Visualizing Truth-Telling in Ai Xiaoming’s Documentary Activism

This study analyses the documentary filmmaking of Ai Xiaoming, filmmaker, literature professor, feminist and rights activist, on the issues of the Jiabiangou Rightist Labour Camp and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The analyses deploy Foucault’s framework of truth-telling in the three axes of subjectification, namely, knowledge, power and morality. Ai regards documentary filmmaking as a way to challenge official knowledge by constructing a ‘truth’, which is based on the testimony of individuals’ lived experiences, rather than narratives determined by official ideology. Ai’s documentary films generate new meanings of xianchang (scene) by recognizing experiences and traumatic memories of grassroots individuals regarding the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, thereby contradicting state representation. The fear between citizens and the police is dismissed by interpreting the confrontational video gaze as (1) a demonstration of citizens’ innocence, (2) a forging of citizens’ on-the-spot solidarity and (3) disclosure of the state power’s less arbitrariness in front of the camera. Ai’s interactions with documentary participants illustrate a new taidu (attitude), namely, new patterns of (1) less-dominated authorship, (2) documentary ethics based on comradeship and citizenship and (3) social personality as the new citizen in the party-state being presented in her documentary films.