Independent Chinese Documentary Cinema

"Muyun Liu’s impressive book offers an original and important study of China’s Independent Documentary Film Movement spearheaded by a group of experimental, grass-roots filmmakers. It explores how the accessibility of digital video cameras led to a new wave of films by individuals motivated not by pedagogical goals but by their desire to capture images of everyday life that document the working lives of ordinary people. These films focus on diversity of voices, plurality of beliefs, and interconnectedness of people from very different walks of life. They also expose economic, social and cultural injustices as well as pressing environmental issues. This is an important and inspiring book that offers the readers a different view of the forces that make-up modern Chinese society. A must-read for anyone interested in the key role of new wave documentary filmmaking in our understanding of the forces that are shaping contemporary Chinese society." —Professor Jeanette Hoorn, The University of Melbourne, Australia "Liu’s book is significant not only for its focus on work little known to English-speaking audiences, or even for its expansion of documentary aesthetics, but for its conceptual depth. From xianchang to moving image as accelerated hyperreal ruin and the tensions of existential freedom and difference, Liu makes a profound contribution to global ecomedia studies.” —Professor Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne, Australia This book explores the history of, and approaches to, documentary production within China from the Land Reform 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. 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.