Personal camera as public intervention: remembering the Cultural Revolution in Chinese independent documentary films

Abstract

Chinese independent documentary films about the Cultural Revolution provide alternative memories to official and popular accounts. In addition to the contestations of memories between the official and non-official and between the mainstream/dominant and the independent/marginal, there lies a third pair of contestation: between the public and the private, which also encompasses the previous two antitheses. To frame it in another way, what is allowed in public and what has to be restricted can be conceived as a key to understanding negotiations and discourses about the Cultural Revolution, as well as the status of independent documentary films in China. This paper explores how Chinese independent documentary films recall the past and bring private memories into public through different aesthetic approaches, reconfiguring discourses around the Cultural Revolution and the documentary films’ independent status.