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 (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy /Gothenburg University, Sweden) is Lecturer in Chinese Studies. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University and has taught extensively on Chinese cinema, Asian cinema, and modern Chinese culture. She has been programmer for Chinese and South Korean film at the Venice International Film Festival for more than a decade. Her recent book chapters are included in Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (eds. C. Berry, L. Robinson, Palgrave Macmillan 2017), Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change (eds. K. Chiu, M. Rawnsley, G. Rawnsley, Routledge, 2017) and Screening China’s Soft Power (P. Voci, L.Hui; Routledge, 2018). She has published film articles in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Documentary Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies.