ABSTRACT
This chapter is a preliminary analysis towards understanding ‘village videos’ in the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous prefecture of south-eastern Guizhou Province. Put simply, village videos are video-recordings of village or local celebrations, special events, and performances that are taped, edited and produced by locally based semi-professional videographers, and sold on video compact disc (VCD) or digital versatile disc (DVD) at shops and markets in the area. The prevalence of amateur and non-professional video productions in rural China is by now recognized as a developing trend within rural communities, as improvements in audio-visual recording technology coincide with increased disposable incomes for rural households throughout the nation (see, for example, Jaffee 2006 on Zheng Dasheng’s film DV China; Xia and Qin 2007). 1 Since 2004, I have encountered, watched, purchased and discussed these videos with shopkeepers, videographers, village residents, anthropologists, filmmakers and graduate students, and yet the question remains: what are these village videos doing in rural Guizhou? Empirically, who makes them, who purchases them, and why? More conceptually, what does the existence and circulation of local videos in a rural, predominantly ethnic minority region of China suggest about visual culture and the politics of locality 2 in the contemporary Chinese nation?
