Personal camera as public intervention: remembering the Cultural Revolution in Chinese independent documentary films

Abstract

Chinese independent documentary films about the Cultural Revolution provide alternative memories to official and popular accounts. In addition to the contestations of memories between the official and non-official and between the mainstream/dominant and the independent/marginal, there lies a third pair of contestation: between the public and the private, which also encompasses the previous two antitheses. To frame it in another way, what is allowed in public and what has to be restricted can be conceived as a key to understanding negotiations and discourses about the Cultural Revolution, as well as the status of independent documentary films in China. This paper explores how Chinese independent documentary films recall the past and bring private memories into public through different aesthetic approaches, reconfiguring discourses around the Cultural Revolution and the documentary films’ independent status.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of my article for their thoughts and suggestions. Thanks to Hu Jie and Wu Wenguang for their time to do the interviews and for the use of their materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jing Meng is a PhD candidate in Film and TV Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is currently researching on representations of the Cultural Revolution on-screens in China after 2001.

Notes

1. Paolo Voci introduces the idea of lightness to describe small screen videos that resist to ‘being framed into and validated by either market, art or political discourses’ (2010, xx).

2. Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) describes inter-subjectivity as one dimension of the self which is enmeshed with the outside Other(s), as Sartre states, ‘in discovering my inner being I discover the other person at the same time’. In film studies, the concept of inter-subjectivity can be applied to deconstruct the relationship between spectator and filmic images: spectatorship is ‘an intrinsically reciprocal practice’ and cinematic images can ‘throw us into an objective apprehension of ourselves’ (Laine 2007, 32).

3. For instance, Though I Am Gone was once shown on SUNTV, a TV channel based in Hong Kong, and distributed by dGenerate Films in North America, and Visible Record in Hong Kong. In addition, Though I Am Gone was nominated for several international film festivals, such as Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, and the OXDOX International Documentary Film Festival.

4. Fanhall net, http://fanhall.net/archives/ (accessed 8 October 2013).

5. At first the project particularly focused on the Great Famine, but the existing films and interviews have expanded its range, covering China's socialist past at various points.

6. The old fool who moved the mountains (yugong yishan) is a Chinese proverb about a foolish man who wanted to remove two mountains in front of his house and his indomitable will helped him succeed.