'My' Self on Camera

This book problematises how the sense of self and subjectivities are understood in contemporary China, and provides illuminating new insights on the changing notion of the individual through cinema.

Understanding first person filmmaking in China as always already political, this study breaks new ground in considering the particularities of this personal form of filmmaking as it emerges in the late 20th Century China. With in-depth case studies written by a scholar who is also a filmmaker, this study is a welcome reassessment of the predominantly western-oriented scholarship on subjective/autobiographical/first person film. Tianqi Yu’s book is a major contribution to the field.

This exciting book reveals that China’s first-person documentary boom takes individualism not as a retreat from but rather as the route to social and political engagement.

With exhilarating brio, My 'Self' on Camera counters Eurocentric first person documentary. It locates Chinese "I" cinemas within the Post Mao period, decollectivization, and marketization. A stirring account of little known films, it insists the Chinese "I" is multiple, conflicted, and relational, traversing between public and private, home and human rights.

Dr Kiki Tianqi Yu is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London, as well as a writer, filmmaker, and curator. She is the author of ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), the co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21 Century (Bloomsbury 2014) and a special issue on East Asian women’s personal cinema for Studies in Documentary Film (2020 14:1). Kiki’s award-winning films include Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016) , and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019. Her curatorial projects include “Dancing with Water: women’s cinema from contemporary China” (Feb-Apr 2024) at various venues in London.