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Making Bored in Heaven: A Film about

Ritual Sensation
CORA DEAN and KENNETH DEAN

This essay discusses the making of the documentary film Bored in Heaven: A Film about Ritual Sensation (2010). We
first discuss our theoretical framework, then following the content and organization of the film, we provide historical
and ethnographic context on the return of the gods to Southeast China over the past few decades. Throughout the
essay, we discuss how the film was made in order to enter into and respond to realms of ritual sensation within an
overall, overwhelming ritual event, collectively performed by villagers in this part of China. Different sections reflect
on camera angles, length of shots, montage, narration, rhythm and breathing, overstimulation and spectacle,
alternative temporality, shamanic possession, and cinematic form. The conclusion discusses key themes of the flow
of affect within communal self-expression and the future of local ritual. [Daoist rites, processions, ritual sensation,
spirit possession]

Introduction practice of archiving was taking on a new dimension.

Their research had already veered into new technolo-

B
ored in Heaven: A Film about Ritual Sensation
(2010)1 follows New Year celebrations in Putian,
Fujian, Southeast China. An experiential project
based on over 20 years of research by Kenneth Dean
and Zheng Zhenman, this film illustrates the growing
intensity of local traditions, as rural villages and their
temples transition into a new century. Villages in this
part of China are undergoing radical transformations.
As land that was once public and agricultural is rebuilt
and changes hands, the intricate temple system has
responded. During the Cultural Revolution, temples
were torn down—now they are being built up into ritual
alliances. The film brings the viewer into the midst of
vibrant performances of local power, massive commu-
nity processions, elaborate Daoist rituals, and trance
dances by spirit mediums, all performing parts of the
overall ritual in honor of the gods.
The film took three years to make and went through
many incarnations and different voices.2 Kenneth Dean
and Zheng Zhenman’s research in Putian, China, has led
to the documentation of ritual activities in hundreds of
villages, the gathering and analysis of thousands of
village temple records dating back centuries, plus much
academic writing (Dean and Zheng 2010). However,
transitioning to a new recording device meant that the
gies, for example, using GIS (Geographic Information
Systems) and remote sensing technologies to build up a
three-dimensional (3-D) mapping project of procession
routes and irrigation systems that led to new under-
standings of the local development of Daoism and spirit
possession in Southeast China and the spread of these
ritual traditions across Southeast Asia. Through film, it
was possible to draw all of these different aspects of the
archival process together to document strong, socially
conscious local ritual traditions that predate contempo-
rary global capitalist economic structures, and which
are quite capable of negotiating the forces of modernity
in the contemporary era. A temple system dating back
hundreds of years that provides scholarships, builds
roads, and cares for the elderly and young children thus
became the focus of our film.
Footage was filmed over three weeks during the
Lantern Festival following Chinese New Year in 2007.
We had to be constantly on the move to try to cover
different scales of activity in different locales across the
region. During the shooting of the film, the film crew
stayed at Prof. Zheng Zhenman’s home, in a village in
the Putian area (featured several times in the film). We
had met many of the Daoist ritual specialists who
appear in the film and some of the mediums before, so

Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 30, Issue 1, pp. 50–61, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458. © 2014 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12030.

they were familiar with our research. Temple committee
members were welcoming, and allowed us to film and
interview mediums, because they were used to our visits
and knew of our long-term research in the area. Prof.
Zheng is completely aware of the dates and places over
Chinese New Year’s Lantern Festival in which different
villages were holding their celebrations, making it pos-
sible for us to film a wide range of processions, Daoist
rites, and spirit possession sessions.
We were only one of scores of people using differ-
ent recording devices to film or photograph these
events. Such devices are now as ubiquitous as cell
phones. As we note in the film, most of these images are
circulated locally, among friends and family, via social
media and on DVDs stored by the temples as records of
their events (they often hire professional cameramen to
record festivals). Our desire to broaden the distribution
of these images grows from our sense of the importance
of these practices as an alternative to typical images of
Chinese modernization, rapid urbanization, environ-
mental and labor conflict, etc.
The film unfolds the different layers or spheres of
the ritual event, from the vast processions around the
villages, to the possessed spirit mediums and opera
singers onstage, to the Daoist ritual masters inside the
temple at the center of the entire ritual. These are
concentric circles of activity that fold into one another,
and then exfoliate outward, all within a continuous
rhythmic soundscape. To achieve this, we drew inspira-
tion from several experimental filmmakers.
In Raúl Ruiz’s (1995) essay “For a Shamanic
Cinema,” he writes about painter Shih-T’ao’s “Six Pro-
cesses”: ways to deal with the visual world. He describes
six ways to approach a painting. “The sixth is known as
vertigo. We enter the painting. The multiplicity of
events becomes an organic whole to which we belong in
body and gaze.” For Ruiz, “Shamanic cinema implies a
constant practice of both attention and detachment, an
ability to enter into the act of filming and return an
instant afterward to passive contemplation.” Accord-
ingly, within each chapter of our film, we set up a
rhythm of intensification followed by moments of rest,
allowing the audience to regroup and contemplate the
images before being swept up in the next event.
It is easy to engage viewers by telling individual
stories about individual people; however, for the pur-
poses of a film about communal expression—multiple
Cora Dean is a writer living in Montreal. Her recently published collection of poetry is entitled Shred (Les Èditions L’Hameçon,
2013). Kenneth Dean is a professor in the East Asian Studies Department of McGill University. His publications include Ritual
Alliances of the Putian Plains (with Zheng Zhengman, 2 volumes; Brill: Leiden, 2010).
