Mao Zedong died in 1976, but his impersonators are alive and well. This film documents the lives of two people who resemble Mao and assume Mao roles. Peng Tian is a villager from Mao’s home province of Hunan who walks into the Beijing Film Academy one day in full Mao dress to study film acting. Chen Yan is a housewife from Sichuan province, whose mother realized she looked like Mao. The documentary was directed by Zhang Bingjian.
Lifeworlds on two sides of the Taiwan Straits—Cinematic narratives
In a cooperation between the Taiwan Studies Program, the Worldmaking Project and the Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS), we are offering a series of films this semester from Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China, depicting complex and conflicted sinophone realities and illustrating different ways of worldmaking, as
—prescribed in the form of “main melodies” by the powers that be, on one side of the Taiwan Straits: we unravel grandiose political narratives of revolution and revival, between dystopia and utopia.
—described as reflections of the everyday, on the other side of the Taiwan Straits: we are given glimpses of “cotidian lives” among the petty, the poor, the marginalized, uncovering their function as heterotopia.
As these films depict multiple “worlds within worlds”, from the point of view of those above, those below and those in between—from gangster boss, to ardent believer, from the young boy playing truant, to an old housewife, dressed to K*ll, they draw our attention to different types of subjectivities, vulnerabilities, desires and aspirations as effects of everchanging biopolitics in the sinophone world.
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