Open Collections

Abstract

This two-part thesis situates Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy (2024-2025) within a broader (cinematic) Chinese history, placing particular emphasis on the role of cinematic repetition as its structuring principal across its form, gestures, historicity, exhibition, and ethos. Deriving from a growing body of monographs and scholarships dedicated to Wang Bing’s cinema (e.g. Pollacchi [2021], Lessard [2023], Guarneri [2024]), and the tightening censorship around his films, it is essential to understand Youth in the face of the politically charged, hyper-mediated information-world. This thesis thus contextualises Youth in relation to political cinema and observational documentaries, demonstrating repetition as relational to cinema and the world, and as an essential quality to the cinematic medium. It understands cinema as a living political body that thinks and does history, and does so both through written argumentation and videographer criticism. I employ the graphic as a method of meaning-making as the written portion of this project serves as a contextualisation and justification for the accompanying video essay that develops these arguments in tandem. This thesis stresses that Youth stimulates us to gain a more informed view on how spontaneous and automated gestures of repetition are, on one hand forming political thoughts and on the other sentence images, a concept coined by Jacques Rancière, which is a state of the image that has both the fragmentation of the image and the continuity of the sentence. This interchangeable and complementary relationship is especially prominent in Youth, as it is not just cinema that has repetition, but is cinema about repetition, which precisely situates itself in the interchangeability of labour and history. The sentence image is not only found in Youth but serves as a concept that I operationalise in the videographic portion of this project.