Bored in Heaven DEAN AND DEAN 51
people coming together to express a greater idea—a
kaleidoscopic approach was necessary. In her 1946
essay “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film,”
Maya Deren writes,
In an anagram all the elements exist in a simulta-
neous relationship. Consequently, within it, nothing
is first and nothing is last; nothing is future and
nothing is past; nothing is old and nothing is new.
. . . Each element of an anagram is so related to the
whole that no one of them may be changed without
affecting its series and so affecting the whole. And
conversely the whole is so related to every part that
whether one reads horizontally, vertically, diago-
nally or even in reverse, the logic of the whole is
not disrupted, but remains intact.3
Another source of inspiration was the brilliant film
Sans Soleil, in which Chris Marker (1983) attempts to
deal with “different concepts of time,” meditating on the
relationship between memory and its recording tech-
nologies. “I remember the month of January in Tokyo,
or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month
of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves
for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how
people remember things, [people] who don’t film, don’t
photograph, don’t tape” (Chris Marker 1983, Sans
Soleil). The ritual-events of the Putian plains bring out
different modes of time and embodiment. Many are
shown in this film: annual seasonal cycles of the pro-
cession; Daoist rites of reversal of time and return to the
undifferentiated Dao; and spirit possession of mediums
by the gods that break the normal flow of time and
bring an outside into the body of the medium at a level
deeper than any interiority. Look into the faces and
images of the mediums in trance shown in the film.
These are “time-images” of alternative temporalities
(Deleuze 1989). Chris Marker described Sans Soleil as an
essay about time and memory. Our film is arranged as
an essay that expresses an event that while constrained
by time stands outside of linear history—an event
repeated over centuries. As Gilles Deleuze put it, “this is
the apparent paradox of rituals, they repeat an
unrepeatable” (1994:2, translation modified).
(Figures 1–4).
We used entirely ambient sound or music recording
in situ throughout the film—these develop what we call
52 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 30 Number 1 Spring 2014
FIGURE 1. Child medium possessed by the God of Theater.
the “ritual soundscape” in the film. We note the impor-
tant role of all-female drum and cymbal troupes in
shaping the rhythm of the soundscape during proces-
sions, but within the temples, it is the aggressive
drumming, pounding of gongs, and chanting of invo-
FIGURE 2. Statue of the God of Theater.
FIGURE 3. Old medium possessed by the God of Theater.
FIGURE 4. Medium in flames.
cations to the gods by male troupes that dominate.
Color, especially red colors, saturates the film. Every-
where the final word goes to the firecrackers and fire-
works exploding on the ground and in the air. In an
effort to provide some calm and counterbalance, we use
a continuous narrative in a fairly soothing voice to try
to contain the overstimulation of the imagery—to keep
the viewer and listener from too much sensory overload.
This is a delicate balance, and each viewer will form his
or her own opinion of the results.
There is no doubt that the film brings us into a
world of highly charged male energy, as seen in the
drumming, the chanting, the bonfires, and the feats of
imperviousness to pain of the spirit mediums. This
aspect of Yang energy is associated with the first moon
of the first month of the New Year and is balanced in the
lunar calendar by the Yin energy of the Feast of
the Universal Deliverance of the Hungry Ghosts held at
the full moon of the seventh month across the Putian
plain. By its nature, and because it is still often subject
to government suppression, these rites are far less spec-
tacular in Putian (but see the documentation on these
rituals in Taiwan and Penang, Malaysia, and elsewhere
in Southeast Asia).
But beyond wanting our audience to be absorbed by
the film, we also wanted the information presented to be
digestible. We moved to a script based on three
overarching themes—festivals, ritual, and modernity—
and divided into six subsections or chapters—Chinese
New Year, the Theater God’s story, processions, Daoist
rites, spirit mediums, and the ritual—each elaborated
below.
Key Themes
The film explores themes related to festivals, ritual, and
modernity. The very first scenes present these three key

thematic statements in script over images of exploding
fireworks during Chinese New Year celebrations.
Festivals are held across Putian to celebrate 1,200
gods at New Year’s. Everyone in village communi-
ties has a role to play.
The collective participation and generalized
performativity of the ritual events we filmed in Putian
make these truly communal productions. These commu-
nities are performing themselves through collective
rituals. The incredible cultural productivity of the region
is expressed through the invention of so many deities,
each with its own story and powers. Dean (1998)
sketched out a theory of the historically transforming
syncretic force field of ritual events and discussed how
this has resulted in complex festivals containing mul-
tiple liturgical frameworks. Extraordinarily, these
frameworks do not generate contradictions, but coexist
in a space of doubles and transformations. This is rather
like a dream, or the workings of a positive unconscious
free from taboos on contradiction. We were interested as
well in the different ways in which individual partici-
pants in these events are pulled toward multiple nodes
of attraction (distinct points of view upon the entire
ritual)—and how to film this disjunctive experience.
Since there can be no overall perspective on the event as
a whole, one has to be imagined—this is the perspective
of the gods who preside over the ritual as a whole (or to
whom the rites are addressed). Such a god’s-eye per-
spective provides a sense of order emerging from the
chaos of the charged ritual field.
In energetic rituals, the forces of the free market
and the power of the state are negotiated into a
celebration of local power.
