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• 1 2017-05-09T11:08:51-07:00 Experimental Modes of Storytelling: Innovative Ways to Rewrite History Through Literature, Art, and Film 26 gallery 2019-06-12T00:20:12-07:00 In Liu Cixin’s short story “The Weight of Memories” (Rensheng 人生, 2011) the burden of memory inheritance is the topic of a series of dialogues between a fetus, his mother, and a doctor. The mother, a migrant worker, passes on her traumatic memories, which in her mind have been rewritten as a series of exciting life opportunities, to her unborn child, who subsequently cannot endure the pain and takes his own life before birth. A nagging sense of social responsibility toward the traumatic past is one possible explanation for the logic driving each generation’s incessant desire to record and document and aligns with the present-day assumption that digital technology allows for quicker and easier accessibility to data, but as Liu’s story illustrates, that same desire can also lead to intolerable suffering.
  
  The drive to preserve and commemorate is also inherently subject to manipulation of the ways in which memory is structured. While new technological tools facilitate modes of information dissemination, they can also distort information, whether in the form of airbrushing women’s bodies on magazine covers, or as in the case of Facebook, where the memories on display are carefully curated by individual users as part of cultivating their online personae, and the practice of selective memory results in a warped version of reality. Writers, visual artists, and filmmakers are experimenting with creative new ways to address the challenges of commemorating history in present-day China.
              Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008) uses the convention-breaking, hybrid genre of docufiction to preserve fifty years of history of the Chengfa 420 factory and its workers. Jiwei Xiao’s “The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke’s Films” (Senses of Cinema, Issue 59, Jun. 2011) explains how Jia can effectively “hold nostalgia at bay” despite his “retrospective attention to the socialist past” (8).
             Cao Fei’s film La Town (2014) features a mythical post-apocalyptic town built and deconstructed with model figures and is narrated through the enigmatic dialogue between an unnamed man and woman modeled after the two main characters in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), a film about the devastating effects of the atom bomb during WWII. Describing the surreal confrontation between a post-apocalyptic near-future and a yearning for the mythical past, La Town is at once every place and no place. Making use of references to easily recognizable twentieth and twenty-first century transnational representations of memory and trauma such as Hiroshima Mon Amour and the Walking Dead, Cao Fei makes contemporary Chinese art film legible in the world context, but also forces viewers to consider the futility of museums and other modes of commemoration.
             
  In “Some Actions Which Haven’t Been Defined Yet in the Revolution,” the artist Sun Xun uses the woodcut form to depict the process of reconciling different versions of history, such as official history or textbook history, and anecdotal or oral history. The short animation, which is based on over 5,000 woodcuts and took more than a year to produce, addresses the history-making process from the perspective of one individual’s typical “day in the life.”