Description
China’s decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (CR) was launched in 1966. The 50 th anniversary in 2016 sparked multiple efforts in China and elsewhere to look back and reflect on the events that indelibly shaped the country and its people. Two such projects in process, one from Dartmouth College and the other from the University of Pittsburgh (UP), were presented to the Foundation’s Asia Program. Both were initiated by East Asian librarians, Zhang Haihui at UP and Nian Lin Xie at Dartmouth. Given the projects’ complementarity, program staff inquired about the possibility of collaboration, and the result is the proposed Unreconciled Memories: Reflections on China’s Cultural Revolution .
Unreconciled Memories is a documentary project consisting of a film based on over 100 video interviews collected by the two librarians and their colleagues, companion websites and accompanying curricular materials. In UP’s “CR/10” oral history project, ordinary Chinese citizens are given ten minutes to share memories of the ten years from 1966 to 1976. Dartmouth’s “Illuminating Firsthand Experiences from China’s Rusticated Youth” focuses on interviews with those relocated to rural areas to “learn from the workers and peasants” during the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement. Selections from these oral histories along with stock film footage from the era and documents including letters, diaries and photographs provided by those interviewed will be used to produce the documentary film, directed by Edward Gunn, emeritus professor of Chinese language, literature and culture at Cornell.
Zhang and Xie write, “In the ten years of the CR, millions of Chinese citizens were killed, untold numbers committed suicide, and tens of millions experienced persecution, imprisonment, loss of educational opportunities, and forced relocation. While this tragic history hangs heavy over the collected interviews, a range of experiences is represented. The proposed documentary will not only outline the political history of the CR but will also feature personal histories to show how this incident unfolded unevenly in China, affecting people at all levels of society in unequal ways. It will include interviews with scholars of modern Chinese history…and explore how the CR has been remembered, misremembered, or repressed. Today the topic of the CR is a main target of Chinese government censorship. Our documentary will let the interviewees assert what they believe must not be forgotten about this era.”
The project directors will work with Diana Marston Wood, consultant to the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, and faculty in Asian studies at UP, to design accompanying teaching material for secondary and tertiary education. Outreach efforts will include screenings in collaboration with Carnegie-Mellon University and Duquesne University and at member institutions of the Nine University and College International Studies Consortium of Georgia. UP also plans to submit the film for inclusion in the Film Expo of the Association for Asian Studies and to place it for broadcast on public television through series such as POV . Approximately 200 copies of the film will be provided to university libraries free of charge. UP’s University Library System will make the film available for open-access streaming and the collected primary source materials will also be accessible online in digital archives at UP and Dartmouth.
Grant funds would cover the time of Gunn and others involved in film production and curriculum development, associated travel costs, rights clearance, subtitles, and transcription and translation.