In Ritual Matters, Dean and Lamarre (2003)
discuss what makes these rituals unique—they are not
staged performances of “local culture” transformed by
state control and the forces of a market into a tourist
commodity. Instead, the state is absorbed into the
ritual (as seen by the police presence in the film—
present but hesitant and unsure of their role, as well
as the ways in which party leaders are absorbed into
the temple management committees after they retire),
and capital is temporarily diverted into the celebra-
tions of local community, away from its usual
deterritorializing flows and effects of undercutting
social and communal values. One could argue that the
current efflorescence of ritual may only be happening
because of the rapid rise of local per capita income
Bored in Heaven DEAN AND DEAN 53
and the tremendous success of many Putian business-
men across China and abroad. But for the moment,
much of the accumulated capital excess is being chan-
neled into communal celebrations. In this way, the
wealthy can demonstrate their status and perhaps
atone for their exceptional success.
Ritual excess mimics, transforms, and reworks the
excesses of global capitalism. Local communities in
Southeast China are brewing a new world.
The specific ways in which ritual events negotiate
the forces of modernity include mimicry (mimetic play)
as seen in the burning of “spirit” money, the sacrifice of
excess wealth in fireworks and feasting, the costly pro-
duction of massive festivals, and the collective partici-
pation of the community in them.4 Daoist rituals mimic
court audiences. Spirit mediums act (in stylized ways) as
the gods who have possessed them, stretching the limits
of mimicry itself. These ritual events generate worlds of
experience as powerful as those that are produced
within capitalism’s phantasmal worlds of advertising
and its mediated virtual worlds.
Chinese New Year
We decided that the film should start with some
contextualizing images of the canal systems to situate
the ethnographic practices. Thus, after the opening
statements/images, the first section of the film shows
Putian from the air, and we see a proliferation of irri-
gation canals across the coastal alluvial plain. We move
to a 3-D model of the plain to highlight this point,
showing the links between the villages and the irriga-
tion system that connects them all together. Several
establishing shots show both the surrounding moun-
tains and the ancient breakwater dams along the rivers
that feed into the irrigation system. Some historical
information is provided in the voice-over narrative—
this is an irrigated plain, completely reclaimed from the
sea by over a thousand years of human labor. We show
some of the canals and the temples situated alongside
them. The important role of the temples in local life has
a long history in this region of China. We explain that
the temples were the centers for the management of an
intricate irrigation system that provided the basis for the
local rice fields and vegetable gardens. The temples had
to develop a system of cooperation and mutual support
to maintain the irrigation system, which was easily
disrupted by flooding, typhoons, silting in of canals, or
poaching of water. The temples had to develop their
own system of control and punishments to keep
54 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 30 Number 1 Spring 2014
everyone in the area alive. This led to the creation from
1500 onward of 150 ritual alliances between groups of
villages gathered along stretches of the irrigation
system, all across the irrigated plain. These ritual alli-
ances were based in higher-order temples that cel-
ebrated great ritual processions and feasts in honor of
the local gods. All this is briefly mentioned and illus-
trated by showing a series of images of processions
through irrigated rice paddies and vegetable plots.
Next, the film presents images of polluted and
clogged irrigation canals, leading to questions about the
role of the temples in contemporary Putian, China. If the
temples no longer manage irrigation, what is their role
in a changing China? We show scenes of young people
gathering outside a temple and others worshipping the
gods inside. We state that “young people have a new
relation to Daoism and to the local gods.” We note that
all these kinds of local communal ritual events were
forbidden during the Cultural Revolution. As late as the
mid-1980s, Daoist priests were still getting arrested,
spirit mediums were dragged off to prison, and huge
confrontations took place between crowds of people
who gathered to defend and rebuild their temples (Dean
1993). Over the next ten years of constant struggle and
negotiation, “traditional” religion was re-created or
reinvented in Putian: one can now find everything from
household cults to neighborhood cults to ritual alliances
of higher-order processions that last for days, involve
60 or 70 villages, and include extraordinary types of
performances in ritual opera. In some areas, ritual opera
is within walking distance during 250 days out of the
year. The collective ritual performances of the villages
of the Putian area during Chinese New Year show us
many of the ways in which local people, young and old,
enthusiastically celebrate their gods and local culture.
The incredible performativity of the local culture is tied
to the growing power of the temple village alliances,
which have formed a “second government” in this part
of China (Dean and Zheng 2010).
This point is only arrived at gradually in the film
through building up multiple series of shots of proces-
sions of many different scales, involving more and
more people. Different kinds of processions, official
and religious, are contrasted. We show how the vil-
lages have become the battleground of the forces of
modernity, with many destroyed to make way for
urban expansion, high-speed railway lines, and indus-
trial zones. Temples are often the last building left
standing in the ruins of the bulldozed villages, as pro-
tracted negotiations are held to discuss compensation
or to find a location to move the temple. As the nar-
rator puts it, “Even the Communist Party does not dare
ignore these centers of village community power and
their links to the powers of the cosmos.” Further scenes
show processions moving through piles of rubble and
temples lined up all in a row next to high-rise apart-
ments. The joke is told that when Mao Zedong was on
earth, all the gods were frightened and ran to heaven.
Now that Mao has gone to heaven, the gods have come
hurrying back to earth.
The Story of the Theater God
The story of the Theater God is told in a ritual perfor-
mance by puppeteers. The marionette god descends to
earth because he is utterly bored by all the bureaucracy
in heaven. Once on earth, he parties late and drinks too
much: he is forbidden to return to heaven. This play,
embedded within the film, teaches us that we all have
our parts to play and that we always have a choice: to
delight in the performance or to merely go through the
paces.
