Feminist approaches in women’s first person documentaries from East Asia

Abstract

This Special Issue of Studies in Documentary Film focuses on a specific practice in nonwestern documentary cinema, women’s first person documentary from East Asia. Investigating this exciting area with aesthetically innovative, and socially challenging practices, it aims to contribute to our knowledge of the ways in which women filmmakers use their cameras to access both intimate and public spaces, and how first person filmmaking practices help us understand what it means to be a feminist, a filmmaker, and most of all, a woman, in this region. With academic literature on first person documentary practice and personal cinema developing at a rapid rate, current studies have contributed significantly to understanding the motivations, patterns, and the construction of self in this practice. While the majority of studies have in large part focused on Western cultural expression (Renov 1996, 2004, 2008; Lebow 2008; Rascaroli 2009, 2017), there have been some notable exceptions. In Rachel Gabara’s monograph From Split to Screened Selves (2006), Francophone North and West African first person works, including films, are examined in conversation with those made by French-born writers and filmmakers, all read through a post-colonial lens. An influential volume in the field, Alisa Lebow’s edited collection The Cinema of Me (2012) includes studies of first person films from India, Brazil, Argentina and Palestine, among other places. Theorising under China’s individualisation process, Kiki Tianqi Yu’s groundbreaking monograph ‘My’ Self on Camera (2019a) explores contemporary first person documentary practice in mainland China. Analysing how filmmakers make socially and culturally rooted ethical and aesthetic choices, it argues that the Confucian concept of the relational self still largely underpins how individuals understand the self. Yu continues to explore the aesthetics of first person expression in recent ‘image writing’ practice, investigating what the essayistic means through the Chinese literary tradition (2019b). Lebow’s recent work on the outpouring of first person films from postrevolution Egypt, (2018, 2020), is another example of this impulse to expand the field of inquiry well beyond limited Western paradigms. This special issue represents the continuation of this desire to explore articulations of the first person in film specifically by women filmmakers, working in the geographical regions of East Asia, primarily mainland China, Taiwan and Japan. Taking this as its site of focus, this volume explores the multiple social practices and productive forces that inhere in the filmic production of the individuated – female – subject in nonwestern, specifically East Asian, cultures.