ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that the politics of place has been of ultimate importance to Chinese independent documentary, whose development provides a rich site for engaging contemporary social theories of space and locality. It focuses on Chinese independent documentary as a significant example of social intervention and demonstrates that Thirdspace, polylocality, and performance studies have much to offer to our reassessment of contemporary China in relation to contending theories of modernity and globalization. Ideologically and financially independent of the mainstream political and commercial media, Chinese independent documentary constitutes a particular kind of Thirdspace as conceptualized by Edward Soja. The immediate goal of performance in documentary filmmaking is to unsettle the stability of the existing ideological and institutional systems and to create new meanings in the process, and for that matter the improvised, contingent operations of Chinese independent documentary linked to its much theorized xianchang aesthetics have greatly heightened its performative quality.
