Precarious Nostalgia in Youth [芳华] (2017): Cinematic Memory Before and After Revolution
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This essay investigates how nostalgia, as a mode of engaging with the past, changes in post-socialist Chinese cinema, with a particular focus on the film Youth [芳华] (Feng Xiaogang, 2017). Although once used as an ideological tool by the Chinese Communist Party, nostalgia’s status becomes more contested under neoliberal economic conditions. Rather than offering a unified representation of the past, nostalgia begins to serve multiple objectives: political, personal, commercial and subversive. Revolutionary symbols and historical events, such as model dramas and the Sino-Vietnamese War, are not only commodified but also stripped of their historical context, imbued with a more generic emotional appeal, and deployed to tacitly resist dominant political narratives. Nostalgia has become a way of navigating state authority, market interests, and individual memory, but it also works to subtly reshape the narratives on which traditional Chinese cinema once depended.
Abstract
This essay investigates how nostalgia, as a mode of engaging with the past, changes in post-socialist Chinese cinema, with a particular focus on the film Youth [芳华] (Feng Xiaogang, 2017). Although once used as an ideological tool by the Chinese Communist Party, nostalgia’s status becomes more contested under neoliberal economic conditions. Rather than offering a unified representation of the past, nostalgia begins to serve multiple objectives: political, personal, commercial and subversive. Revolutionary symbols and historical events, such as model dramas and the Sino-Vietnamese War, are not only commodified but also stripped of their historical context, imbued with a more generic emotional appeal, and deployed to tacitly resist dominant political narratives. Nostalgia has become a way of navigating state authority, market interests, and individual memory, but it also works to subtly reshape the narratives on which traditional Chinese cinema once depended.