4 - Eggs, Stones, and Stretch Marks: Haptic Visuality and Tactile Resistance in Huang Ji’s Personal Cinema

Summary

“The human heart is sometimes very fragile, easily broken like an egg, but it can also be very strong, hard as stone.”

—Huang Ji

Abstract

Chapter 4 highlights the courageous and expressive personal cinema of Huang Ji, a forceful emerging filmmaker who, in collaboration with her Japanese filmmaker husband, made two powerful, award-winning, autographically inflected feature films based on her experience as a sexually abused “left-behind” child in rural Hunan, as well as a home video style documentary about their trans-cultural nuclear family in a time of rising nationalism in China.

Keywords: left-behind children, sexual abuse, trans-cultural cinema, tactile aesthetic, home video

On the muggy late afternoon of August 18, 2012, I was among some two hundred attendees anxiously awaiting the opening of the 9th Beijing Independent Film Festival in Songzhuang, in the city's eastern exurb. The cinema-theater-style auditorium in Songzhuang Art Museum, where previous editions of the festival took place, was made off-limits by local authorities under tightened top-down ideological control nationwide. The new venue is a makeshift art exhibition space, not outfitted for regular film viewing. The organizers set up a stage with a screen and put rows of folding chairs on the floor. Nonetheless, it was crowded with filmmakers from all over the country (with some hailing from Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere), cinephiles, critics, curators, volunteers, as well as members of the Songzhuang community.

After the introductory remarks, the lights went off, and we became engrossed in the opening film, Egg and Stone 鸡蛋和石头 (2011), Huang Ji’s debut feature, despite the rudimentary projection condition. The film had won the Tiger Award for Best Feature Film at the Rotterdam International Film Festival earlier in the year and generated a lot of anticipation in Chinese independent film circles. Based largely on her own experience and shot entirely in her home village area in Anhua county, Hunan province 湖南安化县, Huang Ji's film is the first narrative film to address sexual abuse, trauma, and stunted development among the “left-behind” rural children during China's rapid urbanization and economic globalization, when their parents have migrated to the cities for better-paying job opportunities.

Only a few scenes into the film, projection abruptly stopped. We were told that it was a power outage at first. After a prolonged wait, it became apparent that it was a deliberate shutdown by an invisible hand.