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.

本论文描述了自1949年中华人民共和国成立以来，中国独立纪录片中的事物如何重新配置​​了历次革命的残余。我整体研究了在纪录片中并通过事物重新配置的革命历史。电影。我专注于事物——无论是物体、物质实体、空间还是历史结构——如何告诉我们一些不同的或以前被忽视的关于个人与革命和社会政治运动的对抗的东西。对这个革命时代或社会主义时代的重新映射，是我试图理解纪录片电影中关于革命的改革和变革过程的后革命话语，其理论重点是事物的能动性/自主性。简而言之，这不是对革命或过去发生的任何单一革命事件的研究，而是对中国独立纪录片中历史事件审判的记忆、变异和令人难忘的回归的重新配置。另外，本文并不研究历史，至少不是直接研究历史，而是记录历史、同时揭示和再现历史的电影。尽管这些电影记录的方式和结果多种多样，但我阐述了事物是如何调解和再现革命过去的。具体来说，我考察了徐幸、于爽、李一凡、当代或有些人可能称之为后社会主义时代的赵大勇。法律档案、毛泽东的面容、工厂所在地和家庭空间代表了四个（跨）物质维度，我们总能在其中并通过它们找到历史结构的痕迹、残留物、令人难以忘怀的重现和变化。过去的革命确实以这样或那样的方式结束。然而，革命的过去从未消亡，甚至从未成为过去，至少在事物中并没有通过事物。中华人民共和国革命历史的结构——而不是任何具体的历史事件——不断地再现和重塑为一些东西。因此，“革命残余”一词指的是这些独特的物质实体，它们通过自身作为电影中的代理/自治来体现、重塑和再现有关社会主义过去的历史和历史叙事，而这些实体总是超越事物本身。这种机构/自治通过纪录片来审视和重组晦涩的历史。一方面，这里的基本原理是从事物或借助事物来理解历史——这是新材料历史研究和文化研究中普遍采用的方法论。例如，盐、糖、茶和竹子等材料如何塑造和重塑文化，或者物体/实体（例如筷子和铁路）的历史如何揭示过去的一个重要但通常被忽视的方面，例如烹饪历史以及社会和人们日常生活的现代转型。另一方面，我认为事物本身就是一段历史，可以通过独立的纪录片电影来介导，而不仅仅是一种历史材料资源。正如拉图尔指出的那样，非人类行动者，无论是事物、物体还是物质结构，都参与到不断变化的社会关系网络中，同时这些网络又相互合作、相互关联地构建和不断重建这些网络。拉图尔认为，非人类可能具有与人类相同的能力来改变网络中行为者之间的关系，因此具有代理/自主权。在这方面，事物的代理/自主性可以理解为它如何不断地重新配置历史，从而重建网络。