Subtle animation of the God of Theater’s temple
mural brings the story to life in unexpected ways. We
used simple, desktop animation techniques to bring out
the pure and iconic aspects of the childlike sketches—
while also working in some suggestive, slightly perverse
elements. Like these animations, the worlds of ritual
sensation are also dreamlike visions. In Ruiz’s words, “I
am interested in films which, wherever they occur, are
in some sense unique. Handmade, homemade,
craftsmanlike.”5 Although we were shooting in HD, our
editor, Karen Vanderborght, was very interested in
experimenting with a handheld video esthetic. This
worked perfectly within the framework of this film and
contrasts with the glossy overproduced tendencies of
many TV documentaries. When you are running in the
street with the god’s sedan chair carriers, her camerawork
makes you feel as if you were running as well.
In this film, we used a rapid succession of short
takes, edited to highlight movements from different
directions toward or away from the camera in succes-
sive shots, in order to communicate the frenetic pace
and push and pull of centers of attraction in the ritual
field. Some longer establishing shots are used as well.
But by contrast to the more contemplative long shots of
much contemporary ethnographic film, including the
wonderfully sustained, paradoxical, and rich shots in
J.P. Sniadecki’s film Demolition (2010), our film moves
the viewer at a rapid pace. Partly, this is an effect of the
continuous level of activity within these rituals, but it is
also a conscious decision on our part to highlight this
effect. The film, at moments, picks up a pace so fast that
it might be called a kaleidoscopic whirlwind. Instead of

using a traditional, psychological plot to engage our
international audience, we attempted to communicate a
communal experience, not the individual experiences of
particular participants in the festivals. We sought
to portray waves of transindividual movements of
affect—intensity and excitement—across crowds of
participants and onlookers.6
Despite the wrenching effects of rapid urbaniza-
tion pushed by a powerful state apparatus, the people
in Bored in Heaven dance and celebrate and experi-
ence joy and pleasure in one another. This experience
is easily understood, and it leaps across boundaries of
time, space, and media, generating a point of commu-
nality between the subject and the audience. As a par-
ticipant in New Year’s festivities, you are overwhelmed
by tastes, colors, and smells—we invite our audience
to be immersed, rather than inviting them to judge
whether or not (or in which ways) these festivals are
meaningful. Indeed, there is no effort within the fes-
tival itself to articulate the significance of the festival
or to sermonize on the nature of the beliefs of the
participants.
Yet for the sake of a wider audience, the need for
detailed explanation was crucial—in some ways, this
film is an act of translation, the translation of a festival
spirit that is located in extremely specific spaces, time-
lessly. The constant stream of narration provides a
contextualization that would not have been possible
without decades of fieldwork and research. Cora’s first
draft of the script was even more experimental and
would have included the God of Theater’s voice as
narrator—an entertaining idea, but potentially not
serious enough. We eventually came to believe that it
was important to incorporate Kenneth’s role as
researcher by incorporating the filmmaker completely
into the film—in the end, we were pushed by the
imperative to disclose the relationship of the filmmaker
to the material. We did this by showing Kenneth’s van
stuck in the mud and him struggling to push it out, only
succeeding when members of the procession in their
costumes lent a hand.
Our attitude toward filmmaking attempts a less
proprietary relationship between the subject and the
camera. Our purpose is to invite you, as a viewer, into
the ceremony, to invite the audience to stand alongside
the festival celebrators, not merely in front of them,
staring at them, but to engage with them. Fireworks
explode, firecrackers bang, and gangs of children run
wild—as the viewer, you are just another face in the
crowd, perhaps even a participant in the excitement
generated by those loud explosions and bright colors.
We intentionally chose to stay away from a traditional
documentary narrative—we do not follow single
Bored in Heaven DEAN AND DEAN 55
individuals, but communities of people, and flows of
excitement and affect.
Processions
You can watch a procession, noting all the different
elements in it, or you can get swept along by it, get
caught up in the excitement, and become part of it. The
film tries to do both—to present an overview of the
main elements of the festival as a whole (Daoist ritual
masters inside the temples, possessed spirit mediums in
the courtyards and lanes, opera troupes onstage, pro-
cessions circling the villages, crowds forming when all
these groups converge and the gods return to the
temple)—and also to carry the viewers along and
immerse them in the activity, in the field of ritual
sensation. The narrator states: “I want to show a differ-
ent side of China—to show a procession of images
that reveal the power, creativity and beauty of local
festivals.”
This chapter of the film follows processions large
and small, focusing on family groups, and showing an
array of all-female drum and cymbal troupes, sedan-
chair bearers who walk across bonfires, and many other
popular performance forms. One dimension of local
communal religion that unfortunately gets little cover-
age in our film is the full range of women’s roles. This
is because the festivals at Chinese New Year and the
First Moon Yuanxiao Festival are primarily temple-
based public rites, which forefront patrilineal household
participation. We do, however, include many scenes of
women working, representing their patrilineal families,
preparing offerings to the gods. Women take food,
incense, and spirit money to the temples, to be offered
during the festival. They also prepare offerings and
place them on tables outside each home, to be blessed
by the gods on procession. Of course, women are often
seen throughout the year bringing offerings to the
temple and entering into intimate, contractual relations
with the gods (see Hymes 2002 for a discussion of this
modality of Chinese popular religion).
