Visualising memory: filmmaking as research method to engage with China’s wartime past

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores filmmaking as a historical research method by drawing on the output and experiences from my fieldwork at the Nanyue Martyr’s Shrine, Hunan province of China, where I produced a forty-five-minute documentary Till the Living Memory Fades (2020). Situated on the frontline of fighting in Hunan during the Resistance War against Japanese invasion (1937–1945), this war memorial, dedicated to fallen Chinese soldiers, has survived Japanese occupation and years of Communist erasure, re-emerging today to be visited by groups of people and thus being reincorporated into contemporary China’s war narrative. By analysing selected scenes from the film, I map out the temporal and spatial presence different from the text and discuss how this practice-based research contributes to the current memory study of war. The film uses observational methods from visual anthropology to visualise a complicated correlation between memorial landscapes, material culture, and individuals’ behaviour. It examines how remembering processes have been encoded in senses, embodied knowledge, and lived experiences, generated through affective communication between filmed subjects and the remembrance work organised in commemorative spaces. The capacity of camera to capture multi-layered acts of remembering points to the possibilities of bringing together historical research with practices of filmmaking.