ABSTRACT
The 1990s saw a string of films from the People’s Republic which deal with personal and family life with reference to the political history of Chinese revolution and socialist modernity. The most conspicuous ones among these international film festival-going, award-winning, and commercially circulating films are Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993), Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1994), and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite (1993–1994). Together they mark and culminate a cultural and intellectual trend of pursuing cinematic narrative of a traumatic experience of the past or, more precisely, a visual reconstruction of the national memory through a post-revolutionary catharsis of trauma. In these films, as trauma deconstructs History with a capital ‘H’, a new, somewhat ontological meaning of personal, ordinary, or aestheticized life emerges to fill the vacuum of a past without history, so to speak. Banned or subject to heavy censorship in China, they have been celebrated by critical circles in the West, and often used as a source of standard images in the media commentary on current Chinese social and political developments. Thus, by providing a handle on the unstable and even impenetrable aesthetic styles of the former Fifth Generation filmmakers, these recent epics/anti-epics also manage to insert themselves in the public consciousness as a common point of reference for literary, cinematic, and intellectual discussions on the historical experience of Chinese modernity.
