Animating herstory? Stillness/motion, popular cinephilia and the economy of the instants in the post-cinema age. Issue 3 (2nd September 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: He, Belinda Qian
• Is Part Of: Journal of Chinese cinemas. Volume 11:Issue 3(2017)
• Page Start: 243
• Page End: 258
• Publication Date: 2017-09-02
• Subjects: Motion pictures -- China -- Periodicals; Motion pictures -- Taiwan -- Periodicals; Filmkunst; China; Motion pictures; China; Taiwan; Periodicals; Electronic journals; 791.430951
• DOI: 10.1080/17508061.2017.1376554
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1750-807X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay examines a popular video The Founding Women (2016) that parodies the 'main-melody films' The Founding of a Republic (2009) and The Founding of a Party (2011) by compiling fragments of many other films, mainly in forms of facial close-ups or profile shots of over 80 celebrities. The six-minute short imagines a recasting of modern Chinese history in which female figures take the place of the dominant male historical figures. Animation, broadly defined as the mechanism of transformation between stillness and motion, serves as a lens through which this essay suggests the heterotopic nature of how people encounter this short in relation to a kaleidoscope of film stills, GIFs, microvideos, screenshots or collages that fleetingly cross their perception and memory. This essay reveals that The Founding Women should be understood, beyond either the familiar form of fan edits or a mash-up video essay, as a (meta-)cinematic encounter within the economy of multi-layered found footage, looks, instants and cinephiliac labor. This essay seeks to propose the possibility of considering animation as method that takes the dialectical relations between stillness and motion as fundamental to cinema's multiple lives rather than its death and associated social dynamics in the post-cinematic age.