ABSTRACT
As the cancellation of the Beijing Independent Film Festival in 2014 shows, critical independent filmmaking is not welcome in the People’s Republic of China. In contrast, international festivals crave for voices of dissent coming from China. The independent filmmaker’s image as a bad element at home and a celebrated critical mind or even dissident abroad thus are linked by their shared dependency on their outsider status. This chapter seeks to gain insights into the nature of this outsider position by drawing inspiration from three different meanings of jianghu ke 江湖客, the “guest of the rivers and lakes”: first, in classical poetry, a jianghu ke is a literati exile, by choice or by force; second, a jianghu ke is a member of a social class at the bottom of society, the youmin 游民 (floating population), defined by a lack of social status and often a fixed place of residence; third, in youxia 游侠/wuxia 武侠 fiction, a jianghu ke can be a xiake 侠客, a self-proclaimed avenger of injustice unredeemed or even committed by official authority. While the second meaning primarily relates to the subject matter of much of Chinese independent film, the first and third meanings are used to reconceptualize the filmmakers' position towards the spheres of the political, economic, and social mainstream as well as towards the subjects of their work. Through the implementation of the polysemic notion of jianghu, a fresh look is cast at the independent filmmakers’ social and aesthetic agency and the multifarious interactions between them.
