“Cinematic Articulation of Gendered Negativity in Li Shaohong’s Baober in Love” analyzes a film that alienated its audience when it premiered on Valentine’s Day 2004, due to both its experimental style and its articulation of the Other as an enticing yet destructive space embodied by the central female character, Baober. In addition to evoking various negative feelings, memories, affect and senses through Baober, the film “exhumes” a negative core of the world, a destructive force deeply linked to (female) unconsciousness. This paper argues that Chinese women’s experimental cinema that emerged in the early 1980s not only has female characters that become routinely objectified in commercial cinema but also inhabits a negative psychic space in women’s cinema.
To deepen the contemporary Chinese topic of love and femininity, “Postsocialist Chinese Love and Pain in Teeth of Love” focuses on an extremely negative feeling of bodily pain. Bodily pain, depicted as an experience without an object by Elaine Scarry, leaves no space for creation, thereby “unmaking” the world into a tortured isolation. In contrast, Zhuang Yuxin’s 2007 film, Teeth of Love, sheds new light on bodily pain as an expression of intense passion that allows pain to become a sign of love, thereby creating an event to engage with the world. Pain becomes an indicator of the way in which private feelings intersect with public discourses in both the personal story of the protagonist and the historical transformation of Chinese society from the socialist era of politicized feelings to a neo-liberal era. The film’s depiction of the relationship between love and pain demonstrates in the end a convergence between China and Western societies with respect to the intensification of the family’s role as well as its crises.
Extending the scope from gender, sexuality and love to aging, “Wu Wenguang’s Treatment (2010): Documentary Avenues of Grief” adopts the paradigm of the yixiang (遗像 “commemorative portrait”) to show how various narrative and lyrical strands articulate the absent being of Wu’s mother, while the Folk Memory Project (2009-), begun around the same time, gives voice to the living aged. Treatment presents Wu’s attempt to revivify his deceased mother through lyrical video sequences, the review and contemplation of old possessions, montage, dance, and meta-documentary interludes in which he discusses the making of the film and his feelings about it with an invisible collaborator. The Folk Memory Project is a collective documentary program in which more than 150 amateur documentarists trained at Wu’s workstation unfold the experience of history across rural China by interviewing over 1,000 elderly people. These films give them a voice to articulate sadness and regret as well as memory and historical experience.
Shifting from Anthropocene to nature, “Ecological Feelings as Anthropocentric Responses” focuses on the unpleasant ecological feelings and attempts to examine Wu Mingyi’s ecodystopian science fiction The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011). As neuroscientists claim, our environment plays a central role not only in how we feel but also in our cognitive understanding of how we feel about that environment. In this sense, emotions are always “environmental.” So, what happens to our emotions when that environment changes drastically? Stephanie LeMenager answers this question by stating that “feeling ecological need not be pleasant.” The last paper analyzes how the indigenous world and the environmental disaster matter in shaping the characters’ unpleasant ecological feelings and how these feelings have become a public response to anthropocentrism.
The panel includes scholars from different career stages, gender and ethnic backgrounds. Papers will be limited to 14 minutes to secure a 15-minute discussion period.