Section outline

  • This week will focus on an essential part of Chinese independent cinema - independent documentary that emerged at the end of 1980s. The availability of DV camera on the retail market in the late 1990s has made documentary filmmaking accessible to individual amateurs and largely facilitated the long repressed personal filmmaking. This week will discuss independent documentary as personal expression and social engagement in the still politically repressed China.  


    Screening: Nostalgia, dir. Shu Haolun, 2003

    trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=iT1o43_kR1Q&feature=emb_title

    Reading:

    Yu, Kiki Tianqi. “Nostalgia toward Laojia: Old Home as an Imagined Past” in 'My' Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2019

    Edwards, Dan. “From Underground Practice to Alternative Public Sphere” in Independent Chinese Documentary: Alternative Visions, Alternative Publics, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2015. (ebook available through QM library)

    Additional reading:

    Berry, Chris. "Getting real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism" in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, edited by Zhang Zhen, Duke Univesity Press, 2007.