Within the processions shown in the film, there are
many drum and cymbal and other performing (march-
ing or dancing) troupes made up of women, but they do
not have central roles as Daoist ritual specialists, as
temple committee community representatives, or as
possessed mediums. However, it is important to note
that there is a large group of local female spirit mediums
who are active in contacting the dead in the Putian area,
but this is generally a private, family matter conducted
in the medium’s home altar. Some women do become
temple leaders or fundraisers for temple construction
56 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 30 Number 1 Spring 2014
projects. In the film, we show a group of women car-
rying the sedan chair of the goddess Mazu, and we
mention that more and more groups of women are
forming scripture recitation groups dedicated to the
many goddesses of the regional pantheon.
In this chapter of the film, we introduce informa-
tion about the temples and their gods. Most villages on
the Putian plain have around three or four temples, and
each temple has four or five gods. Each god requires a
ritual celebration on his or her feast day (usually about
one a month), and all of them are celebrated together
during the processions of the Lantern Festival during
Chinese New Year. Anyone watching the film will sense
the devotion and reverence felt toward the gods and the
sincerity of the villagers and townspeople of China. The
gods and their rituals are a powerful source of faith and
spirituality in contemporary China. The power and unity
of communal processions are most strikingly portrayed
in scenes of vast lines of interconnected benches with
lanterns on top, carried around the village boundaries at
the Lantern Festival on the first full moon of the New
Year.
We show the members of a village temple manage-
ment committee carrying the sacred incense burners of
each ritual neighborhood to their home altars. The
temples collect funds from every household (a small per
capita fee) as well as much larger individual donations
from wealthy villagers (many of whom work in the
cities). They use these funds to pay for the ritual spe-
cialists and for the opera performances. They also use
the temple funds to build roads, put in electricity, set up
public toilets, give out scholarships, dispense charity,
and take care of the sick and elderly. The temples are the
center of village cultural life. On normal days, old men
play mahjong while kids run and play around the
temple. But when rituals take place, older women arrive
early, carrying their stools to claim a spot in front of the
opera stage. They explain the stories of the heroes of
Chinese history portrayed onstage to their grandchil-
dren, who stare at the painted faces and brilliant cos-
tumes parading before them.
The temples of Putian contain over 1,200 different
gods. We show one altar with over 50 god statues. Most
of these gods were only known and worshipped in a
single village. Others are known all across China. Every
village has its God of the Earth, who protects the sacred
territory of the village. Births and deaths are reported to
him, and annual sacrifices are held in his honor in
spring and autumn, to pray for abundant crops, chil-
dren, and wealth, and to give thanks for the harvest. In
their homes, villagers worship their ancestors and some
local gods with offerings of rice and incense. Many
villages also have ancestral halls, where all the members
of the same extended lineage gather to worship genera-
tions of their ancestors. Thus, ritual activity pervades
everyday life, and one could argue that ritual roles are
as fundamental, or more so, than kinship roles.
In a sequence in the chapter on Processions, we film
a balcony full of photographers, raising the issue of
spectacle and its relation to contemporary media. Ritual
events are highly mediated, as the overwhelming pres-
ence of various recording devices shown in the film
indicates. The spectacular nature of Chinese ritual (see
Johnson 2009) lends itself to film, video, and Internet
uses. Perhaps this is the return of the repressed, the
revenge of popular religion, denigrated for over a
hundred years within China as “feudal superstition” and
attacked as an obstacle to progress. Now its spectacular
visuality provides a new form of fascination and thus
power in an age of rapidly circulating imagery.
We end this section with superimposed images of
multiple processions and raise the question of coher-
ence. All human perspectives (camera angles) are
limited. Only the gods can see the order rising out of
chaos as rituals are performed simultaneously in scores
of villages across the Putian plain. This theme is
repeated throughout the film, with reference to the God
of Theater’s interaction with(in) the ritual-event.
Daoist Rites
In this chapter, we highlight performances of rites by
two different groups of Daoist ritual masters performing
similar rites at different scales in two temples, moving
from one group to the other to show parallel move-
ments. The multiple and diverse elements of Chinese
popular religious rituals are held together by these
Daoist rituals, which provide an overall liturgical frame-
work that links processions of the gods, Daoist rituals,
spirit medium possession, and Chinese opera into an
overall ritual event. The Daoist ritual is at the center of
the overall ritual and is performed inside the village
temple. The Daoist ritual master invokes the powers of
the high gods of the Dao, works the cosmological forces
of Yin and Yang, reverses time through a visualized
journey back into the undifferentiated, and then gener-
ates a new world within the ritual space. Outside, on a
stage facing the temple, opera is performed as an offer-
ing to the local gods and as entertainment to the vil-
lagers. The gods of the temple are carried in a
procession around the streets of the village to each
household and then around the boundaries of the
village fields. On larger processions, multiple village
processions merge into a vast procession around a
common ritual territory.

The Daoist rites include music, dance, and inner
visualizations. We follow the former through moments
of laughter and interaction between the ritual masters.
We illustrate their visualizations with drawings from
local Daoist manuscripts tracing the flight of the Daoist
ritual master, riding a crane, through the stars, to the
court of the Jade Emperor. We show how the Daoists
ritual masters place documents onto paper horses to
send to the heavens in flames. As a life-size paper horse
and rider burns up, the narrator states:
There was a Pony Express in imperial China, which
transmitted important messages to and from the
court. The Daoists mimic this system in a vast
paperwork empire with its courts in the stars and in
the underworld. All documents are prepared in trip-
licate. One copy is sent to the heavens, one is kept
on earth, and one is sent to the underworld. The
burning of documents and talismans releases the
powers gathered within them, transforming them
into orders to the spirit soldiers. The messages are
transmitted in the smoke, which rises to the
heavens.
