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

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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.