Film and Digital Video as Testimony of Chinese Modernity: Trauma, History, and Writing

By visualizing atrocities of the twentieth century, film claims a place in the public consciousness of history by recording, re-envisioning, and investigating the past.¹ For some, a cinema of traumas is an indisputable testament to the violence and the ruins of modernity's dreamworlds.² On celluloid or as digital signals, moving images have recorded gruesome and shocking details of injury in the name of progress, revolution, and purification. They show political movements' frenzied faces, portray modern weaponry's destructive impact on human bodies, and exhibit experiences of pain. Footage taken by amateurs has revealed some of the most damaging acts in the midst of war and disorder, while certain historical films, though regarded by historians as inaccurate, provoke somber questions of justice and moral authority in a world of vast uncertainties.³ Collective memory that is strengthened by moving image testimonials, when channeled back into a sense of history as optimal progress, often reveals subtle or explicit nationalist sentiments and even sexist self-glorification, especially in such places as war museums and shrines.⁴ Manipulations of the images' stark revelations supporting retreat into reactionary identity formations are not uncommon, and state memory institutions regularly use historical documentaries and feature films alongside material objects to manufacture the desired memories. Dueling claims made on the basis of collective memory and historical consciousness raise questions of ethics, in the afterlife of testimonials bearing witness to atrocities.

Portrayals of collective trauma, rising from the same context that bred aggressive power and fueled cruelty in the first place, are not immune from sadistic entanglement with a poetics of cruelty and violence. When viewed from a technologically mediated distance, they feed a morbid voyeurism for de-realized spectacles of brutality in which destructive consequences that hurt become engrossing.⁵ Modern media has trained US eyes to differentiate various forms of destruction and dying that incite fascination and instill indifference—though such indifference does not in itself exclude the surge of hostility among ideological opponents.⁶ Mediated scenes of destruction have great rhetorical force, often evoking what one might call "ideological pleasure," or the pleasure of being on the right side of destructive power as the result of being in allegiance with the ideology or worldview endorsed by the media.

Death equalizes. Catastrophes do not discriminate. Over time, however, memories of atrocities of the last century have been equalized, and the names of national leaders—Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—invoke ideologies, cult worship, and political suppression, which in turn has led to both silencing and dissent. These political explanations are not to be taken as the whole story, to say the least. The scope, scale, and intensity of the "holocausal events" of the twentieth century, Hayden White argues, have challenged the established methods of nineteenth-century humanistic historiography. Today, there can be no attribution to human "agents" who are in full and conscious view of the causes, effects, and moral implications of such events; any expectation of representational objectivity must be set aside as well.⁷ The failure of humanist historiography for White means abandoning realist storytelling techniques and seeking literary modernism to express modernist events in which beginnings and endings, inside and outside, or events and their remembrance do not have distinct boundaries and forms. The impulse of modernist writing to "de-fetishiz[e] both events and the fantasy accounts of them"⁸ has remained one predilection among others in the search for adequate and ethical representations of carnage, especially those occurring in the cold war era. Other modes (realist, epic, ironic, melodramatic, surrealistic, horrific) continue to be taken up to make sense of the multiple symbolic orders entailed in national traumas, not to mention filmmakers' attentiveness to the uncanny remains of trauma and their emotional impact on those who have suffered.⁹ Writing about catastrophes in the somber age of the "after" does not equalize, and narrative and anti-narrative modes are taken up by postcolonial writers and filmmakers to engage the modernist events that take place in the world. To invoke Theodor Adorno's observation here: "[A...