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

本文旨在探讨自1949年中华人民共和国成立以来，中国独立纪录片是如何重构革命残余的。我研究的是革命历史，它已经通过纪录片电影中的东西重新配置。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个人与革命和社会政治运动的对抗的东西。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时期关于革命的话语，在纪录片中的改革和变革过程中，理论上集中于事物的能动性/自主性。简而言之，这不是对革命或过去发生的任何单一革命事件的研究，而是对中国独立纪录片中历史事件审判的记忆，变化和令人难忘的回归的重新配置。此外，本论文并不研究历史，至少不是直接研究历史，而是研究记录同时又揭示和再现历史的历史电影。尽管这些电影记录的方式和结果多种多样，但我还是要解释事物是如何中介和再现革命过去的。具体来说，我考察了在当代或后社会主义时代，由徐星、于爽、李一凡和赵大勇制作的中国独立纪录片中四种革命残余的重新配置。法律的档案、毛泽东的面孔、工厂的位置、和家的空间代表了四个（反）物质维度，在这些维度中，我们总是可以找到痕迹，遗留物，挥之不去的重现，以及先前历史结构的变化。过去的革命确实以这样或那样的方式结束。但是，革命的过去从来没有死过，甚至没有过去，至少没有在和通过的东西。中国革命历史的结构--而不是任何具体的历史事件--反复地复制和改造自己成为一些东西。因此，“革命残余”一词指的是这些独特而独特的物质实体，它们通过电影中的媒介/自主性体现、重塑和再造了关于社会主义过去的历史和历史叙事，这些媒介/自主性总是超越了事物本身。这样一种媒介/自主性通过纪录片电影进入对晦涩历史的审视和重组。其基本原理是，一方面，从事物中或借助事物来理解历史，这是新材料史研究和文化研究中普遍采用的方法。例如，盐、糖、茶和竹子的材料如何塑造和重塑文化，或者一个物体/实体的历史，比如筷子和铁路，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的现代转型以及人们的日常生活。另一方面，我认为，一件事本身就是一段历史，可以通过独立的纪录片电影，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，无论是一个事物、一个物体还是一个物质结构，都参与了不断变化的社会关系网络，同时这些网络又相互合作、相互联系地构建和不断重建这些网络。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/自主权。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构历史，这也重构了网络。

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.