Talking heads in Chinese independent cinema: discourses and speaking rights

ABSTRACT

The talking head has been widely used within Chinese independent cinema. On the one hand, the practice is criticized by Chinese independent filmmakers for serving the propagandist ends of Chinese state television; on the other, it is also introduced by Chinese independent cinema to attest to the social sufferings experienced by marginal people. In this paper, the theory of intertextuality is adopted to analyse the use of talking heads within both Chinese Sixth Generation cinema and independent Chinese documentary, while exploring the collective documentary impulse of Chinese independent filmmaking. I shall develop the following two arguments: (1) the ideology of talking heads is shaped by the “linguistic context” of film production. They can serve official and grassroots discourses placed within an authoritative and a private cinematic context, respectively. (2) Both Chinese independent documentary and feature-length films adopt talking heads to deliver marginal voices, which advance the speaking rights of both Chinese independent filmmaking and voiceless social groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Talking heads
• speaking rights
• marginal voices
• documentary impulse
• Chinese independent cinema

Acknowledgements

This paper is adapted from a part of my Ph.D. thesis, which is still in progress; I’d like to thank my supervisor Prof. Dina Iordanova for giving me advice to improve both this paper and my thesis. I must also thank my friend Dr Connor McMorran and Mr Patrick Adamson for proofreading this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by China Scholarship Council [grant number 201608060100].

Notes on contributors

Huimin Deng

Huimin Deng is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and is supervised by Prof. Dina Iordanova. In 2016, he started his doctoral research on the interrelationships between Chinese Independent Documentary and Urban Cinema of the 1990s. His research interests include semiotics, documentary and Chinese modern history. He has been published in Excursion Journal, Frames Cinema Journal, and Cinergie Journal.