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Songs of the Super Girls on the Road to the Golden Age

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by Meghan Horvath
For two short years a televised singing contest called Super Girls took China by storm. Statistics of the show, modelled on American Idol, astound.  An estimated 400 million tuned into the show to watch 80,000 contestants aged 18 – 20 participate. Millions of text votes were cast for the audience’s favourites and fan clubs popped up across China. Among those swept up in this cultural phenomenon was photographer, writer and filmmaker Jian Yi.

By the end of the first season rumours circulated that the Chinese government might ban the show and so Jian decided to pick up his camera before it was too late. Shooting the second season of Super Girls was a window into a society in transition. As someone who has always been interested in gender issues, the negative press surrounding the contestants of the show piqued Jian’s curiosity and motivated him to get to the bottom of what this new generation was really about. What were their attitudes? Their values? Jian says he wants to make films about what he knows, and for him this was mainstream culture in China, something he felt was underrepresented in the media. At the outset of this documentary project he felt confident China’s mainstream culture would reveal something distinctly Chinese.

The culmination of Jian filming around the second season of the show was his first feature length documentary Super Girls! The film, which premiered at the Cambridge International Film Festival this past summer, is many things: a social documentary; an historical record; a visual sociology about gender and mainstream culture in China. For Jian these are the days before the golden era, a time when the state still oppresses but also a time when more doors are opening as a result of more affordable technology and the ability for Chinese citizens to now travel abroad. This generation, who’ve been dubbed ‘the lost generation’ by their own country, have the best chance of fulfilling the process of individuation their parents began in the 1960s. This is part of what makes the contest so popular, Jian claims – Super Girls gave the Chinese people an outlet for expression and created a sense of community. Jian has produced a series of films under the rubric ‘China Dreams’, and Super Girls! is the third film (though the first to be completed) of this series.
Director Jian Yi Director Jian Yi Among the contestants he chose to shadow Jian hoped for the winner. Filming without the permission of the contest administration and thus without a tripod, Jian operated on the fringes and was constantly under threat of being shut down. If it seems absurd that a man with a camera could have blended into the crowds, one only has to imagine the number of people surrounding the television studio of each district, lured by the prospect of potentially glimpsing the next Super Girl. 

Jian originally intended to film the girls on stage but following the lives of the Super Girls off the contest grounds proved more interesting. He felt there was a better chance of capturing a more honest portrait of each girl here, where the stories behind the headlines had the time and space to become known. And so Jian adjusted his focus and changed his tact - in his words, ‘like walking at night’ - eventually abandoning his original pursuit. When asked if anything caught him by surprise during the making of Super Girls!, Jian struggled to name something that came at him out of left field because he constantly assessed and reassessed his objectives, responding to new ideas along the way rather than obstinately holding onto the idea from which he started. Jian’s ability to juggle allowed him to push beyond the superficial and a layered film was the result.

Jian’s patience was rewarded by fantastically spontaneous moments where the contestants behave as if the camera is not there. One of the most striking aspects of the film was the emotional proximity with which Jian got to the contestants. It surprised even him, that the young women so unhesitatingly let him into their world.  Jian attributes this to the generation’s familiarity with the media and speculates it was entirely feasible that the young women sidled up to him because he was a man with a camera, and publicity for them could perhaps translate into more text votes.  But this explanation proffered by Jian dismisses his talent as a documentarian, mainly his patience and desire to uncover the nuances of a (mainstream) world most think they already know. That Jian portrayed something more than stereotypes or caricatures was reaffirmed when one of the girls watched the film and found it so real that she felt she was seeing herself for the very first time.  

The irony is that even though this generation of youth is perhaps the most media savvy -  practically half of the contestants in Super Girls! studied some kind of media related discipline at university - this literacy has not paved an easier road for filmmakers. Jian explained that there is no public funding for independent filmmaking – either you shoot what you want and have it not be shown, or you can receive private funding, but even then what you shoot will have to first pass state censorship. So Super Girls! was truly an ‘underground’ filmmaking endeavour in every sense - from shooting without permission of the contest authorities to self-financing the film. Jian spent 3 months shooting on HDV and another 6 months editing Super Girls!

Stylistically, Jian is a fan of long takes and is known to keep track of the total number of cuts while watching a film.  This style serves him well in Super Girls!  Among the characters of the documentary is a contestant who lives alone with her pet mouse in an apartment rented by her divorced parents.  Outside the television studio, she sells pens to other contestants so they are prepared when confronted with paperwork once inside.  Jian’s camera stays with her as she hawks her merchandise outside until her tough exterior cracks and within a fleeting moment a glimmer of vulnerability is exposed.  There’s a lesbian contestant who hopes her family connections will help her make the final round of the contest.  There’s a girl who has entered the contest with her friend, and another from the country who believes the Super Girls contest could change her destiny.
This idea of destiny is one theme of the film. There’s a sense among the contestants that the contest is a vehicle, which could propel them from the life they’re leading. And there’s a sense that the contest temporarily closes the gap between these young women’s expectations and the somewhat narrow opportunities that Chinese society lays out before them in ordinary times.  One contestant expressed her gratitude for the contest as a platform to showcase her talents.

Super Girls! has screened a few times in China. Was it possible for an audience already familiar with the contest to come away with anything new after watching Jian’s documentary? Surprisingly, yes. The film was a revelation even to its Chinese audience who happened to find its ‘backstage’ scenes extremely funny.  Jian is pleased to be able to hold a mirror up to his own country whose only idea of itself is mediated by the state’s media. However Jian was not sure whether Western audiences would tolerate the film’s 123 minute running time considering the many things he felt were untranslatable including the somewhat complicated structure of the contest itself. But given that one of the themes to have emerged from his examination of mainstream culture was (surprise!) a celebrity culture, there was a lot that felt familiar.  Even Jian marvelled at how China’s mainstream culture was perhaps not so distinctly Chinese after all. 

As it turns out, the rumours proved true. The Chinese government banned Super Girls after the show’s second season. The official reason was that the low-brow contest was diluting Chinese culture, but Jian suspects there is more to the story. One possibility was that the show was a threat – not necessarily because of its popularity, but because this popular show was produced by the decentralised Hunan TV network and not China Central TV. So among the list of what the documentary Super Girls! is, an artefact from a distinct moment in modern Chinese society can also be added.  More recently the Chinese government has banned off-site voting (by SMS, internet or telephone) in all Chinese television shows. So if this policy is not revoked then Super Girls! will be the remnant of a show of this kind.

Based in Beijing, Jian keeps quite busy. With friends he has established ArtiSimple, a studio dedicated to developing film and photography projects with a social purpose.  His next documentary project, tentatively called The New Socialist Climax, will follow Chinese civil servants encouraged to make pilgrimages to the birthplace of the Red Army. Previously Jian has helped Chinese villagers produce documentary films through a EU-China Village Governance Training Programme and is now seeking to begin a similar project with industrial workers. His feature film Bamboo Shoots (Dong Sun) just won the Bronze Zenith Prize in the best world first films competition at the Montreal World Film Festival, and there are a few others in the works. Although Jian is happy experimenting with different mediums, to him documentary has a special appeal because ‘life is a better writer than fiction.’

Would Jian direct his curiosity and camera to other societies in transition? Without hesitation he thought not. But a few beats later he reconsidered this strong first response. “Well when China enters its golden era, yes. But only then I would feel I could go elsewhere.”

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