Planet in Focus 2020: CoroNation

The most-enticing fact about Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s new documentary, CoroNation, is that it features footage smuggled out of China that provides an uncensored look at the initial days and weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan, China. Over 500 hours of footage, shot by collaborators in China, were provided for the artist living in exile in Berlin, and that alone makes it an invaluable record of our recent, and ongoing, historical moment. The film is a patient and intimate portrait of a society dealing with a pandemic. But rather than merely illuminate the immediate crisis, the film offers a broader portrait of contemporary China and the experience of living through the transformations that have taken place there in the last 20 years.

At turns bracing, and poetic, CoroNation is akin to a film by the great documenter of this moment in Chinese history, Jia Zhangke. Ai’s film often recalls the slow-motion disaster of Jia’s masterpiece, Still Life, set amid the relocations of entire cities and districts in Fengjie caused by the flooding created by Three Gorges Dam project in the mid-2000s. Like that film, CoroNation occasionally leaves one bewildered and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the changes occurring in China. However, if one can resist the urge to view the documentary as simply an exotic and critical look at China’s role on the global stage, one might learn something about how the pandemic has been experienced by everyday people in the world’s largest nation. What the viewer might witness is how the experiences of the Chinese people are very different in some ways and very similar in others to our own experience of late capitalist modernity.

As noted, in ostensibly telling the story of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan last winter, beginning in December 2019, CoroNation is a documentary about recent, and this case still ongoing, history. It is tempting to focus purely on the “exposé” aspect of the narrative, speculating on how Ai Weiwei was able to get the footage out of the country and defy the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censors. While Ai Weiwei is maybe the most famous dissident artist of contemporary Chinese culture, the film is not simply a damning critique of the CCP, but a look at how China has responded in this moment of great crisis. Its observational style suggests that by moving beyond the shock of current events and dystopian fear-mongering, the COVID-19 pandemic might provide an opportunity to witness how human civilizations in this moment deal with a major global crisis, both China specifically, and, by contrast, Western nations. 

But the “CoroNation” the title playfully alludes to is the nation of China, which emerges as the guiding subject of the film. By following a variety of people at different points in the pandemic’s early months, we get to experience both the massive power of the CCP and the way that the traditional cultural values of China have both shaped the response to the crisis, sometimes at the same time. This dual response is perhaps no better exemplified than in the film’s fascinating final sequence, in which people come to pick up the ashes of their family members who died in the pandemic from government officials, the ashes of their loved ones crunched into traditional funeral urns and tied in a red sash of cloth.

The film can be roughly divided into two parts. The first half of the film plays out the beginning of the pandemic, as people start to realize what is happening, Wuhan is locked-down, and doctors attempt to figure out what they are facing in the coronavirus. It plays almost like a science-fiction disaster film, with the details of the pandemic only emerging in bits and pieces as the people themselves search for answers and try to secure their own safety. The film opens with aerial drone footage of Wuhan’s railway station at a standstill, surreal in its scale and emptiness. The film then begins by following a young couple on their drive back into the city of Wuhan through a snowstorm, navigating highway checkpoints where identification and temperature checks must be passed, and through empty restaurants and hotels along the way back to their condo in the city. The storm of wind and snow outside, and the dead fish in their fish tank, are eerie presages of the pandemic storm approaching.

The film offers no on screen titles and no talking heads to explain things. Rather, the footage allows the narratives to unfold with a sense of discovery as the people on screen adjust and adapt to their growing realization of what is taking place. With the hindsight of seven months, we can use our relatively greater knowledge of what happened to place narratives into context. We witness the building of a massive makeshift hospital and the horror of doctors working in them facing a virus they know very little about. Most relatable and yet excruciatingly frustrating is the experiences of a construction worker from a different district, trapped in Wuhan and living in a parking garage while facing a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare. We sympathize with his desire to go home, not knowing when lockdown restrictions will be lifted. When taken together, these individual portraits offer a helpful picture of the larger shape of the pandemic.

The scale of both China’s day-to-day life and the government response to the pandemic is difficult to comprehend from a North American perspective. In the first half of the film, I was occasionally struck by just how big Wuhan is, in terms of just how many buildings and people there are, but also stunned at how quickly the government mobilized to combat the virus. But at the same time, this scale manifests in so many levels of bureaucracy and what seems like an impersonal proceduralism, which shows how the CCP’s desire to maintain control is actually very difficult. When a small geographic district contains more people than all of Canada, it’s not hard to understand how bureaucracy might grow out of control; it isn’t simply a bloated bureaucratic system, but the challenging logistics of governing over a billion people.

Ai Weiwei, despite showing a great affection and concern for his country, does not shy away from criticism either. Though, it is worth noting that the desire to assign authorship of this film solely to Ai ignores the production context of this film, where he acts more as editor than a traditional director. The material he works with was curated from what he was given by the people of China, who I’m certain risk retribution if they were to be discovered to have helped him. Thus, rather than come across as simply a xenophobic or ideologically charged condemnation of China, the critique is embedded into the actual structure of the film. We experience the fear and the confusion of the individuals affected by the measures put in place. Rather than just see China as a monolithic group of people, the film gives faces and voices to its citizens. The film offers plenty of philosophical fodder for contemplating the balance between individual and collective needs, and I appreciated how despite the ultimately critical portrait, it is seen as a genuine problem to be worked out rather than a given. 

In some of the film’s most interesting scenes, we follow a grown son in lockdown with his mother, herself a hardline communist who cannot understand how her son is upset with the government, when, in her mind, they so clearly have handled the pandemic better than what she sees of the West on the news. The contrast between her perception of the West and the advantages the CCP has had in dealing with a crisis and the perspective on China we often see in Western media is something that is rarely portrayed in most Western accounts of China. The mother’s expression of a very particular ideological view of the world draws attention to all the ways that we are all shaped by our assumptions about what is natural and what values are worth protecting at all costs. In China, as everywhere, the pandemic puts the taken-for-granted into relief so that we can actually view it more clearly.

CoroNation, despite coming from one of the most famous critics of the CCP, is more than just coronavirus fear-mongering. It’s an observational, philosophical, and ethnographic portrait of a country facing a crisis. Rather than attempt to come up with a final statement on something that is so clearly not finished, it tries to be there and document without censorship or fear of pleasing any particular party. It captures the strange and science-fictional situation the planet finds itself in, and lets us viewers outside of the country of China see how this massive and unique culture has attempted to deal with the pandemic, for good or ill.

9 out of 10

CoroNation (Germany, 2020)

Directed by Ai Weiwei.