Workshop organised by Lisa Richaud, 2025-2026 fellow at the Paris IAS, Doctor of Anthropology at the Université libre de Bruxelles, and Xu Minghong, doctoral student at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, to be held at the Sorbonne Nouvelle campus.

Presentation

Unemployed, an artist and a former creative industry employee wander and hang out in the alleys and green spaces of Beijing. While an absurd quest seems to be momentarily formulated (the search, for a reward, for a missing carrier pigeon), the film is structured around seasonal scenes in which intention disappears behind inactivity and wandering. But inactivity does not mean absence of action: Dongsi and Shitiao perform minor gestures together, punctuating the silence with exchanges that are often cut short by a clearly difficult mutual understanding.

Unsurprisingly, both directors and critics have interpreted the film in terms of a shared condition – that of a disoriented youth, subject to idleness and uncertainty about the future. However, the staging, centred around the encounters between the two protagonists, seems to avoid the explicit articulation of a collective identity, preferring a mode of sociality based more on the sensory experience of shared time, and playing with the idea of "the identical – here, ’the same trousers" rather than the same identification – becomes the condition of possibility for (not) doing things together.
The analysis will focus on the staging of joint inactivity, which is constitutive of this non-thematised mode of sociality, where the characters seem to be maintained in a state of minimal attention to their surroundings rather than total disengagement. Together, Dongsi and Shitiao cultivate the possibility of a quiet pessimism, the potential of which we will question, particularly in light of the recurring use of "cute" (ke'ai) as an aesthetic category (Ngai 2012) in Chinese internet users' judgements of the work.

Discussant: Emmanuel Siety (Sorbonne-Nouvelle – IRCAV)
With the participation of Anne Kerlan (EHESS CECMC) and Evgenia Giannouri (Sorbonne-Nouvelle – IRCAV).

The session is part of a series of monthly workshops devoted to the aesthetics of detachment in mainland Chinese cinema, organised by XU Minghong (Sorbonne-Nouvelle - IRCAV) and Lisa RICHAUD (Paris IAS).

Description of the workshop cycle

Through recent films from mainland China, this series of workshops explores how filmmakers have been able to highlight a trend at work in contemporary Chinese society: that of individual and collective distancing from normative injunctions to sacrifice the present in the name of future social success. Produced between 2017 and 2023, the works selected for each of the four sessions thus feed into a broader socio-anthropological questioning of the rejection of conventional lifestyles centred on work or ‘success’ (academic, economic, etc.), particularly when this emerges in an authoritarian context, among young people and beyond. How does cinema contribute to a reimagining of what it means to be, to become, or to be-with, when the present and the future are no longer thought of solely through the prism of normative frameworks?

Multiple in their forms and tones, the films presented here seem to us to produce, in their own way, what we call an "aesthetic of detachment", legitimising bodily and emotional states that suspend the intentionality and "capacity to aspire" required by capitalist modes of production or by the Party-State's projects for a "rejuvenation of the nation." We will seek to conceptualise the modes of agency through which subjects influence or resist, even temporarily and without great vigour, the forces to which they are subjected. Through a transdisciplinary dialogue combining anthropological reflection with film analysis, we will attempt to define what the specificity of cinema as a medium does to our theorising in the humanities and social sciences.

Detailed description and program available at the following link:
https://cecmc.hypotheses.org/76125

Parters

EHESS – Centre d’Etude de la Chine Moderne et Contemporaine

Terms and conditions of participation

Open to the public, registration in the limit of available seats.
To participate, please contact the following address: minghong.xu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
Event in French.