“My Work Constitutes a Form of Participatory Action”: An Interview with Ai Xiaoming

Ai Xiaoming, born in 1953 in Wuhan, is a retired professor in the literature department of Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-Sen University. Following an academic career in comparative literature, she came out as a public intellectual, initially through involvement in defending women’s and gays rights. She organised many activities to raise awareness on issues such as discrimination and violence against women, the most famous of which was the translation and staging of The Vagina Monologueswith her students. While she initially used documentary filmmaking as a tool to record and disseminate these activities for educative purposes, she quickly extended her work on video to the documenting of current cases of public violations of rights. In the past few years, she has produced a corpus of around ten independent documentaries on subjects such as village elections and property rights, AIDS, and the Sichuan earthquake scandal. (JP)

Filming Space/Mapping Reality in Chinese Independent Documentary Films

This article is a general attempt to sum up and challenge some of the issues the notion of Space raises when in contact with the Chinese independent documentary film movement. I will focus my analysis on how this concept influences the choice of topics, the roles it plays during the shooting process and how the representation of space in these films is linked to the emergence of a new documentary aesthetic and practice.

Editorial

Yingjin Zhang, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China

Corrado Neri, Âges inquiets. Cinémas chinois: une représentation de la jeunesse

Book Reviews (PDF version)

Ian Aitken and Michael Ingham, Hong Kong Documentary Film

Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, Lisa Rofel (eds.), The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record

1989-2019: Perspectives on June 4th from Hong Kong

QIAN, Ying. 2024. Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China. New York: Columbia University Press.

VIGNERON, Frank. 2018. Hong Kong Soft Power. Art Practices in the Special Administrative Region, 2005-2014. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.

Editorial

Performance, Documentary, and the Transmission of Memories of the Great Leap Famine in the Folk Memory Project

ABSTRACT: Independent documentary film projects dealing with history have recently multiplied in China. While all seek to shed new light on personal experiences of the Mao era, they vary greatly in form, method, and scale. Launched in 2010 by Wu Wenguang at the Caochangdi Workstation, a space devoted to contemporary dance and documentary film, the Folk Memory Project aims at producing various textual and visual records of the historical experience of rural populations, especially during the Great Leap famine. Of special interest are the 20 documentaries of the Folk Memory Project’s film section – a body of works constantly growing following yearly returns by filmmakers to their “home” villages. These films are characterised by a performative aspect that is rare in other Chinese documentaries on similar topics. This contribution examines this body of documentaries and the role of performance and performativity in the recording of collective memory of the famine. KEYWORDS: Performance, memory, documentary, Great Leap famine, Wu Wenguang.

WANG, Bing 王兵. 2018. Dead Souls (Si Linghun 死靈魂).