Spirit Mediums
As the Daoist rites conclude, we begin a chapter on
spirit mediums and possession. This chapter includes
some of the most powerful images in the film. The gods
can possess a medium anywhere, but most mediums are
possessed in the temple. Then they go outside the temple
and perform feats of self-mortification (fire-walking,
cutting themselves with swords and maces) to show the
power of the god over pain, life, and death. Some
mediums speak in the voice of the gods. Others form
troupes that do collective exorcistic dances. Astonish-
ingly, the multiple representations of the gods do not
provoke issues of contradiction. Instead, different rep-
resentations of the same god can and do appear simul-
taneously, as if in a dream, or in a film.7
A prolonged conversation between Zheng Li, a
research assistant, and a group of young mediums and
village elders is a highlight, and an unusual moment, in
the film. A significant reason for this is that we were,
from the beginning, interested in how close we could
come to the traditional documentary format while at the
same time twisting off in a new direction.8 Even the
interviews carried out in Bored in Heaven are not
designed to illicit personal responses to the rituals, but
instead to gather information while revealing the limits
of what we were permitted to know. As filmmakers, we
wanted to illuminate the rituals the people of the Putian
Bored in Heaven DEAN AND DEAN 57
plains live with, not to film individual reactions to these
events. By approaching Daoist festivals with respect,
seeking to express the delight and pleasure of New
Year’s celebrations, we sought to develop a film that
invites the viewer to share in that excitement. The very
nature of film, the fact that it is instantaneous so you
cannot stop and reread and think about your emotional
reaction, but instead are constantly forced into the next
moment, the next image, means that any film that is
attempting to educate rather than propagandize must
strain against the confines and standards of its own
medium. As storytellers, we often use characters to
express different issues, and the easiest way to stir
emotion is to have your audience connect with a char-
acter and pick up on that character’s emotions. The
challenge for us was to ask how the audience would
react if we encouraged them to have their own emo-
tional reactions to the rituals and festivities as a whole.
We wanted to see if it was possible to tell the story
taking the ritual-event itself as a character.
Historical and Ethnographic Context
Each region of China has its local culture, with its own
dialect (more like a distinct language, in that outsiders
cannot understand it when spoken, although the written
language is shared). There are many such dialect regions
in Fujian province alone, not to mention the rest of
China. Only three million people speak the Putian
dialect. They live along a long, narrow river valley that
broadens into a coastal plain, in the two counties of
Putian and Xianyou. Speakers of the Fuzhou dialects to
the north, beyond a low-lying mountain range, and
those who speak Minnan (Hokkien) dialect to their
immediate east and south cannot understand their
spoken language. It is not only the dialect that is dis-
tinct. The Putian region has its own architectural styles,
local cuisine, clothing and customs, opera forms, ritual
practices, and even local pantheons filled with unusual
combinations of local gods. All of these aspects of local
culture are illustrated throughout the film.
But there are many cultural forces that hold Chinese
culture together and provide some unity to Chinese
popular religion as well. Confucian morality is still a
powerful common value across China, and it is empha-
sized in the hierarchical and stylized forms of ritual
conduct seen in these rites (look for the community
representatives in the film and watch their ritualized
bowing, directed by the Daoist master). Another pow-
erful unifying force is the written language and the
shared heritage of Chinese literature and thought. In the
rituals seen in this film, Daoist ritual provides the main
58 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 30 Number 1 Spring 2014
underlying cosmological and liturgical framework. This
is another major unifying cultural force across many
forms of local communal religion in China.9
As mentioned in the film, the role of Chinese living
overseas in Southeast Asia is an important aspect of
religious life in Putian, as elsewhere across southern
coastal China. These emigrants and their descendants
returned after the Cultural Revolution with cash and
vital ritual knowledge, and they have played a signifi-
cant role in the revival of local communal religion in
China. These transnational networks affect many vil-
lages in Putian. In such villages, space is stretched along
networks of chain migration, and institutional innova-
tions, ritual knowledge, and ritual change flow back and
forth within these networks, enriching the cultural rep-
ertoire of the Putian peoples (Dean 2011).
Capitalist forces have transformed village life,
forcing many villagers into the factories and to
migrate into the cities to take part in the incredibly
rapid transformation of the Chinese economy. This has
had many profound impacts on Chinese social life, the
family, gender relations, and popular religion. What is
unexpected, perhaps, is the degree to which the
popular religious ritual events shown in this film show
how the villagers are using their ritual heritage to
negotiate the forces of modernity. Rather than simply
abandoning their traditions, they perform their rituals
with even more spectacle and extravagance and
delight. Instead of turning these rituals into a “theme
park” cultural showcase, everyone still takes an active
part in the performances. One might have anticipated
that the Chinese Communist Party and the local gov-
ernment would ban these performances or insist that
they change into nationalistic parades in honor of the
New China. Instead, official symbols are adapted and
absorbed into the ritual performances (e.g., we show
images of Premier Hu Jintao carried in a procession),
and many local government officials and members of
the Chinese Communist Party join the temple commit-
tees after they retire. They bring with them their con-
nections and their managerial skills. The temples are
where the action is, and by participating in the temple
committee meetings, they can still maintain their
status in the community.
