The 2024 Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival has concluded. On November 16, during the 37th China Film Golden Rooster Awards ceremony, when the distinguished fourth-generation director Xie Fei was awarded the honor of the "Lifetime Achievement Award (Film)" from the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the entire audience stood up and applauded.
The camera swept across the front row of the audience, capturing the emotional sight of Xie Fei's former students from Beijing Film Academy—fourth-generation directors such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Yin Li, and Li Shaohong—along with younger filmmakers like Shen Ao, all moved to tears. In his acceptance speech, the 82-year-old Xie Fei reminisced about the inaugural China Film Golden Rooster Awards held in Hangzhou in 1981, saying, "At that time, I was 39 years old and the youngest member of the selection committee, while the others were all senior figures in the arts."
At the 37th China Film Golden Rooster Awards ceremony, Director Xie Fei received the "Lifetime Achievement Award (Film)" from the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles.
As the most heartfelt moment of the award ceremony, it seemed as if the entire timeline of over forty years of Chinese cinema crystallized in that instant. Looking ahead to 2025, we are about to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Chinese cinema. If we consider the "senior figures" Xie Fei mentioned, such as the honorary director of the first Golden Rooster Awards, Xia Yan, and director committee members Yuan Wenshu, Zhang Junxiang, along with committee members Jin Shan and Yu Lan, the historical timeline condensed at the awards ceremony now possesses an even broader framework and overlapping significance.
Film is an art that carves time, as well as a reflection and record of history. During the Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival, the renowned scholar and one of the first senior professors in the humanities at Tsinghua University, Wang Hui, took to the stage at the Golden Rooster Film Forum and Academic Forum, delivering a lecture entitled "Disappearance, Repetition, and Replacement: Chinese Film in an Accelerated Society," which serves as both a review and an interpretation of the touching moment at the awards ceremony.
Professor Wang Hui delivering his lecture.
The following is a comprehensive record of Professor Wang Hui's lecture. For reasons of length, Pengpai News reporters have made some edits and organized the content into sections based on semantic groups.
"The Accelerated Society is Not a New Phenomenon"
The concept of an accelerated society is a new theoretical proposition, but it is not a new phenomenon. We know that Marx addressed this in "The Communist Manifesto," stating, "The constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted unrest, and all the conditions of existence, are unique to the bourgeois era as opposed to all previous eras." In this world, "all fixed and rigid relations, along with the ideals and insights that accompany them, have been removed; new formations of relationships become outdated before they can solidify..." In other words, in the course of historical evolution, an accelerated society is synchronous with modern society, particularly in close relation to the modern capitalist industrial revolution and the subsequent waves of the information revolution.
However, the contemporary discussion of an accelerated society emphasizes its departure from past focuses on production and productivity, in favor of transformations in technology that alter the mechanisms of time. According to a German theorist, Hartmut Rosa, a representative of the Frankfurt School's fourth generation, "Modern society is a system strictly regulated, coordinated, and dominated by time, and this temporal system lacks any ethical conception." Earlier, Yan Fu translated "Evolution and Progress," giving rise to the notion of evolution and progress; we pursue progress toward the future, yet today everyone acts and hustles under the mechanism of time.
Thus, social acceleration has become a self-propelling system that seemingly requires no external driving force. The acceleration of technology was intended to grant us freedom, but each technological advance simultaneously controls the rhythm of our behaviors. In this regard, acceleration has altered the dynamics of social relationships, which can be summarized in three key aspects:
The first aspect is the acceleration driven by advancements in science and technology. Today, whether it’s mobile phones, computers, or various electronic technologies updating rapidly, such advancements are among the foremost catalysts for change.
The second aspect is the changes within society itself, as the accelerated development of science and technology has led to a similar acceleration of social change. Each day, people communicate online and through videos with various individuals; sometimes, physical proximity does not equate to genuine closeness, nor does distance equate to true remoteness, as instant connections trigger significant shifts in social relationships. Engagements with seemingly distant events forge connections, while we develop unfamiliarity and coldness in relations with those physically closer.
In other words, the rapid shifts in societal changes have resulted in alterations in the forms of daily life, which constitutes the third principal aspect and the most vital part—Rosa's foundational theory posits that within this temporal management system, the relationships among time, space, humans and nature, and among people and things, have all experienced changes at a high velocity. He refers to this as a mechanism of time management that imposes a non-ethical control, termed "time authoritarianism," thereby shaping the lifestyles of people. The fundamental question then becomes: How do we escape from this? This presents a central dilemma faced by a technology-driven society undergoing rapid changes.
Amidst such alterations, there exist certain preconditions, which Rosa did not previously discuss. In analyzing the process of acceleration, a primary premise is the synchronicity of time. When we watch films, regardless of where we are on this planet, films like "Operation Red Sea" reach audiences in Africa, Myanmar, Thailand, and India—all grouped within the same time framework, depicting the emergence of synchronicity.
Poster for "Operation Red Sea."
In the context of Chinese society, a truly global concept of synchronicity emerged in the 20th century. As we stand in the year 2024, we are in the 24th year of the 21st century globally. In my previous studies, I noted that the first individual to define China's position with meaningful global synchronicity and a shared space was Liang Qichao. In 1900, while in exile in Hawaii, he wrote a long poem titled "The Pacific Song of the 20th Century."
