WIAS Seminar Series
“Global History Studies in the post-corona era” Open Lecture：Un/bounding the Great Wall: Sino-Japanese Documentary Media connections in the Long 1980s（1/20）
Abstract
Spanning the late 1970s and early 1990s, a series of coproduced documentaries featuring Japanese entities in partnership with China Central Television (CCTV), have emerged. Emblematic of the Sino-Japanese “techno-friendship,” these projects launched spectacular trans-China voyages undertaken by transnational film and television teams along the routes and territories across the Silk Road, the Yangtze River, and the Yellow River. This paper highlights the Great Wall project, encompassing CCTV’s Wang Changcheng (Odyssey of the Great Wall) and Tokyo Broadcasting System Television (TBS)’s Banri no chōjō (the Great Wall); both aired in 1991.
These projects arguably constitute an epistemological-technological nexus wherein the CCTV crews explore what could be documentary(-making) through/out the location shooting. Leveraging the nexus, the Japanese teams gain privileged access to locations and infrastructural networks, enabling them to configure a multilayered Sino-fantasy, underpinned by documentary epistephilia toward Chinese histories, cultural heritages, and post-Cultural Revolution conditions of the PRC.
I contemplate the Great Wall project’s dis/continuation of the techno-friendship mode. CCTV and TBS have used their journeys along the Great Wall territories to work through disparate landscape-affective assemblages while negotiating East Asian (post-)Cold War geopolitics. While the Sino-fantasy of Banri no chōjō is drastically reterritorialized by its studio-staged reportage on the Tiananmen Incident, Wang Changcheng reinvents a self-scrutinizing gaze upon “China” in the aftermath of Tian’anmen, innovatively realigning the political aesthetics of documentary (jilupian).
Speaker：
MA, Ran （Associate professor, Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University）
Ma Ran is an Associate Professor in “Japan-in-Asia” Cultural Studies and Screen Studies at Nagoya University, Japan. Her research interests revolve around the intersection of Inter-Asia studies, transnational film and screen cultures, and film festival studies, for which she has published book chapters and journal articles. Her current project focuses on the dynamics of translocality, infrastructure, and affect within the context of transnational media across East Asian locales. Ma is also the author of Independent Filmmaking across Borders in Contemporary Asia (Amsterdam University Press, 2019).
Date & Time
Jan 20, 2025 (Mon.) 16:00 – 18:00
Venue
Room 10, 16th Floor, Building 33 Toyama Campus, Waseda University
Program
16:00～16:10 Opening Remarks（IIYAMA, Tomoyasu）
16:10～17:10 Seminar：Un/bounding the Great Wall: Sino-Japanese Documentary Media connections in the Long 1980s（MA, Ran）
17:10～17:55 Q ＆A
17:55～18:00 Closing Remarks
Moderator
IIYAMA, Tomoyasu (Professor, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University)
Prospected Audience
Students, Graduate students, Faculty members, Research members, General participants
Language
English
Organizer
Waseda Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS)
Registration
Pre-registration is required：Please register using the pre-registration link below.
※Registration will close once capacity is reached.
https://form.run/@tyama–0xrGVucUssmrLZNLsxRf
Poster