All age groups participate, playing different roles at
different stages of their lives. Everyone in the village is
expected to play a part in the ritual. Some bring offer-
ings from their households to set before the gods during
the ritual, or burn spirit money and set off firecrackers
when the god’s procession goes by their house. Others
carry the gods, or get possessed by the gods, or under-
take long apprenticeships to become Daoist priests, who
communicate with the gods through their intricate
rituals. Married men rotate into positions of leadership
in the temple management committee. Women prepare
offerings to represent their (patrilineal) households, or
participate in all-female drum and cymbal processional
troupes, or join scripture recitation groups dedicated to
local powerful goddesses. Crowds of onlookers gather
round, many armed with cell phones, cameras, or video
cameras. Another important point to note is that many
villagers work in cities and only return to the village for
these ritual occasions. Young people have grown up
over the past 25 years in an ever-expanding ritual
world, so that even though many leave their villages for
the cities, the ritual realm calls them back at Chinese
New Year or at other important festival occasions in the
year.
As mentioned above, the temples in this part of
China have formed a “second government,” dedicating
funding and planning to local infrastructure projects,
charity, scholarships, and cultural activities that the
local government is not able to provide (for a variety of
reasons). Most processions are at a manageable scale
and do not pose a threat to the government. In fact, in
this area (as seen in the film), the public security forces
work with the temples to control crowds and traffic.
These rituals are similar to medieval Christian and
earlier Roman and Greek religious festivals and proces-
sions. On such occasions, social roles can be inverted,
and a poor villager can become a possessed medium and
speak in the commanding voice of a god. The ritual can
be chaotic, with many different forms of sensory stimu-
lation pulling participants one way and the other at the
same time. Still, there is an underlying order to the
events (Daoist masters at the center, mediums and opera
outside the temple, processions moving around the
village boundaries, and individual households seeking
the blessings of the god). Several times in the film, we
gesture toward this emergence of order out of chaos
through the all-seeing perspective of the gods (of the
God of Theater).
Chinese popular religion continually produces more
and more gods, even in recent times. In contrast to
monotheistic religions, with strict theologies defining
the nature of the (singular) deity and the nature of the
correct rituals with which to worship that deity, Chinese
rituals are much more free form and open to transfor-
mation and new revelation (from the possessed spirit
mediums). There is no Bible or Koran—the Buddhist and
Daoist Canons are filled with thousands of books
“spoken by the Buddha” or by “the most High Lord
Lao(zi).” Notice that there is little emphasis on preach-
ing or explaining the meaning of the rituals since there
is no set theological doctrine to explicate. Nevertheless,
underlying moral attitudes are emphasized through

ritual means in the hierarchical relations and move-
ments shown by the Daoist ritual master and the com-
munity representative before the high gods of the Dao.
Through its diversity and complexity and its very exu-
berance, Chinese local communal religion poses a major
challenge to Western (Abrahamic, post-Reformation)
ways of thinking about religion, divinity, and the role of
ritual in society.
Ritual activity in Putian, China, is probably more
intense than anywhere else in China. This is partly for
historical reasons (see Dean and Zheng 2010, vol. 1) and
partly because the Chinese government is allowing the
local religious scene to develop more freely because of
the connection to nearby Taiwan. The reinvention of the
local ritual system, after the destruction and hiatus of
the Cultural Revolution, has taken place over 25 years.
Now, all the levels of the ritual system can be seen, from
temples and rites of neighborhood shrines all the way to
great ritual alliances combining processional troupes
from 50 or 60 villages.
Conclusions
This film makes a claim about the continuing impor-
tance and centrality of ritual activity in Chinese life. We
offer images of practices of conviviality and community
effervescence. Within China, these kinds of documen-
taries are starting to gain attention, especially as the
government moves to broaden its cultural policies and
to enshrine certain forms of “immaterial culture.” So far,
however, Putian’s festivals have survived on their own
because of their ability to negotiate both the powers of
the state and the forces of capitalism. We show many
aspects of these rituals to prove this claim, including
showing the different scales of different aspects of the
event—processions large and small, smaller or larger
groups of Daoist ritualists, and individual or collectively
trained groups of spirit mediums. In the final chapter of
the film, we show these different elements coming
together once more in a single ritual. We bring viewers
close to the ritual action so they can see people inter-
acting with one another (as well as with the filmmaker
and the camera) and playing their roles in the ritual
(mostly with exuberance).
This film will stand as a record of the revival and
power of popular religion in contemporary China. It
offers a commentary on the history and importance of
these practices. As a film, it strives to bring the viewer
into contact with an overcharged sensory realm of
ritual. There are several moments of considerable
esthetic beauty in the film (some landscape shots; the
shot of the line of linked lanterns stretching on and on
Bored in Heaven DEAN AND DEAN 59
as the line snakes around a large courtyard; the shot of
a goddess being carried past a bonfire; the image of a
medium waving his sword under a tangle of telephone
and electric wires; several images of spectacular cos-
tumes and behavior in the ritual sequences). In these
cases, beauty is power, as shown through communal
creativity in the form of constantly evolving rituals of
excess and celebration.
In terms of Bill Nichols’s (1991) dichotomy between
implicit argument (perspective) and explicit argument
(classic expository documentary), this film goes a dif-
ferent direction altogether. While we do provide con-
siderable information about the footage through the
narrator’s voice, the power of the realm of ritual sen-
sation complicates the possibility of any single perspec-
tive emerging on these ritual-events. We agree with
those theorists of documentary film and photography
who point out the value of film’s excess—for through-
out this film, qualities of excess are omnipresent
(MacDougall 1998; Thompson 1999; Vaughan 1992).
