Filming Historiography in Things: Residues of Revolution and Chinese Independent Documentary Cinema

本文描述了自1949年中华人民共和国成立以来，中国独立纪录片中的事物是如何重新配置以前革命的残余的。我研究的是在纪录片电影中被重新配置的革命历史。我专注于事物——无论是一个物体，一个物质实体，一个空间，还是一个历史结构——如何告诉我们一些不同的或以前被忽视的关于革命和社会政治运动的个人对抗的东西。对这个革命时代或社会主义时代的重新映射，是我试图理解后革命话语在纪录片电影中的改革和变革过程，理论集中在事物的能动性/自主性上。简而言之，这不是对革命的研究，也不是对过去发生的任何一个革命事件的研究，而是对中国独立纪录片中历史事件的记忆重构、变异和萦绕的回归。此外，本文不研究历史，至少不直接研究历史，而是研究记录历史的电影，同时揭示和再现历史。尽管这些电影记录的许多方式和结果，我解释了事物是如何调解和重建革命的过去的。具体而言，我研究了徐星、于爽、李一凡、赵大勇等人在当代或后社会主义时代拍摄的中国独立纪录片中革命的四种残余的重新配置。法律档案、毛的面容、工厂的位置和家的空间代表了四个（跨）物质维度，在其中，我们总是可以找到痕迹、残余物、挥之不去的重复，以及以前历史结构的变化。过去的革命确实以这样或那样的方式结束。然而，革命的过去从来没有死亡，甚至从来没有过去，至少不是在事物中或通过事物。中华人民共和国的革命历史的结构——而不是任何具体的历史事件——不断地复制和改造自己成为某些东西。因此，“革命残留物”一词指的是这些独特而独特的物质实体，它们体现、改造和再造了历史和关于社会主义过去的历史叙事，它们在电影中作为一种机构/自主性，总是超越事物本身。这种代理/自主性通过纪录片电影被调解到对模糊历史的审视和重构中。这里的基本原理是，一方面，从事物中或借助事物来理解历史——这是一种在新物质历史研究和文化研究中普遍采用的方法。例如，盐、糖、茶和竹子等材料如何塑造和重塑文化，或者一个物体/实体（比如筷子和铁路）的历史如何揭示过去的一个重要但通常被忽视的方面，比如烹饪历史和社会和人们日常生活的现代转型。另一方面，我认为一件事本身就是一段历史，它可以通过独立的纪录片电影来中介，而不仅仅是一种历史材料资源。正如拉图尔所指出的，一个非人类的行动者，无论是一个东西、一个物体还是一个物质结构，都参与到不断变化的社会关系网络中，而这些社会关系网络同时又相互合作、相互联系地构建并不断地重构这些网络。在拉图尔看来，非人类在改变网络中行动者之间的关系方面可能具有与人类相同的能力，因此具有代理/自主性。在这方面，事物的能动性/自主性可以理解为它如何不断地重新配置历史，同时也重建了网络。

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.