Tragedy and trauma : remembering the Maoist era in Hu Jie's historical documentaries

Abstract

 Hu Jie (胡傑)’s independent documentaries are distinguished by their historical subject matter and cinematic style. Focusing on the traumatic Maoist era, a time of turmoil and upheaval elided and purposefully forgotten by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, Hu’s films represent the past using an assemblage of testimony, archival footage, and documents, often featuring highly cathected accounts and images of bodily suffering. While scholars, frequently focusing on his use of testimony, often analyze his films as polyphonic works of counter-memory that write alternative histories and belie the official historical narrative, few have examined Hu’s own historical narratives. Despite the films’ subject matter, no English-language scholarship has analyzed Hu’s works as representations of historical trauma. Engaging with historiographical analysis and psychoanalytical discourse of trauma theory, this project will examine how Hu narrates the Maoist era and works through its trauma. It will analyze three of Hu’s documentaries: Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2005), Though I am Gone (2008) and My Mother Wang Peiying (2010). Each film recounts the story of a woman killed in the midst of a mass movement during the Maoist era, and features the motif of a woman with a bridled mouth. This project will argue that Hu uses both narrative and image to represent the traumatic past. Casting both in a tragic mode, Hu’s documentaries pursue the intellectual and psychic mastery necessary for effective and adequate representations of trauma, facilitating the remembering of and coming to terms with a forcibly forgotten past.