Personal Documentary

Chapter 4 turns to independent documentary and examines its non-fictional exercise of the subject-driven intervention in historical thinking. After an analysis of the observation documentary of Duan Jinchuan, it distills from the prevalent and much discussed verité practices an initially neglected line of “personal documentary.” It delineates the formal features as well as theoretical implications of this extraordinary practice and then examines two monumental examples of personal documentary: I Have Graduated by Wang Guangli and West of the Tracks by Wang Bing.

Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject

Chapter 1 first provides a succinct account of the representational mechanisms of subjectivity and spatiality found in yangbanxi, the famous model operas (along with their contemporaneous cinematic reproductions) of the Cultural Revolution. It then discusses the screen subjectivities in the 1980s and rediscovers a 1980 film, Night Rain in Bashan, which qualifies as an uncanny harbinger of contemporary independent cinema in terms of its imaging of a borderline subjectivity: a forsaken child. This chapter concludes with an elaborate discussion of the Forsaken Generation whose historical self-portraiture is evidenced by a range of contemporary cultural forms including literature, music, painting, theatre, and cinema.

Surface and Edge: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye

Chapter 3 approaches the cinema of Jia Zhangke from two angles: first, a complex mechanism of multivalent and metanarrative subject positions in and beyond the cinematic frame compels the spectator to a highly active and conscious process of taking up history and image critically; second, it proposes the concept of “surface” to highlight Jia’s cinematic texture through various figurations of superficial time and superficial space in Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. Lou Ye’s highly expressionist and kinetic works conflate screen subjectivities with directorial and spectatorial ones. An analysis of two films by Lou Ye, Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly, demonstrates that, despite the two auteurs’ difference in style, they share a highly comparable epistemological interest in the relationship between history, representation and subjectivity.

Introduction

The introduction opens the book with two highly symbolic anecdotes of cinematic imagination, respectively provided by filmmakers Cheng Qingsong and Wang Guangli who share a desire to rewrite the socialist past and understand postsocialism on a personal scale. The introduction then introduces the concept of the Forsaken Generation and explicates its peculiar historical consciousness as embodied in a much more personal and critical approach to history when compared with their older siblings found in the “educated youth” or the Fifth Generation. The Introduction concludes with an explication of the methodology used and a chapter outline.

Performing Bodies in Experimental and Digital Media

Chapter 5 examines experimental documentaries by women and queer filmmakers such as Tang Danhong, Shi Tou, and Cui Zi’en, as well as various experimental videos and digital media projects by Wang Qingsong, Feng Mengbo and other contemporary artists. All discussed works blur the boundary between self and other and between camera and performance, making it clear that subjectivities are actually imagined, contested, and produced in close and conscious relation to representational media and the particular historical moment, in this case, postsocialism. Shaping forth from this complex interplay of historical energy, media appropriation, and subjective interventions are some of the most sophisticated critical subjects of contemporary China. Documentaries under close analysis include: Nightingale, Not the Only Voice; Women’s Fifty Minutes; The Narrow Path; Night Scene.

For a Narration of One’s Own

Chapter 2 closely examines selected narratives by the Fifth Generation and the Forsaken Generation, with emphasis on those from the latter group. Revisiting two Fifth Generation epic classics about China’s modern and socialist decades, Zhang Yimou’s To Live and Chen Kaige’s Fairwell, My Concubine, the chapter identifies their structure as characterized by chanceful illogic, debilitating cyclicality and ineffective subjective intervention. Following a discussion of the advent of independent cinema at that time in the light of a subjective turn in approaching historical representation and formal reflexivity—summarized in the term “personal filmmaking”—Chapter 2 then looks closely at two quintessential self-narratives of the Forsaken Generation: Meng Jinghui’s avant-garde play I Love XXX (Wo ai XXX, 1994) and Jiang Wen’s independent feature In the Heat of the Sun (1994).

Conclusion: China’s Luckless but Hopeful Angels of History

The conclusion provides an analysis of the contradictory conflation of stylistic excess and thematic obscuration in Jiang Wen’s film, The Sun Also Rises. In its juxtaposition of hyperactivity and death, often suicide, of characters, the film represents a dilemma facing the Forsaken Generation: how to the spectrality of the socialist legacy. Engaging with Jacques Derrida as well as Walter Benjamin, it suggests this generation of independent filmmakers as contemporary China’s “luckless but hopeful angels of history.” The conclusion ends with a poem by the author that distills the spirit of this book in a powerful dream image.