Emergent Visions: New Independent Documentaries
Emergent Visions presents screenings of exceptional independent documentary films produced in China and Taiwan, followed by scholarly discussions led by faculty and students. The films selected range from the just released to classics and evince distinct, compelling cinematic visions; yet they all share a commitment to serving as witness to the rapid changes taking place in China today.


Thursday, November 19, 2009      7:00 pm

Rumination 反芻 (Fanchu)  2009          
Directed by Xu Ruotao

Combining narrative cinema, performance art, and experimental theater, Rumination (Fanchu) is a powerful fiction film that focuses on a handful of characters living in a desolate rural landscape during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The protagonist is a boy who comes of age in the fervor, violence, and instability of 1966 to1976 as slogans replace dialogue and youth overturn authority. Rather than simply tracing events in a typical linear fashion, however, director/screenwriter Xu Ruotao projects two countervailing trajectories of time: the film begins with the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution even as time seems to march forward from the film’s first title card, which reads “1966,” the year the Cultural Revolution began. This unique structure not only expresses a new cinema of historical re-digestion, but also evokes provocative associations with contemporary Chinese society. Filmed on a small budget with the help of fellow artists and played by a cast of nonprofessional actors, painter Xu Ruotao’s first filmic endeavor produces a poetic yet haunting vision of these ten years of upheaval, impelling a renewed and realigned confrontation with history.

Discussant: Eugene Yuejin Wang, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, Harvard University


Location: CGIS South, Belfer Case Study Room S020
1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA
Contact: jieli@fas.harvard.edu

 

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