tech, face recognition, virtual pay systems, QR core everything) water park arena events (simultaneously) with efforts to get better at everything – to learn everything, from science & tech to good manners to simple basic behaviors as useless (?) as smiling exercises or the ‘Western business étiquette hugging’. Let them hug you and hug them back as softly or strongly as they do!

That said – I would have liked more palpable experience of China’s vast new networks of public transport or its actual Research & Development ‘business parks’, incubators – all the state-private technoscientific capabilities (including its space exploration program) or the biomedical advances. There were snippets of subcultural milieus – yet this was indeed explored elsewhere in some detail(thinking of the amazing Shamate that I still haven’t seen). Also would have liked to see more about internal tourism -even its red tourism.

1862- Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer aka Sygnały MMXX aka Signals: A Space Adventure (1970, DDR – Poland)

spacetime coordinates: sometimes in the 21th century

Polish poster version which as usual looks just fabulous

directed by: Gottfried Kolditz 

Trivia: One interesting fact is that the celebrated actor Romanian Iurie Darie plays the role of Commander (could not believe my eyes!). S The captain of the ship Laika was played by Piotr Pawlowski. Another characteristic of these movies was their diverse cast – in fact the cast was supposed to reflect a similarly diverse future as well as the realities on board the Interkosmos Soviet space program. So, Polish, East German, Romanian, Serbian and one Egyptian actress Soheir El Morshedy are part of the cast of this SF.

Here is some information about the Subharchord, an early electronic sound generator made in East Germany by Gerhard Steinke and used in TV shows, movie soundtracks etc for its futuristic, experimental feel.

And here a cool slide presentation about SF fandom in the GDR with lots of details, about authors, covers SF clubs and SF zine publishing stats.

The movies is generally criticized for its lack of philosophic vacuity or for lack of ideas in comparison with its much more celebrated predecessor 2001 directed by Kubrick (that in its turn got inspiration from Ikarie XB-1 directed by Czechoslovak Jindřich Polák). A strange signal from space arrives and Research Station Ikaros supposed to search for alien life forms, goes mysteriously silent around Jupiter. One strange characteristic is the general non-involvement in matters SF of either the film directors or script writers. There was a gap btw current SF writing in East and these movies, a thing that also sounds familiar with today’s situation when most of the new, exciting and interesting SF voices (with the notable exception of Liu Cixin or Jeff VanderMeer do not manage to see movie adaptations made from their literary oeuvres). For film directors it seems it was mainly just a chance tryout or even something dictated politically, although they had quite a free hand. Another characteristic was that gender equality was actively promoted and women scientists and pilots were treated on equal terms as the men. Architects in contrast, or set designers were much more enthusiastic and many of them probably, we might suppose SF fans that finally found an opportunity to exercise their talents, shape some alien planetary surfaces or spaceship designs.

logo of the Soviet Interkosmos which allow various member states of the Eastern bloc to send their cosmonauts to space

imdb

1861 – Utopia in Babelsberg – Science Fiction from the DDR (2021 documentary by DEFA)

timespace coordinates: somewhere in the East Germany 1960s 1970s 1980s

Somehow I cannot embed the link so here it is (sadly only in German! and only available till 11.05.2022 ∙ 23:59). Many thanks to Julia Linda Schulze for catching on with this documentary and keeping us in the loop with it!

//This is, without question, one of the best documentaries I have seen about the context, ideals and cinematography surrounding East bloc, ex-Socialist SF. Maybe this is again a demonstration as why it is such a niche thing and why most of the older SF movies do not getting enough of an exposure and why it is easy to get stuck with images of mostly US, English-language movies from the same period (mainly space-age 1960s and 1970s). There is lots of interviewed researchers including film directors, special effects contributors, script writers, set designers, costume makers as well as SF historians, SF writers, art curators etc from current Germany that dwell on the retro-futuristic, the ideological engagements of the DDR period and the general openness towards a better and definitely more Internationalist and Pacifist, non-militarist future. The usual triumphalist scientist vision of unlimited growth and untrammeled progress that hounded so much of the Soviet planning is not really prominent, there is more questions and warnings as well as usual problems carried along in space. A few ideas first of what struck me when watching it. If you want to know more and see a few screen captures I made, here’s my take on it with the TW thread like rabbit hole into various related directions.//

