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Center for East Asian Studies | China’s Transitional Cinema
April 9, 2022 @ 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm
“Microtemporalities of China’s Transitional Cinema around 1979”
A keynote address for the 2022 Trans Asia Graduate Student Conference, sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.
What was post-Mao Chinese cinema before the rise of the Fifth Generation, and can we call it a “transitional cinema”?
Paola Iovene, Associate Professor in Modern Chinese Literature at the University of Chicago, will engage these questions by looking at a handful of 1979-80 films that depict the mass protests following the death of premier Zhou Enlai in 1976. Long unavailable to most viewers, these films have acquired a second life thanks to video sharing websites. This talk will map out how cinema mediated images of unrest and violence when the country began transitioning away from socialism, teasing out the microtemporalities these images revealed about the recent past, and reflecting on their contexts of viewing back then and today.
Paola Iovene, Associate Professor in Modern Chinese Literature at the University of Chicago, will engage these questions by looking at a handful of 1979-80 films that depict the mass protests following the death of premier Zhou Enlai in 1976. Long unavailable to most viewers, these films have acquired a second life thanks to video sharing websites. This talk will map out how cinema mediated images of unrest and violence when the country began transitioning away from socialism, teasing out the microtemporalities these images revealed about the recent past, and reflecting on their contexts of viewing back then and today.
