Beyond Nostalgia

In Chapter 3, 11 Flowers represents personal and fragmented memories of the Cultural Revolution from an 11-year-old boy’s perspective. These memories challenge the monolithic narrative of history and the Maoist rhetoric of revolution. At the same time, this fragmented narrative mode enables individual agency in narrating and constructing history. In addition, through portrayals of everyday life in the Maoist era, the film reveals how the dominant ideology at that time was strategically misinterpreted by ordinary people and was dispersed in everyday life. Socialism, in this context, becomes a mystery, a joke, and a traumatic awakening. In the lm, art possesses enlightening power for the 11-year-old boy, who begins to obtain self-awareness through painting. The film thus conveys the director’s authorial enunciation and his belief in art as a form of liberation, not only for a boy in the Cultural Revolution but also for Wang Xiaoshuai as a film-maker. The shifting trajectory of Wang’s film-making—from independent to art house—alludes to the shifting relations between film-making, the state, and the market. In 11 Flowers, personal memories become the hallmark of Wang’s auteur expression.

Introduction

Autobiography, then, has the unenviable task of confronting, confounding, and even confirming the assumptions, impressions, and (mis)conceptions about the author’s or filmmaker’s identificatory positionings. —Alisa S. Lebow1 1.Alisa S. Lebow, First Person Jewish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xviii. Born after the Cultural Revolution, I began to know about that historical event from the odd line in a textbook and through occasional films and television dramas set in that period. To a large extent, filmic representations, be they memoirs or fictions, form the way I perceive and make sense of this historical period that I never experienced. The Cultural Revolution, though known to many people as ten years of turmoil and disaster, seems to me a distant, tough, and yet passionate era. My parents recount anecdotes of their schooldays, and they sometimes even express longing for the ‘good old days’ of innocence and carefreeness. In the 1995 film ...

A Collective ‘I’ and Its Contending Readings

Chapter 5 investigates the television serial drama Sent-Down Youth to discover how personal memories are used to provide pedagogical lessons and to build up a collective imagination of the past. The television drama is presented as a critique of the Cultural Revolution against the backdrop of the rising fever for the ‘Red Culture’ campaign in Chongqing, but it also exalts the idealism and altruism of the Cultural Revolution generation and criticizes materialism in contemporary society. Socialism here is associated with idealism, collectivism, and passion. However, the audience may also apply their understandings of the political context and personal memories to decode the representation, producing diversified and contested readings of the television drama. Television—being state owned and the mouthpiece of the party-state—both limits and enables the proliferation of multiple personal memories and discourses about the past and the present.

Post-trauma Narrative

Chapter 4 further explores fragmented memories in post-trauma narratives in Red Amnesia, Shanghai Story, and Blue Sky Bones. In these post-trauma films, the past penetrates the present, constituting a postsocialist reality that accommodates different ideologies and temporalities. There is a tension between amnesia and remembrance, between the past in demolition and the present in reconstruction in contemporary China. The repression of the past in turn causes the resurfacing of unwelcome memories of past trauma. To many of the Cultural Revolution Generation, the lingering pain of the past still haunts the present and becomes a form of belated, persisting tragedy for their sons and daughters. Different from previous traumatic narratives that conclude the trauma in the past tense, post-trauma narratives unveil the continuity between the past and the present. Just like the prefix ‘post-’ in postsocialism, post-trauma implies a reconfiguration of trauma rather than a complete break from it.

Post-revolution Nostalgia

Chapter 2 looks into the film Youth, which chronicles the lives of several performers in a military art troupe throughout the decades and focuses on coming- of-age romance. Similar to Under the Hawthorn Tree, Youth also reveals a strong sentiment of nostalgia. Whereas the former longs for the simple and pure life of the past, the latter is obsessed with the aromatic smell of youth. Youth reproduces a lot of Mao-era dances and songs, rendering memory as a form of spectacular performance, while history has become merely a footnote to youth and performance.

Conclusion

This book has examined the representations of personal memories of the Cultural Revolution in films and television dramas in mainland China after 2001. It aimed to elucidate that personal memories are far from solid and spontaneous; rather, they are constantly constructed and articulated in relation to social, political, and economic contexts. Moreover, film-makers employ divergent personalized narrative modes and construct various versions of personal memories on screen, to address their particular concerns. These disparate micro-narratives across screens (or even on one screen) reveal the contesting memories of and discourses on socialism in contemporary China. In this sense, personal memories also articulate contending Chinese modernities in the postsocialist era.