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5 - Coming Out of The Box, Lalas with DV Cameras

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2020

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Summary

Abstract

This chapter focuses on China's earliest documentaries about lesbian subjects, The Box (Ying Weiwei, 2001) and Dyke March (Shi Tou/Ming Ming, 2004), examining the imbrication of technique and content, and the issue of “objectivity” in documentary filmmaking. It further raises the question of how we produce knowledge about social others. Foregrounding the tension between The Box's knowledge/power scheme and LGBTQ-oriented politics, I then turn to Dyke March to explore the contrast in its sensitivity to the socio-political specificities of its subjects, and its political activist responsibility for its subjects. This chapter finally introduces four more recent lesbian documentaries from China, highlighting a developing trend in Chinese lesbian documentary filmmaking: independent production that emphasizes both collaboration and the specificity of a lesbian identity.

Keywords: documentary, lesbian, The Box, Dyke March

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, independent documentary filmmaking flourished in the People's Republic of China, as Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, Zhang Yuan, and Jiang Yue launched what is commonly referred to as the Chinese New Documentary Movement. Until the mid-1990s, this movement was dominated by men, but ever since Li Hong's Out of Phoenix Bridge (1997), films by female documentarists like Yang Lina, Liu Xiaojin, and Tang Danhong have focused on the turmoil and uncertainty of life in postsocialist China. Zhang Zhen argues that these contemporary women filmmakers are connected by their focus on issues of social change, particularly their effects on women. This approach diverges from that of their male peers in general, especially the epic and idealistic perspective advocated in Dziga Vertov's concept of “Kino-Eye,” as seen in The Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Accordingly, Zhang calls these documentarists, “women with video cameras.” Continuing to examine female homoeroticism in China’s changing mediascape, this chapter moves from socialist settings to the current postsocialist environment with its “awakening of new desires and identities,” focusing on two independent documentaries made by women: The Box (2001) and Dyke March (2004). While The Box was single-handedly produced, directed, shot, and edited by Echo Y. Windy (Ying Weiwei), Dyke March was a collaborative work by a lesbian couple, Shi Tou and Ming Ming.

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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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