Monday, April 20, 2015

Presenter: Linda Zhang, LRCCS MA

Faculty Discussant: S.E. Kile, Asian Languages & Cultures

Abstract:
“Narrative or Archive? History and Memory in Ghost Festival (Guijie)”

A film that encompasses personal history through memory, Ghost Festival (Guijie) highlights several key questions about narrative and realism in contemporary Chinese documentary. Filmed by Shen Jie from Guizhou, Ghost Festival hit the Chinese independent festival circuit during 2013. Only 46 minutes long, the film’s sole subject is Shen Jie’s 80-year-old mother who mourns for deceased family members during the Ghost Festival rites, while recalling in their dialect the family history under the backdrop of land reform and the Great Famine. The filmmaker occasionally shifts the lighting between states of illumination, haziness, to complete darkness. Image obscured, only his mother’s voice remains, relating a memory marked by fear, distrust, pain, and joy.

In this paper, I seek to uncover the film’s desire to present a competing rendition of historical archive and “reality” through the marginalized rural voice. I examine the subjectivities of the filmmakers and subjects from Ghost Festival and films from the Caochangdi Folk Memory Project, which also record folk, village, and personal histories. My paper analyzes the process of how these memories of land reform, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution translate from local dialects to Mandarin subtitles, and in turn from Mandarin subtitles to English subtitles. Furthermore, I look at cinematic transitions from diegetic sound to non-diegetic sound which together construct a narrative of intimacy with the village and the filmmaker’s emotions. Thus, I argue that there lies an antithetical tension in how Ghost Festival both records “reality” through memories while also expressing the subjectivity of the filmmaker. In a broader vein, this paper is concerned with how a film such as Ghost Festival retains historical and cultural memory while also challenging normative histories about the transition between Socialism and Post-socialism.

BIO: 

Linda C. Zhang’s research focuses on the legibility of marginalized voices within contemporary Chinese cultural production. Her current projects focus on independent cinema, documentary film, migrant worker poetry, and the history of literary realism. She is currently a Master’s Student studying contemporary Chinese visual culture and literature at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.