Independent Chinese Documentary Cinema: Perspectives on Time and Ecological Phenomenology

This book explores the history of, and approaches to, documentary production within China from the Land Reform to the present day. It examines the institutionalisation of socialist realism during the PRC’s revolutionary era; considers the emergence of the fluid xianchang aesthetics and the creation of contingent subjectivities in relation to physicist Carlo Rovelli’s loop quantum gravity theory; explores two factory films through the angle of temporality; argues that time in the post-X era is multi-layered and can be experimented through a cinematic ruin aesthetics; and theorises ecological temporality in relation to Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology on being as freedom and Caroline Godart’s analysis of difference.

Muyun Liu, PhD, is currently employed by the Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia. She is a lawyer based in Melbourne, and received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2018.