AustLit

This tribute to Paul Willemen's scholarship is inspired by his debate with Kim Soyoung about the use of the freeze-frame in South Korean film as “blockage”. It examines the phenomenon of splitting and doubling in contemporary independent Chinese films about young women alone in the public sphere, and in particular Liu Shu's Lotus (Xiao He, 2012). As well as the comparison with the South Korean situation, the essay locates these films in the long lineage of Chinese films that use the figure of the woman alone in the public sphere as a symbol of China alive in the bitter seas of modernity. The essay argues that instead of blockage, perhaps what we find with splitting and doubling is a symptom of compulsory progress under conditions of Chinese neo-liberalism, which combines a one-party authoritarian political system with a market economy structured around growth. (Source: publisher's abstract)