Wednesday, September 11, 2024 at 7:30pm
Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth Century China
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
A lecture by Ying Qian
From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In this talk, Ying Qian draws from her newly published book to discuss how documentary was deeply embedded in these upheavals. Situating cinema’s late-nineteenth century invention in the East Asian context of colonial warfare and revolutionary agitation, the lecture will consider documentary’s emergence in transnational activism at the turn of the 20th century, trace its development in political contestation and war propaganda between the 1920s and 1940s, and reflect on the form’s productivity and crisis during the Mao-era, as well as its reorientation in the post-Mao decade. Arguing that there is no universal documentary, but historical manifestations of its possibilities, Qian proposes a method to engage with documentary as an “eventful medium,” around which the dialectical relationship between media practice and revolutionary epistemology can be examined.
The talk will also feature selections from historical documentary films, including, most notably, Zheng Junli’s Long Live the Nation(s) (1940), a rare film rehearsing wartime inter-ethnic solidarity, whose artistic ambitions and political maneuvers could be compared to Dziga Vertov’s One Sixth of the World (1926).
Ying Qian is an associate professor in Chinese Cinema and Media at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, and the author of Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.