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

在物中拍摄史学：革命的残余与中国独立纪录片

• 批准号: 2895464
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: King's College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2895464
• 关键词: Filming; Historiography; Things; Residues; Revolution

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.Specifically, I investigate the reconfigurations of four residues of revolution in Chinese independent documentary films made by Xu Xing, Yu Shuang, Li Yifan, and Zhao Dayong in the contemporary or post-socialist era as some may call it. The legal dossier, Mao's visage, the location of the factory, and the space of home represent four (trans-)material dimensions in and through which we can invariably find traces, leftovers, haunting recurrences, and variations of the previous structure of history. Revolutions in the past indeed ended in one way or another. However, the revolutionary past is never dead or even past, at least not in and through things. The structure of the revolutionary history - rather than any specific historical event - in the PRC repetitiously reproduces and refashions itself into some things. The term "residue of revolution" therefore refers to these distinctive and unique material entities that embody, remodel, and recreate history and historical narratives about the socialist past through themselves as an agency/autonomy in films that invariably goes beyond things themselves. Such an agency/autonomy is mediated through documentary cinema into the scrutinising and restructuring of obscure history. The rationale here is, for one thing, to understand history from or with the help of things - a methodology commonly practised in new material history studies and cultural studies. For instance, how materials of salt, sugar, tea, and bamboo have shaped and refashioned culture or how the history of an object/entity, say, chopsticks and railways, may reveal a significant but usually overlooked aspect of the past, such as the culinary history and the modern transformation of the society and people's day-to-day life. And, for another, I argue that a thing itself is a history that may be mediated by independent documentary cinema rather than just a type of historical-material resource. As Latour points out, a nonhuman actor, be it a thing, an object, or a material structure, participates in networks of shifting social relationships, which at the same time cooperatively and interconnectedly construct and continuously reconstruct these networks. Nonhumans, in Latour's view, may act with the same capacity as humans in modifying relations between actors in a network and therefore have agency/autonomy. The agency/autonomy of a thing in this regard can be understood as how it continuously reconfigures history, which also reconstructs the networks.

本文描述了中国独立纪录片中的事物如何重新配置​​自1949年中华人民共和国（PRC）以来先前革命的残留物。我研究了在纪录片电影中的事物和通过事物重新配置的革命历史。我专注于事物 - 无论是一个物体，一个实体，空间还是历史结构）可能会告诉我们一些与革命和社会政治运动的个人对抗的不同或以前被忽视的事情。我试图理解革命后的革命性话语在纪录片电影中的改革和变革过程中，理论集中于事物的代理/自主权，对革命后的革命性话语进行了革命后的论述。简而言之，这不是关于革命或过去发生的任何革命事件的研究，而是对中国独立纪录片中历史事件试验的回忆的重新配置。同样，本文并不是要研究历史，而是直接研究历史，而是关于历史记录的电影，同时揭示和复制了历史。尽管有这些唱片的许多方式和结果，但我阐明了事物如何介导和重现革命性的过去。合法的档案，毛泽东的面貌，工厂的位置和房屋空间代表了四个（跨）物质尺寸，我们可以总是可以找到痕迹，剩余的，困扰的复发以及先前历史结构的变化。过去的革命确实以一种或另一种方式结束。但是，革命性的过去永远不会死，至少没有在事情中。革命历史的结构（而不​​是任何特定的历史事件）在中国重复地重现并重新塑造成某些事物。因此，“革命的残留物”一词是指体现，重塑和重现有关社会主义过去的历史和历史叙事的这些独特而独特的物质实体，这是电影中的代理/自主权，这些电影总是超越自己自己的事物。这种代理/自主权是通过纪录片电影来介导的，以审查和重组晦涩的历史。一方面，这里的理由是从事物的帮助或借助事物的帮助理解历史 - 这是新物质历史研究和文化研究中通常实践的方法。例如，盐，糖，茶和竹子的材料如何形成和重塑文化，或者是如何揭示过去的刻薄和铁路的历史，例如，如何揭示过去的重要但通常被忽略的方面，例如烹饪历史以及社会和社会和人们日常生活的现代化。而且，对于另一个人来说，我认为事物本身就是一个历史，它可能是由独立的纪录片电影所介导的，而不仅仅是一种历史资源。正如拉图尔指出的那样，一个非人类演员，无论是事物，对象还是物质结构，都参与了改变社会关系的网络，与此同时，与此同时，该网络合作且相互联系，构建并连续地重建这些网络。在拉图尔（Latour）看来，非人类的行为可能与人类在修改网络中的参与者之间的关系并因此具有代理/自主权的能力相同。在这方面，事物的代理/自治可以理解为它如何连续重新配置历史，这也可以重建网络。