Independent Chinese Documentary Cinema: Perspectives on Time and Ecological Phenomenology

This book explores the history of, and approaches to, documentary production within China from the Land Reform to the present day. It examines the institutionalisation of socialist realism during the PRCs revolutionary era; considers the emergence of the fluid xianchang aesthetics and the creation of contingent subjectivities in relation to physicist Carlo Rovellis loop quantum gravity theory; explores two factory films through the angle of temporality; argues that time in the post-X era is multi-layered and can be experimented through a cinematic ruin aesthetics; and theorises ecological temporality in relation to Jean-Paul Sartres ontology on being as freedom and Caroline Godarts analysis of difference.