This book explores the history of, and approaches to, documentary production within China from the Cultural Revolution to the present day. It examines the institutionalisation of socialist realism during the PRC’s revolutionary era; considers the emergence of the fluid xianchang aesthetics and the creation of contingent subjectivities in relation to physicist Carlo Rovelli’s loop quantum gravity theory; explores two factory films through the angle of temporality; argues that time in the post-X era is multi-layered and can be experimented through a cinematic ruin aesthetics; and theorises ecological temporality in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology on being as freedom and Caroline Godart’s analysis of difference.
Chapter 1: Introduction,
Chapter 2: The linear temporality of socialist
realist film The Great Land Reform.
Chapter 3: The xianchang aesthetics and
entropic rhythms in Doctor Mas Country Clinic and Lost in Home.
Chapter
4: The cinematic simulacra of a hyperreal capital time in the documentary
films China Blue and Chinas Van Goghs.
Chapter 5: Digital ruin gazing in
Wang Jiuliangs Beijing Besieged by Waste and ruinic traces in Zhao
Liangs Behemoth.
Chapter 6: Ecological ontology and creative gleaning
in Yak Dung, the Aoluguya trilogy, Huamulin Village Oh Little Qiang and The
Gleaners and I.
Muyun Liu, PhD, is admitted to the Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia. She is a lawyer based in Melbourne, and received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2018.
