What (Not) to Wear During a Cultural Revolution

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 pm to 6:30 pm
Venue
Russell Square: College Buildings
Room
G3

About this event

Professor Chris Berry, Film Studies Department, King's College London

Leading public intellectual and Tsinghua University professor Wang Hui has pointed out that the legitimacy of market socialism in today’s China is built on the repudiation of the Cultural Revolution “decade of chaos” (1966-1976). Documentary films like Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone have been building a vital civil archive of testimonials about some of the more traumatic events of the Mao era. But what about everyday life? This talk presents research conducted in Summer of 2011 into film and fashion during the Cultural Revolution. Using film clips to trigger memories and group interviews, we found a complex and gendered picture emerged of how people used clothing to differentiate themselves from others in an era when anything as “bourgeois” as fashion supposedly did not exist, and how they used films – Chinese and foreign, new and old – as sources of ideas and inspiration.

Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. In the 1980s, he worked for China Film Import and Export Corporation in Beijing, and his academic research is grounded in work on Chinese cinema and other Chinese screen-based media, as well as neighboring countries. He is especially interested in queer screen cultures in East Asia; mediatized public space in East Asian cities; and national and transnational screen cultures in East Asia. Together with John Erni, Peter Jackson, and Helen Leung, he edits the Queer Asia book series for Hong Kong University Press. Prior to his current appointment, he taught at La Trobe University in Melbourne, The University of California, Berkeley, and Goldsmiths, University of London. Primary publications include: (with Mary Farquhar) Cinema and the National: China on Screen (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006), Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004), and (edited with Janet Harbord and Rachel Moore), Public Space, Media Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Organiser: Gina Heathcote

Contact email: gh21@soas.ac.uk

Contact Tel: 020 7898 4367