Evidently,
fifteen minutes will not get you very far in today’s China. Guo Lifen (familiarly
known as Fenfen) gained considerable new media-social network notoriety as the
subject of Leslie Tai’s collaborative documentaries, but the reality of her
class and circumstances remained unchanged. Her personal travails will become
grist for public consumption in Tai’s The
Private Life of Fenfen (trailer here), which screens as part of this year’s
Documentary Fortnight at MoMA.
Guo
Lifen has a lot of history with Tai. By giving her editorial control over their
previous film, Tai hoped to avoid issues of exploitation. The divorced Guo also
has considerable history with men that could be considered unambiguously
exploitative. After completing their collaboration My Name is Fenfen and her own Sister
Heaven Sister Earth, Tai gave a camera to record Guo video diary. Three
years later, Guo handed Tai over one hundred hours of tape, declaring her
dreams were now “dead.”
It
is stark stuff, including accounts of family strife, domestic abuse, and an
abortion precipitated by her lowlife fiancé’s drunken attack. Guo recounts it
all matter-of-factly, as if she were already dead on the inside. Frankly, her
testimony is quite spooky, but Tai’s presentation strategy is somewhat
debatable.
Rather
than simply edit it together, she films closed circuit broadcasts of Fenfen’s
diaries, as if it were a legit reality TV program, in the sort of greasy spoons
and hole-in-the-wall shops that cater to migrant workers such as Guo. While it
adds an uncomfortably voyeuristic dynamic to the film (particularly when we
hear some of the viewers’ unkind commentary), it also provides the constant reminder
that this is where Guo came from and this is where she will inevitably return.
