Yijiao Guo (KCL) - 2023-24 Students
yijiao.guo@kcl.ac.uk

Filming Historiography in Things: Revolution Residues and Chinese Independent Documentary Cinema

This thesis delineates how things in Chinese independent documentary films have reconfigured the residues of the previous revolutions since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. I study the revolutionary history en bloc that has been reconfigured in and through things in documentary cinema. I concentrate on how things – be it an object, a material entity, a space, or a historical structure – may tell us something different or previously disregarded about the individual confrontations with revolutions and socio-political movements. The remapping of this revolutionary time, or the socialist era, is my attempt to understand the post-revolutionary discourses on revolution in its reforming and transformative process in documentary cinema with theoretical concentrations on the agency/autonomy of things. In a nutshell, this is not a study on the revolution or any single revolutionary event that happened in the past, but reconfigurations of memories, variations, and haunting returns of a trial of historical events in Chinese independent documentary films. Also, this thesis does not study history, at least not directly, but films about history that record while simultaneously revealing and reproducing history. Many ways and results of these film records notwithstanding, I explicate how things have mediated and recreated the revolutionary past.

Primary Supervisor: Chris Berry

Secondary Supervisor: Victor Fan