Estranged Reality: on Narrative Strategies of Early Chinese Independent Film

摘要

This paper discusses a political practice of film language carried out by the emerging Chinese independent filmmakers at the end of the 20th century. After a careful reading and symptom analysis of the "estranged" narrative passages in four representative independent films in the 1990s, this paper puts forward that the early Chinese independent film relied on the estranged camera language to take anti-classical "monologue to the camera" and "anti-imaginary line" photographs, which integrated the author's own situation into the works and expressed the despair and rebellion of the individual after being suppressed by the state and the collective. On this basis, it further reveals the "reflexivity" of independent film, that is, the "estranged reality" against the "illusion reality" under the traditional film mechanism, and the restraining and dispelling effect on the visual hegemony in the consumerist society.