Time, Space and Movement

Abstract

Independent Chinese documentary is usually associated with a non-teleological sense of time. Often interpreted through the prism of Gilles Deleuze’s theory of cinema, this distended temporality is understood to reflect a loss of faith in narratives of progress, both socialist and western, in early 1990s China. And yet, it is also clearly the time of xianchang: time ‘in-the-now’, or the time of the contingent. What, then, is the relationship between xianchang as a practice and this particular temporal sensibility? How, in other words, does the former generate the latter?