Speaker: Ying Qian, associate professor of Chinese Film and Media, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University

Respondent: Géraldine A. Fiss, associate teaching professor of Inter-Asia and Transpacific Studies: China Focus, Department of Literature, UC San Diego

Hosted by Wentao Ma, Ph.D. student, Department of Literature, UC San Diego

This event will be held via Zoom Webinar -- registrants will receive the Zoom link prior to the event start time.

Abstract

In this talk, Qian thinks about documentary as a caring medium: it mediates relationships across and around the camera, and out of such relationships, it creates attentional formations that make specific forms of care possible. In particular, Qian excavates documentary's important presence in the hard and soft film debate in China's 1930s. By discussing Cheng Bugao's docu-fictions as oppositional to the infotainment of the newsreel and the illusory transparency of the Capitalist process film, and by reading Liu Na'ou's home movies and travelogues as a colonial subject's search for grounding, connectivity, and horizontal relationships that could offer solace and protection, Qian shows that the hard and soft film camps, despite their pronounced differences, proposed complementary ways to care. Qian ends the talk with a 1940 docu-fiction, "The Light of East Asia," made in Chongqing on reforming Japanese POWs through theater and cinema. With this film, Qian thinks further about the potential of theater and film production to initiate transindividual processes of healing, on condition that such productions were democratically organized to practice equity and respect for all people involved in the process.

Biography

Ying Qian is associate professor of Chinese Cinema and Media in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Her first book, "Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Cinema in 20th Century China" (Columbia University Press, forthcoming in 2023) studies the making of documentary cinema – broadly defined to include newsreels, educational, industrial and scientific films – in 20th century China, treating it as a prism to examine how media and revolutions are mutually constitutive of each other: how revolutionary movements gave rise to media practices that reconfigured political and social relationships in specific ways, and how these media practices in turn informed and delimited the particular paths of revolutions’ actualization. She’s now working on a new monograph on media and the ecologies of knowledge in social movements. Her articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, New Left Review, China Perspectives, Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, New Literary History of Modern China, and other journals and volumes. She curates, makes videos, and contributes to activist communities whenever she can.

About the Media Care Talk Series

Dozing at the movie theater, listening to the podcast on the subway, counseling via Zoom appointments, searching immigration policy on the internet…In this increasingly crumbling world, media offer maintenance and sustain our vitality while they also harm our well-being through abuse and addiction. This talk series examines the concept of care and showcases the process of knowledge production surrounding artificial care in media practice. We will browse a range of media objects and platforms - from cinema to teletherapy, from smart drugs to sleep apps - and explore the habitual, affective, and material potential of healing and solidarity within film and media theories.

This series is co-organized by the Film Studies Program and the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts at UC San Diego with generous support from the following: 21 Century China Center, Department of Communication, Department of Visual Arts, Department of Literature, and the Institute of Arts & Humanities.

Questions

Email surajisranicenter@ucsd.edu.

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