Description:

The Chinese New Year film is a regionally significant cultural form that underwent considerable transformation in recent years. In this talk, I will explore emergent features of the Chinese New Year film in relation to a (trans-)national experience: the annual journey undertaken by more than 150 million Chinese migrant workers and students—the largest recurring human migration event in the contemporary world—to return to their ancestral homes for the Spring Festival holiday period. My main argument is that the capitalist model of development contains an irreconcilable contradiction: subjects come from somewhere, but they cannot access this point of origin. Through a comparative study of Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain(2014) and Lixin Fan’s The Last Train Home (2009), I hope to show that the vicissitudes of the homebound journey in the Chinese New Year film allegorize the impossible desire to return to the place of origin destroyed by capitalist globalization. Whereas the critical documentary makes visible the trauma of capitalist exploitation in its all-too-human aspect, the spectacle of history in the blockbuster action film enacts a kind of foreclosure whereby the repressed economic Real reappears in the register of the political Imaginary. Inserting a non-western perspective into a Western Marxist debate, I reinterpret the problem of the visibility of capital through a structural analogy between Marx’s critique of primitive accumulation and the psychoanalytic theory of trauma and foreclosure. 

Bio: Cassandra Xin Guan 关昕 is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and an affiliated faculty at the Center for East Asian Studies. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology from 2022-2024 and received a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. Her writing has been published in academic journals such as October, Screen, Film-Philosophy, World Picture, and Critical Inquiry.  She is currently finishing a book manuscript, called “Maladaptive Media: The Exigency of Life in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility,” while simultaneously developing a second research project on the dialectic of mass mobilization and demobilization in Chinese state-sponsored media art forms.