facing reality: chinese documentary, chinese postsocialsim by chris berry

Berry, Chris. 2002. “Facing Reality: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism.” In Wu Hung, Wang Huangsheng, Feng Boyi, eds, Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000). Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 121-131.


cinema verite of Fred Wiseman and Ogawa Shinsuke

p121 In the People's Republic of China,however,postsocialism has more parallels with Lyotard's postmodernism, where the forms and structures of the modern (in this case socialism) persist long after faith in grand narrative that authorizes it has been lost. Furthermore, this condition is even felt in the West, where the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 forced those on the left-- do such terms make sense anymore?-- to confront not only declining faith in liberal capitalist democracy but also the absence of any visible alternative. In other words, I write this essay not with a neo-Cold War hope that China may one day join the "free world," but out of a shared interest in the question of tactical response to having to work in the globalizing territory of what de Certeau calls "the space of the Other," at a time when the absence of visible and viable outside space threatens the meaningfulness of the very phrase.

post-Berlin Wall film Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life