Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema

Qi Wang is an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Qi Wang’s radical intervention revaluates Chinese independent cinema’s challenge to the official and commercial media. Instead of emphasizing the realist determination to document everyday life in contemporary China since the 1990s, she shows us how these films also invoke history through personal memory in their attempt to come to terms with the earthquakes in Chinese social, cultural, and political values of the last half century. Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema is a dense, detailed, and riveting account of the postsocialist generation’s subjectivity. Richly illustrated and informed by new research and numerous interviews, its shining audacity takes my breath away.

• List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Understanding Postsocialism on a Personal Scale; Two Siblings or Generational Subjects of Chinese Postsocialism; The Forsaken Generation and Historical Consciousness; Material, Structure and Methodology Part I From the Past: Subjectivity, Memory and Narrative1 Toward the Figuration of a Postsocialist Subject; Subjectivity and Spatiality in Yangbanxi and 1980s Cinema; A Ship on a River: The Historical Space in Night Rain in Bashan; The Figure of a Forsaken Child; The Forsaken Generation: Take It Personally and Historically 2 For a Narration of One’s Own; Wilful Chance and Futile Subjects in To Live and Farewell, My Concubine; To Figure New Subjects: Independent Cinema and Personal Filmmaking; Self-narrative I: I Love XXX and a Radical Recollection of History; Self-narrative II: Fractured and Fragmented In the Heat of the Sun; The Delirium of a Fool: Narrative Excess and the Subject’s Alter Ego; Self-portraits of New Cinematic Subjects out of the Dirt of History Part II In the Present: Camera, Documentary and Performance3 Surface and Edge: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke and Lou Ye; Jia Zhangke: A Subjective Metanarrative Vision; Platform: Cinematic Space and Multivalent Subject Positions; Superficial Time: Writing on the Wall; Superficial Space: Debris, Wanderers and Vehicles; Lou Ye: Dwelling on the Edge of the Camera 4 Personal Documentary; Chinese Verité and Duan Jinchuan’s Invisible Gaze; Personal Documentary; I Graduated: Subject-ing the Past to the Present; West of the Tracks: Subject-ing the Present to History 5 Performing Bodies in Experimental and Digital Media; Nightingale, Not the Only Voice: A Performance of Inter-subjectivity; Shi Tou: Women, Bodies and Herself; Cui Zi’en: Embodying Realities and Performing Identities; Play with the Body of History: Experimental and Digital Media Conclusion: China’s Luckless but Hopeful Angels of History Notes Selected Filmography and Bibliography Index