'My' Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China

by Kiki Tianqi Yu

Overview

Explores first person narative documentary in post-Mao China. Focuses on the performative and reflexive process of documentary film. Proposes action as a crucial aspect of first person documentary, contributing to the debates around art practice as action.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780748698219
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	11/16/2018
Series:	Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Dr Kiki Tianqi Yu is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London, as well as a writer, filmmaker, and curator. She is the author of ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2019), the co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21 Century (Bloomsbury 2014) and a special issue on East Asian women’s personal cinema for Studies in Documentary Film (2020 14:1). Kiki’s award-winning films include Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016) , and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019. Her curatorial projects include “Dancing with Water: women’s cinema from contemporary China” (Feb-Apr 2024) at various venues in London.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Action, Amateurness and the Changing Sense of the Individual Self

Chapter One: Female First-Person Documentary Practice: Negotiating Gendered Expectations

Chapter Two: The Amateurness and An Inward Gaze at Home

Chapter Three: Nostalgia toward Laojia: Old-home as an Imagined Past

Chapter Four: First Person Action documentary: Longing for a More Politicalised Space

Chapter Five: Ethics, Camera and Language in Contestable Minjian Public Spaces: the Problematic Public Self

Chapter Six: Camera Activism: Provocative documentation, First Person Confrontation, and Collective force

Chapter Seven: Whose Self on Camera? - Motives, Mistrust, Disputed Authenticities

Chapter Eight: From Fragile First Person Documentary Practice, to Popular online First Person Live Streaming Broadcast - Zhibo: Changing Intentions, Changing Individual Selves

Acknowledgements

Filmography

Bibliographies

Pictures

Index

What People are Saying About This

This exciting book reveals that China’s first-person documentary boom takes individualism not as a retreat from but rather as the route to social and political engagement.

Patricia R. Zimmermann

With exhilarating brio, My 'Self' on Camera counters Eurocentric first person documentary. It locates Chinese "I" cinemas within the Post Mao period, decollectivization, and marketization. A stirring account of little known films, it insists the Chinese "I" is multiple, conflicted, and relational, traversing between public and private, home and human rights.

Alisa Lebow

Understanding first person filmmaking in China as always already political, this study breaks new ground in considering the particularities of this personal form of filmmaking as it emerges in the late 20th Century China. With in-depth case studies written by a scholar who is also a filmmaker, this study is a welcome reassessment of the predominantly western-oriented scholarship on subjective/autobiographical/first person film. Tianqi Yu’s book is a major contribution to the field.

Chris Berry

This exciting book reveals that China’s first-person documentary boom takes individualism not as a retreat from but rather as the route to social and political engagement.

Editorial Reviews

With exhilarating brio, My 'Self' on Camera counters Eurocentric first person documentary. It locates Chinese "I" cinemas within the Post Mao period, decollectivization, and marketization. A stirring account of little known films, it insists the Chinese "I" is multiple, conflicted, and relational, traversing between public and private, home and human rights.

Patricia R. Zimmermann

This exciting book reveals that China’s first-person documentary boom takes individualism not as a retreat from but rather as the route to social and political engagement.

Chris Berry

Understanding first person filmmaking in China as always already political, this study breaks new ground in considering the particularities of this personal form of filmmaking as it emerges in the late 20th Century China. With in-depth case studies written by a scholar who is also a filmmaker, this study is a welcome reassessment of the predominantly western-oriented scholarship on subjective/autobiographical/first person film. Tianqi Yu’s book is a major contribution to the field.

Alisa Lebow