We used contingent events caught during filming some-
times as symbols (such as the child with albinism filmed
climbing a pile of rubble, who slowly turns her face—
cut to a shot of people salvaging bricks from more
rubble—this fleeting ghostly image suggests the return
of the uncanny, á la Buñuel) and sometimes as moments
of resistance to, or engagement with, the filming (all the
shots of people interacting with the camera—making
faces back at the viewer).10
This film seeks to cast the viewer into a state of
sensory overload, while still showing the humanity of
the participants in these events, their joy, and their
excitement. Different audiences react in distinct ways to
the film. In U.S. audiences, viewers frequently ask the
“belief” question. Do these people really believe in these
gods? What do these rituals mean? These are important
questions, reflecting the religious heritage and orienta-
tion of many Americans, including secularized ones. In
many ways, the film is designed to forestall this ques-
tion and to turn it back on the questioner. If the viewer
has been touched, confused, excited, or dazed by the
film, and the range of sensations it has introduced her
to, then she may be ready to think about a field of
communal ritual experience where beliefs are dispersed
in ritualized actions, rather than articulated as doc-
trines. Here contradictory representations of the gods do
not lead to conflict, but coexist in a dreamlike profusion
of expressive possibilities, rather similar to the condi-
tions of cinema itself. This is what we call the “positive
unconscious” of local communal religion in China
(Dean 2010, ch. 10).
The final moments of the film raise the question of
the future—will these practices continue? We argue that
60 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 30 Number 1 Spring 2014
this kind of performance of local power and community
is a vital dimension of the future of China. Yet contem-
porary independent Chinese documentary film has
rarely dealt with this kind of collective ritual activity.
When such materials are taken up in the work of more
mainstream filmmakers such as Jiang Yimou and Chen
Kaige, they are often rendered as a form of dead tradi-
tion or as a kind of exotic or feudalistic and destructive
past (with some notable exceptions, such as the puppet
performances in Huozhe [To Live]). Contemporary
Chinese independent filmmakers and visual anthropolo-
gists are beginning to explore this realm of activity, and
we anticipate exciting new work in this area of ethno-
graphic film.11
Notes
1
The title of the film relates to the story of the God of
Theater, who was bored by all the bureaucracy in Heaven
and went down to earth to join in the fun (see the section
on the Theater God’s story).
2
The idea for the film took firm hold during a conversa-
tion between Kenneth Dean’s and Zheng Zhenman’s
daughters, Zheng Jing and Cora Dean, when both women
participated in the professors’ fieldwork (2006). Prof.
Zheng is a professor of history at Xiamen University and
Director of the Center for Research on Local Historical
Documents. Prof. Dean and Prof. Zheng have collabo-
rated on research projects for over 20 years. Inspiration
for a film on their research came from the ethnographic
films of Jean Rouch and Maya Deren, as well as Raul
Ruiz’s adaptation of Proust’s Time Regained (1999). If
Ruiz could translate Proust’s narrative of decades of
memory into a feature film, perhaps it was possible to
translate decades of fieldwork research into an experi-
mental documentary film.
3
Bill Nichols’s (2001) Maya Deren and the American Avant-
Garde includes the complete text of Maya Deren’s “An
Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film.”
4
See Michael Taussig’s (1993) Mimesis and Alterity for
interesting reflections on the power and creativity of
mimetic play.
5
Marker, who was described as having everything he
needed to make a movie in his apartment without ever
leaving, might have approved of the home editing studio
we set up, using funds from a grant from the Fonds de
Recherce Societé et Culture Quebec (FQRSC). FQRSC Projet
Novateurs grants were designed to encourage artists to
conduct research and researchers to engage in artistic
projects. With help from Montreal-based colleagues
Thomas Lamarre (East Asian Studies, McGill University)
and Brian Massumi (Communications, Université de
Montréal), the project was conceptualized and the appli-
cation was successful, and we began the process of
forming a film crew. We were fortunate to attract Karen
Vanderborght, a talented Belgian independent filmmaker,
to work as our cinematographer and later the main editor
for the film.
6
See Brian Massumi’s (2011) Semblance and Event: Activist
Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts for a description of the
role of affect in relation to (esthetic) experience.
7
For more information on spirit mediums and possession in
relation to Daoist rites, see Davis (2001), Dean (1993),
Dean and Zheng (2010), and DeBernardi (2006).
8
A significant distinction between Bored in Heaven and
other documentaries is the fact that we use no face-to-
face interviews with outside “talking head” experts.
Kenneth Dean and Zheng Zhenman are introduced briefly
but appear only sporadically on camera throughout the
film.
9
In modern times, cultural unity is achieved by the use of
Mandarin Chinese, which is broadcast on television and
radio, and by students memorizing texts by Mao Zedong,
Deng Xiaoping, and Karl Marx in school. See Schipper’s
(1993) The Taoist Body for further discussion of the Daoist
liturgical framework. On Chinese local communal reli-
gion, see Jordan (1972), Sangren (1987), Weller (1987),
Dean (1993, 2003), Chau (2005), Feuchtwang (2001),
Overmyer (2005), Lagerwey (2010), and Goossaert and
Palmer (2011).
10
For further discussion of these issues in the context of
current underground Chinese documentary film, see
Robinson (2010).
11
Ethnographic film in China tends to focus on the ritual
activities of “minority peoples.” As notable exceptions, the
writings and films by Jenny Chio and Tami Blumenfield
deal with the complicated relations among ethnographic
film, cultural performance, and touristic spectacle in some
communities in Southwest China.
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