ABSTRACT
Departing from the assumption that social perceptions of redress and rehabilitation (pingfan) had an impact on the process of redefining the socio-political relationship in early post-Mao China, popular films dealing with the processes of coming to terms with the past of those years are read as both reflections of and contributions to the underlying perceptive framework. Through a re-interpretation of films like “The Legend of Tianyun Mountains” as “pingfan movies,” the text identifies three aspects of redress and rehabilitation as perceived in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The filmic approach reveals an idealization of a golden past before traumatization coinciding with the awareness of having come to a point of no return, a wishing for procedural justice superseding notions of retributive and restorative justice, and finally the longing for an acknowledging explanation from those in charge replacing the postulate of ideological truths. These findings based on artistic expressions point to a complexity of the needs and expectations held toward redress and rehabilitation that was going far beyond official “pingfan” policy and related discourses.
