The Entangled Career of Guo Xiaolu

Born in the People’s Republic of China and based for roughly two decades in the United Kingdom, Guo Xiaolu straddles Asian and European cultures in a prolific career that includes fiction as well as nonfiction films, novels, memoirs, and essays.  Trained at the Beijing Film Academy as well as at the UK’s National Film and Television School, she writes across media entangled with the critical debates raging in cinematic and well as literary circles.  She grapples with feminist, Marxist, post-socialist, post-colonial theories as they collide with the embodied reality of being a Chinese woman in a world that makes her an outsider in her native and adopted countries.  Forces of power clash with “she, a Chinese” (as She, A Chinese, the title of one of Guo’s acclaimed films indicates) as Guo rebels against, operates through, and survives by the various ways in which her gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality are defined by herself and others across borders.  Inspired by the theoretical writings on transnational documentary entanglements by Patricia R. Zimmermann and three of her collaborators (Helen De Michiel, Dale Hudson, and John Hess), this investigation of Guo’s oeuvre focuses on her nonfiction films.  While it is difficult to disentangle her films from her literary endeavors and her fiction from her nonfiction output, this presentation focuses on Guo as a transnational documentary filmmaker who brings cross-border communities into cinematic conversations that transcend national, ethnic, class, and gender boundaries.  With a distinctive first-person voice that places people and places within an orbit that takes the perspective of a diasporic Chinese woman as its center, these films range from encounters with working-class Chinese laborers to celebrities such as Laurie Anderson.  Scholar Kiki Tianqi Yu writes eloquently about a growing body of documentaries made in the first-person by diasporic Chinese women directors to which Yu herself has contributed as a filmmaker, and Guo’s nonfiction output shares many of the same characteristics.  Her films take a critical perspective on gender, ethnicity, and class with a keen understanding of the particular position occupied by Chinese women inside and outside of the People’s Republic.  Guo’s work stands out because of her eclectic choice of subject matter from workers building the Olympic Stadium in Beijing to chance encounters with people she meets as she attends international film festivals and other cultural events around the world.  She moves from the countryside to the city, from the realms of manual to intellectual labor, and across racial, ethnic, and class divides that bring contradictions to the surface and take viewers beyond the autobiographical to a place of profound social commentary.  Films considered for analysis include many of Guo’s short subjects as well as feature documentaries.  By exploring how these transnational entanglements expand conversations around the role of the Chinese woman as a creative and intellectual presence on the world stage, this presentation highlights Guo’s critical voice on capitalism, sexism, racism, and the ways in which various institutions enable and limit the creative imagination of the critic with a camera.