When I began researching first person narrative documentary practice in China, there were not so many films of this kind around and there was a general suspicion of this practice within the independent documentary community, of it being too private or too narcissistic. Little attention had been given to the politicality of this practice: how individual makers communicate through a personal camera with their family, surroundings or society as a social engagement. Focusing on how filmmakers turn the camera inwards on their own selves, this book explores a twofold research question. Firstly, how is the self represented on camera in a contemporary Chinese context and what does the filmic self-representation explore? Secondly, during the process of filmmaking, how does the first person filmmaker position his or her self within complex relations with others, society and the state? Responding to this, I took the film text as an aesthetic and cultural object, and examined how the self is constructed for one's own camera. I also examined first person filmmaking as a practice, through which individual filmmakers as agents experience a process of deconstructing and reconstructing their subjectivities. In addition to the eleven films by nine filmmakers examined in this book, and the China Villagers Documentary Project involving Wu Wenguang and ten village filmmakers, more first person documentary films have emerged in the 2010s during the writing of this book.

From the First Person on Camera to the First Person Online in the 2010s

Since 2010, or even earlier, when Wu Wenguang started to reflect on his own practice in the making of Fucking Cinema, there has been a general move to explore the personal at Caochanghdi Workstation Beijing, which was mentioned in the last chapter, a studio of documentary filmmaking and theatre dancing initiated by Wu Wenguang and Wen Hui, Wu's then long term-partner since the early 1980s, a dancer and filmmaker who was mentioned in the Introduction.