I believe that this is the first time in the history of China where the Pacific Ocean as a space and the 20th century as a time frame were utilized to articulate China's geographical position. In his lengthy poem, Europe, America, Asia, Africa, and Latin America were all woven into a consensus within his written work. This space is one of diversity, yet no matter how vast the differences in social customs and individual concepts of time, they are organized within a synchronous relationship, thus resulting in a temporal-spatial split. We can observe similar synchronicity and fragmentation within Chinese cinema.
The second aspect is the relationship with time itself, referred to as temporal dislocation. Due to the modern world creating synchronic relationships, a phenomenon of multiple overlapping times arises. This notion of temporal overlap does not merely pertain to differences among regions such as Brazil, Africa, or within our own country, or even in Yi, Tibetan, or Inner Mongolian areas. Instead, these intertwining temporalities penetrate into one another. This crossing occurs not only among them but also intertwines people's conceptual relationships with actual lifestyles.
Today, we see a surge in time-travel narratives, which represent a dislocation of time, aiming to shatter our existing perception of time. When we consider such narratives from a mythical perspective, they are typically understood along the continuum of normalcy that includes past, present, and future. However, due to technological advancements, there emerges not just a traditional understanding of myths and time travel, but a comprehension of time dislocation.
A French philosopher once articulated that for many who firmly believe in linear history—from past to present to future—this dislocation of time is unacceptable. Nonetheless, he also argued that this may be closer to the truth today; the notion of "temporal dislocation" is more aligned with reality. He noted that "temporal dislocation" itself is anti-historical. What does this mean? It suggests that history inherently contains dislocated temporality. Hence, he later stated, "History exists precisely because people are not always in harmony with the currents of their time, always seeking that difference. Because they defy the era they live in, they sometimes fall out of sync with it, refusing to act according to the specific position arranged through the temporality."
Transformations of Accelerated Society Depicted in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
This statement may seem abstract, but I can provide some film examples to illustrate. For instance, in "Umbilical Cord," a Mongolian mother moves to the city and lives with her brother, yet she finds it difficult to adapt. Her brother, a singer, realizes that his mother and brother exist in completely incongruous temporal realms, leading him to decide to return his mother to the grasslands, to the time of the past grasslands. The mother is an Alzheimer’s patient, often experiencing hallucinations centered around her past life on the grasslands, which she deems "real."
Poster for "Umbilical Cord."
A particularly touching moment in the film occurs when the brother originally hopes to care for his mother in his own way, only to find one night that she has wandered to a lake's edge. Concerned that she might fall in, he ties a rope around her waist and then ties himself to the other end, akin to an umbilical cord connecting mother and child. Yet, viewed through the lens of modernity, especially legal standards, this form of restraint resembles imprisonment and is not accepted in contemporary society.
Furthermore, upon the mother’s return to the grassland, it is no longer the same grassland of her past; it has been divided like farmland, with barbed wire fencing, robbing it of the wild horses that once freely roamed during the nomadic era. Hence, the grassland to which she returns is that of modern time, where she can only find connections to the past through her hallucinations. Through this film, we witness a dislocation of temporality, which is not solely the mother's illusion, but a reflection of the essence of life itself. This indicates the frictions, tensions, contradictions, and conflicts arising from the intertwining of multiple times within the space the brothers inhabit. Ultimately, the film raises profound ethical and emotional questions regarding how humanity confronts significant changes and seeks to find our value within these multiple temporalities, creating resonance and empathy with the audience.
"Umbilical Cord" explores how we ascertain what it means to be human and our place in a rapidly accelerating society. Faced with a non-ethical mechanism of temporal control, how can we transcend it and reclaim those relationships? Contemporary films depict the rapid transformations of accelerated society not just as forward movement like in "The Wandering Earth," but increasingly showcase the salvage of what has been lost, with many works reflecting on the past that is fading away or has already disappeared.
I believe that if we embed this theme within the broader evolution of contemporary cinema, it may not be entirely new but represents an essential evolution. We can engage with this theme by exploring how the acceleration process has manifested differently across various stages over the past two decades—from the 1980s and 90s to the new century—resulting in distinct cinematic forms and intergenerational differences.
It is essential to remember that the so-called generational differences are always blurred because the greatest filmmakers and films can transcend generational boundaries, maintaining their timeless characteristics. However, within this "blur," we can perceive the changes of the times. Since cinema synchronizes with its era, surpassing other artistic forms, it embodies history itself. Not only does it reflect history, but the filmmaking process, technological contexts, and each value perspective are deeply ingrained within the narrative of imagery, making cinema an integral part of history.
I wish to provide a brief retrospective of temporalities to trace history amid disappearance. Since the 1980s, the fundamental propositions posed by the fourth and fifth-generation directors differ from today’s directors. Although both engage with rural landscapes and interpersonal relationships in border regions, there are substantial differences in the expression forms utilized in the acceleration process, all organized within the acceleration processes of different times. It's vital to remember that this acceleration has been occurring for quite some time; it may be that today’s pace of