Cosmonaut in the front is played by legendary Serbian actor Gojko Mitic that is known as the East German Winnetou in the Karl May Easterns (Ostern), as well as for his cosmonaut in 1970 DEFA studios Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer (Signals: A Space Adventure):

👇
Utopia in Babelsberg – Science Fiction aus der DDR / #sciencefiction #movies of #EastGermany

imho probably the most lovely #documentary dedicated to Socialist #SF yethttps://t.co/7h2X4vNRrw

many many thx to @xxxschuellexxx #studiobabelsberg #DDR #retrofuture #75yearsDEFA

— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) May 19, 2021

1. Although there is a lot of aesthetic appetite for the retro futuristic Former East, its communist monumental art, brutalism and mosaics, there are very few detailed popular accounts about how pop cult was the future or space exploration during the Cold War. In retrospect, we are left with an openly nostalgic (Ostalgie – how it is called somehow disparagingly in Germany) feeling, as well as a lot of, I guess, normal misunderstandings about a period mostly labeled as a broken dystopia, a period of cultural creative and artistic censorship. In the eyes of the aggressively individualistic and ‘free speech’, a transgressive present, it all seems uber-controlled, stiffing, with education and history suffering from propaganda, party and state- induced inaccuracies and biases. It is really to fixate on Stasi terror Cold War or ’empty idealism’ since there really existed a repressive state surveillance, human rights abuses etc These of course existed and nobody needs to deny them. Cringe is ok, even ridiculing, but then nihilism and cynicism are at the order at the day every day. It is harder and harder to entertain any kind of ideals, other than ‘futurism’ or singularity as dictated corporate leaders (Elon Musk or Bezos entrepreneur ‘genius’ types) CEOs and their overbearing visions of how the future should be shaped and in who’s image. Promethean – ‘besting and bending nature’ to our will is clearly not the way, yet common will and reason must still have to weigh in if we are to somehow mitigate what mostly Western ‘growth’ has already done to the planet. Thus, under critical and trying times, it is becomes hard to acknowledge there was a playful side, a dreamy side and one that considered cooperation and pacifism as the precondition for space exploration, or avoiding the worst of the worst here on Earth. Visions of the East bloc Utopia are not a bloc, and are naive in any way, they are informed by a certain scientifically-informed outlook, of changing emotions and hopes in regard to the progressive fragility of modern human civilization as a whole, at a particular juncture, a difficult turning point characterized by that very modern separation of the ‘space of experience’ from the ‘horizon of expectation’ (highlighted in the work of German historian of Enlightenment and Modernity Reinhart Koselleck, especially his Futures Past). Our whole collective experience as an entire species, one might say of humanity as a whole, has not prepared us for what is around the corner, the existential risks around the next bend. This might mean unprecedented space exploration, material improvements, a more egalitarian space living, unusual and unsuspected medical & technological amenities, as well as the incredible and unprecedented material and ecological threats, that none of our ancestors experiences or current experiences can prep us for what’s coming. These split, the split between the lived and accumulated experience of previous generation and what lies ahead was particularly prominent in the XX East bloc, ex-Socialist, ex-Communist -call them what u want countries and political systems. This dissociation of the future from both present and the past – has, I think also characterized and formed these anxieties and hopes that animate and infuse these East German movies.
