Recently I had to pleasure of stumbling upon an excellent example of what documentary filmmaking can be when I saw Yung Chang's Up the Yangtze. Call me old-fashioned but lately I've been shying away from documentaries because the market seems to have been flooded by poorly conceived, shoddily produced, slapped together videos that simply assert a political point of view, better suited to the Op-Ed pages than a movie theatre. Call me crazy, but when I go to see a movie, I would like to be engaged by characters who are fully fleshed out three-dimensional living breathing animals... people I can care about spending 90-120 minutes with.
Unfortunately, too many so-called documentaries are more like filmed press releases and one has the distinct impression that the filmmakers wrote a paragraph about what the film would say, then grabbed a camera and set out to shoot that paragraph.
Up the Yangtze, by contrast, is a film in which the filmmakers were obviously guided by their subject-matter, not vice versa. The film beautifully captures intimate moments in the life of a family that will be displaced by the rising level of the Yangtze river, a pet project of China's communist regime and a legacy of Mao Tse-tung. Over the course of the film's 90-odd minutes, we really get to know several people whose lives and fortunes rest on the future of this river, which is being forever altered by the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest project of its kind.
Another wonderful thing about the film is the way in which the cinematography is so totally in synch with the emotional content of the picture. The camera seems to empathize with the plight of its subject in almost every frame of this film. The examples are too many to name here.
But essentially, this film is a breath of fresh air and should be viewed by documentarians as a reminder of what their form can yield with painstaking attention to detail and a willingness to follow one's subject wherever the tide may lead.
