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Vision Beijing

 What does Beijing look like? Or, more exactly, what represents Beijing? As it counts down to the Olympics this August, the physical city is hard at work preparing for its appearance on the international stage. Teams of workers are refurbishing the stone, wood, and paint of the ancient landmarks, while other armies of labourers rapidly assemble steel and glass and futuristic synthetics into a 21st-century skyline. Full-grown trees arrive by caravans of trucks in the night; by dawn their roots have been untrussed and planted in the local soil. Cab drivers listen to English-instruction tapes as they drive a rejuvenated fleet of taxis. Millions of Beijingers—in one way or another—are working on the challenge of how best to reveal themselves to the world. The average Beijinger just wants foreign visitors and Olympic fans to respect what they see.

The VISION BEIJING film project—sponsored by the Information Office of the Beijing Municipal Government, the Beijing Foreign Cultural Exchanges Association, and the Beijing Tourism Association and organized by the Beijing Foreign Cultural Exchanges Center—addresses these facts and the Beijingers’ anticipation. How might the world see Beijing? By recruiting international directors to shoot short films around the city, the Information Office sought an early glimpse at the outside world's perspective, which will then be incorporated, through the distribution of the resulting promotional shorts, into Beijing's own Olympic self-presentation.

The directors who worked on Vision Beijing—Tornatore of Italy; Patrice Leconte of France; Majid Majidi of Iran; Andrew Lau Wai-Keung of Hong Kong; and Daryl Goodrich of Great Britain—were invited to roam the city, with logistical support from the government in their filming. This was a historical first: previously, other outside filmmakers have been required to ask permission, site by site, to shoot on location. Even if they could get clearance to film in Beijing, they were, by definition, limited to their preconceptions.

Still, it was not easy: Beijing, as it is being remade into a modern international capital and global business centre, aided by the inspiration of the 2008 Olympic Games, is a moving target. This can be good news for Olympic visitors, for instance, when they step off their jetways into the new, 10-million-square-foot Terminal Three of the Beijing Capital International Airport. Those of us who got here earlier in the city's growth spurt can remember getting off international flights onto a tarmac bus, due to air-traffic overloading. The new is constantly overtaking the old here—or overtaking what used to be new. Tornatore and Leconte's films both capture the image of the gigantic latticework of the National Stadium (Bird’s Nest) in the middle of assembly; by now, the steel of the Bird's Nest is all in place.

Not many debutantes come with centuries of history piled up under their party dresses. But there are at least four different Beijings, layered on top of one another or standing side by side: there's the historic imperial city, with its gray hutong lanes and ornate ceremonial complexes; the rebuilt 20th-century city, with its mix of monumental and utilitarian structures; the 21st-century boomtown, with luxury malls and a still-sprouting skyline where avant-garde architecture battles it out with nouveau-riche architecture. And finally, within and around it all, there's the immense and crowded city where millions of people go about the business of daily life.

So what you see in Beijing depends on where you look. This is true even of the basic conditions. Face north, toward the mountains, and the sky may be blue; face south, toward the factories of Hebei, and the same sky is white. Baking sun on Tiananmen Square is pleasant warmth at Beihai.

The five directors have all tried, to different extents, to move among the city's layers to create some sort of definitive image. Cinematically speaking, there is no easy shorthand for Beijing. New York is the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge—in less than a second, any audience in the world knows it is seeing pictures of New York. Show the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, and you have Paris. Cristo Redentor, the Ipanema promenade, and a hillside of favelas, and it's Rio de Janeiro.

Part of the problem is that Beijing is large and flat. The twin features at the heart of the city—the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square—are wide and low-slung: difficult to register at a glance. The Great Hall of the People lacks any sort of spire or dome to set it apart. The hutong only look like hutong if the camera is within them, not sweeping over their tops in an establishing shot. The most distinctive tall buildings in the Central Business District are still under construction. And the Great Wall is instantly recognizable, but it's a symbol of China in general, not the city proper. (It's also an hour's drive from the urban centre; then again, the Statue of Liberty is in New Jersey.)

For people in China, the signature building of Beijing is probably the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest at the Temple of Heaven. The round, three-tiered blue roof is an unmistakable and unavoidable emblem, but it's essentially unknown to outsiders. That may be because the building is off on its own in a park, with no other features to share the scene. It may also be because so few foreign cameras have had the chance to film it before now.

