Wang Bing’s Filmmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses and Marginal Spaces

This volume offers an organic discussion of Wang Bing’s filmmaking across China’s marginal spaces and against the backdrop of the state-sanctioned ’China Dream’. Wang Bing’s cinema gives voice to the subaltern. Focusing on contemporary China, his work testifies to a set of issues dealing with inequality, labour, and migration. His internationally awarded documentaries are considered masterpieces with unique aesthetics that bear reference to global film masters. Therefore, this investigation goes beyond the divides between Western and non-Western film traditions and between fiction and documentary cinema. Each chapter takes a different articulation of space (spaces of labour, history, and memory) as its entry point, bringing together film and documentary studies, Chinese studies, and globalization studies. This volume benefits from the author’s extensive conversations with Wang Bing and insider observations of film production and the film festival circuit.

Elena Pollacchi is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies and has taught courses on Chinese-language film and documentary cinema, Asian cinema, and contemporary Chinese culture at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy), Stockholm University, and Gothenburg University (Sweden). She holds a PhD from Cambridge University in Chinese film studies and has published extensively on Chinese-language film and documentary cinema, film festivals, and film production and exhibition circuits. She is a member of the selection committee and programmer for Chinese-language film and South Korean cinema at the Venice International Film Festival.