2. While the above cannot be ruled out, there is the exactly opposite feeling that experience, however slight and remote, back here on earth, can somehow introduce us to somehow that is beyond immediate reach, transforming us here on earth trough mutual communal play. That we, as communal playful primates can practice and the enjoy is essential in a period of tremendous technological & scientific changes. This happens whenever we have to face the future together. Yes technological and scientific overdrive – was popular in Soviet east, heavy ‘Taylorist’ industrialization started with Lenin, Chernobyl events immediately followed suit, catching up with the West and war against nature made sure the collapse came earlier than planned, but ecological and environmental (as well as what we would call X-Risk) thinking was also making strides. Especially during the long 1980s, the last gasp of those divergent regimes was reworked and visible in SF bookd amd movies. Some Socialist SF movies already started showing the dirty side of things, moving away from the totalizing ‘Star Trek’ futures, acknowledging there is pollution, there’s a visible tear & wear of progress and technological betterment, and the fact that the post-apocalyptic times or xenoplanetary worlds might be quite un-heroic, with ego-maniacal rulers, neo colobialism, and various forms of slavery, racism and sexism still very much alive. Even as a space faring civilisation you still had to recharge a spaceship’s hyperdrive from (sic!) – proto-technological remains such as a pair or phosphorus smeared matchsticks (like in Soviet Kin-Dza-Dza 1986). This planetary future was to be experienced, not just dreamed or read about in SF books, and one that cannot be faced as nations nor as corporate entities, not even as people or as a single species, nor race, gender, sex, origin and birth – should be made a priority. This universalist call it what u want – program, grand plan, vision, dream, etc has been a motor for a lot of very unlikely cosmic visions, from the Pioneer playgrounds, school visits, children’s books, TV programs etc. This was a practice foremost – of imaginary exercises in schools, during classes, in kindergartens, when one had to write and think in terms of the year 2000, write an essay about what one would do or one’s children would do in that incoming future! Everything was suffused (at certain periods more than others for sure) with the livable qualities of this kind of starry eye program, the idea that you can participate via present into a future. That you or your group of school friends are some small part of something much more grandiose that makes even the usually drab, scarcity prone and usually defective Socialist present livable. It was almost the runaway- dreaming of the weirdo Russian cosmists (Tsyolkovsky, Fyodorov etc) and shameless avantgarde lofty ideals but turned into something more humble, more terrestrial, (DIT) DoItTogether in a way that was not deffered (no waiting!), but constantly living it and experiencing it in the Now. There is a lot of nostalgia industry nowadays, although noirish 1940 nostalgia adds a different layering to – and makes retrowave cyberpunk post-Marxist itself divergent, diverging further more from a complacent belief in unlimited progress as such. Marvel is peddling tons of nostalgia, just thinking about WW84 or Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, yet calls about “retrofuturism” obscure the fact that what we are properly speaking about is not a nostalgia about something gone, something used up, but for the future – of valuing not just what was or is, but what could have been; those unrealized (maybe even more and more unachievable at the present moment) potentialities that coexist and suffuse what has happened or happening. What they lacked in action, plotline or even cerebrality, or the usual Kaboom competitive strife & big Star Wars fireworks, these Eastern SF flicks provided a vague, general background, a substrate on which a programmatically (much too rosy &) hopeful, universalist (in spite of everything – colonialism, imperialism, racism, instrumental reason, carbon ideology, patriarchy etc) belief that one can skip exotic bananas (as one of the SF writers in the movie reminisces), in order to entertain the possibility of contributing to exoplanetary adventures. At the same time, this strain of SF was not good at dealing with the past, especially the East German past during the WWII, or the way a recent past as much as an older past still lingers or may affect present outcomes and futural imaginings. Still, what Utopia in Babelsberg Studios manages to evaluate or value is that is is possible to approach such imaginings without fetishizing them. We are mostly thinking about Hollywood as the preeminent dream machine, even now in the rise of China Hollywoods seem to bend and become reinvested in the Chinese Dream. This makes me(and probably others) curious, since, like Frankfurter School cultural pessimism always maintained, Hollywood is too much real and not very much dreaming. It was never about dreaming, but about repeatedly selling the same waking nightmares or recycled capitalist tropes as realities in the form of dreams.