If so, the VISION BEIJING directors are making up for lost time. Every one of them except Lau (whose film is almost entirely indoors) includes a shot of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest. The films add up to a sort of audition for the visual hallmarks and World Cultural Heritage List sites of Beijing: Tiananmen Square, Houhai, Beihai Park, the Great Wall, and the Bird's Nest all make multiple appearances. Tornatore and Leconte each at one point try to encompass Beijing's size and complexity by showing the sprawling, intricate model of the city that can be found at the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall.

Smaller motifs repeat themselves, too. Pedicabs appear multiple times, as do bicycles. Taiqi and water calligraphy make several appearances. So do Peking Opera performers, and neighbourhood-watch members with red armbands. The similarities show through more sharply because no two directors had the same idea of what kind of film should portray Beijing in five minutes.

Tornatore’s Reunion is a short movie drama, telling the story of a grown-up set of classmates coming together from their various lives around the city to surprise their old teacher. Majidi, in Colours Fly, took a class of schoolchildren and dispersed them out into the city to launch Olympic-themed balloons. Goodrich, in Belief, constructed a voice-over about China's Olympic ambitions, with scenes of young athletes in training to reinforce the script. And Lau and Leconte abandoned formal narrative altogether: Lau's Colour-Fragrance-Taste Beijing confines its attention to the city's food, shown through an extended flurry of quick cuts, and Leconte's Beijing—A Film Impressionistic works its way wordlessly through an array of images, the monumental layered with and reflecting the commonplace.

Cramming a huge city into a little film is bound to create pressure. Tornatore uses his narrative to jump to as many parts of Beijing as he plausibly can, from a curbside bicycle-repair stand to the higher reaches of the local art world. It's an easily accessible form of storytelling, but Beijing residents can look past the story on second viewing and use Reunion as a memory-teaser geography quiz: at what outdoor cafe in 798 do the characters meet? Which house at the Commune at the Great Wall makes an appearance? Where along the Houhai bar strip is the pedicab parked?

Colours Fly takes a more stylized approach to moving people around the city. For Majidi, the streets are a canvas for his teams of children to flow through, their tracksuits matching their balloons, in colour-coordinated streams of red, yellow, blue, green, and dark purple (Olympic black was too sombre for the balloons).

Goodrich focuses for the most part on solitary athletes: a diver, a gymnast, a boy struggling to shoot a basket on the playground. But the mass scale of the athletic activity comes through at different points: a row of gymnasts turning slowly foot-over-head in sequence; a rattling cloud of countless ping-pong balls, viewed down the net line of a row of tables.

While the other directors were brought in to see Beijing with fresh eyes, Lau was already familiar with the city. But by confining his attention to food, he managed to achieve the same sense of being overwhelmed by the city. The images pop into view and multiply and push each other off the screen: roast ducks, stewed abalone, raw beef, fried rice, fruit, crabs, donuts, xiaolongbao and…what? Donuts? The dishes gleam with Cantonese gloss. A series of movie stars proclaim—in an ecstatic, rapid-fire manner—their love of food.

Leconte's transitions in Beijing—A Film Impressionistic are wordless and loosely associative. The Bird's Nest’s angular forms first appear in close up, then the camera skips further and further back until the rounded form fills the frame, at which point it yields to the rounded form of an umbrella. Some sequences are bluntly, capital-I Impressionistic, with the lens out of focus to create a suggestive, blurry vision of a silk-sash dance (chouwu) or even water lilies, which would be shameless if the director had not been aware of the shamelessness of it. Leconte's film has a wry wit, which is grounded in the real. He plays with the jingly sound and visual rhythm of Beijing’s sea of bicycles, but also makes room for a blurry mass of automobiles. There are at least three million of them, after all. And while Leconte films taiqi in the park along with everyone else, the self-styled Impressionist's park also has unmown weeds, intimating stillness and the natural connection and flow between man and nature, even in a gigantic modern metropolis. The VISION BEIJING films, as a group, are marked by a degree of courtesy toward their subject matter, a delicacy that is not always found in the old and rugged city itself. The directors were set loose on Beijing, but they were still following an invitation. There's a reason that Chinese hosts say “bie keqi,” urging guests to stop acting like guests. Not one of the five films was impolite enough to capture a chai mark on a city building, not even a building that needed it. None caught a public toilet, not even one of the excellent new ones. None saw the city's old, eternal dust, or the way it softens the sunlight. Still, on the back side of an ancient park, there were those ungroomed grasses left to go to seed.

So what am I seeing in these films? Am I just seeing something old? Some things new? Or, am I getting a first glance at the promise of a new generation, a regeneration of wild grass in this ancient city?

Tom Scocca is a freelance writer who resides in Beijing. He is working on a book about the city's Olympic preparations, and he writes about China and modern media for the New York Observer.