Chinese documentary as public culture

Abstract

This article addresses the question of publicness in independent Chinese documentary, using examples from the lesbian and gay community as illustrations. It argues that changes in both form and subject matter in contemporary lesbian and gay independent documentary reflect the emergence of a socially engaged form that seeks to raise awareness through increased visibility. This can be understood in relation to Ching Kwan Lee and You-tien Hsing’s concepts of “recognition” and “representation”. Both of these concepts, however, are connected to ideas of the public and publicness. While there is a tradition of associating documentary with the public sphere understood in Habermasian terms, in China the public sphere as an institutional space has a problematic history. Instead, I suggest that other ways of understanding publicness are demonstrated by these documentaries: publicness as representational visibility, as performance in material space, and as an affective invocation of a shared viewing experience. This allows us some perspective not simply on the role of independent documentary in China, but the social significance of documentary more broadly conceptualized.