KKF at the Barbican: One Second (12A) & Screentalk with Dr. Jie Li and Dr. Chris Berry, Book Signing + Reception, 28 Nov 2024

Thursday 28th November, 6.15pm
Barbican Cinema 1
Standard ticket price: £13, concessions available

The Foundation is delighted to be collaborating with the Barbican once again to present an evening celebrating the winner of this year’s Moving Image Book Award, Dr Jie Li.

Zhang Yimou’s One Second (China, 2020, Mandarin, 105 minutes) intertwines with the ideas presented in Jie Li’s book Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press), which addresses how cinema in China has been used as a tool of both resistance and propaganda. One Second looks at the journey of a man living against the backdrop of China’s political upheaval, showcasing Yimou’s mastery in portraying human resilience amid historical turmoil.

After the screening, Jie Li will be joined by Professor Chris Berry to discuss the themes presented and explored in both the film and the book.

Following the conversation, audience members will be invited to the cinema foyer a wine reception and book signing.

We hope to see you there!

“A phenomenally well-researched, brilliantly presented thrill-ride of a book that draws on extensive field interviews as well as the archive to open up a whole new set of discussions around the notion of state propaganda..The book is a model of nuanced, rigorous scholarship. It’s as exciting a moment as I can remember in the field of film book publishing, with a plethora of groundbreaking work being made available across the board.”
Kieron Corless, 2024 Award Judge

Jie Li is Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, her research interests center on the mediation of memories in modern China. Her first book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia, 2014), excavates a century of memories embedded in two alleyway neighborhoods destined for demolition. Her second monograph, Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era (Duke University Press, 2020), explores contemporary cultural memories of the 1950s to the 1970s through textual, audiovisual, and material artifacts, including police files, photographs, documentary films, and museums. Li has co-edited a volume entitled Red Legacies: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Harvard Asia Center, 2016). Her current book project, Cinematic Guerrillas: Maoist Propaganda as a Spirit Medium explores film exhibition and reception in socialist China, including movie theatres and open-air screenings, projectionists and audiences, as well as memories of revolutionary and foreign films. Her other research projects include a transnational film history of Manchuria and a cultural history of noise in modern China.

Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. Prior to his current appointment, he taught at La Trobe University in Melbourne, The University of California, Berkeley, and Goldsmiths, University of London. Primary publications include: Cinema and the National: China on Screen; Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution; Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation; Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture; Public Space, Media Space; Chinese Cinema, 4 vols, The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record; Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and Social Space; Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes; TV China; Chinese Films in Focus; Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After.