Screening: Ruins in Recent Independent Chinese Cinema

An illustrated lecture by Berenice Reynaud.

The emergence of the New Chinese Cinema has been one of the most exciting events in the last decade, as it is exploring new ways to represent a society in which billions of inhabitants are submitted to radical and unexpected changes. A new generation of filmmakers (including Wang Bing, Jia Zhangke, Ou Ning, Cao Fei, Ying Liang, Cui Zi’en) are creatively using digital media to coin hybrid forms between documentary and fiction. This presentation will discuss how this new cinema is addressing an overwhelming phenomenon currently taking place in China, the production of ruins as part of planned urban renewal. The spectacle of such ruins is caused by a variety of historical and sociological factors, including the general shift from heavy industry to service industry, the construction of the Three-Gorges Dam, and the preparation for the Olympics in Beijing and World Fair in Shanghai.

Significantly, a number of new Chinese films articulate how the ruins address the spectator, directly or indirectly, and reshuffle tropes of historical/architectural memory and nostalgia. Excerpts from films by Jia Zhangke, Ou Ning, Ying Liang, Wang Bing, and others will be shown.

Bérénice Reynaud is the author of Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux cinémas (Paris, 1999) and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (London, 2002).  She has written extensively on Chinese cinema and video, US independent/experimental cinema, queer cinema and cinema by women for Sight & Sound (UK), Film Comment (USA), Cinema Scope (Canada), Senses of Cinema (Australia), Cahiers du cinéma, Le Monde diplomatique, Libération (France), Meteor, Springerin (Austria), and Nosferatu (Spain), among others.  A Delegate for the San Sebastian International Film Festival (Spain) since 1993, she has also curated film/video series for the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the UCLA Film & Television Archive (Los Angeles), and is Co-Curator for the film series at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Los Angeles). Reynaud teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.