Newshufa’s Weblog

Hu Jie’s film, ‘Though I am gone’ (2006), returned to me in the middle of the night after I’d seen it. This is a documentary about the Cultural Revolution, centering on an 85 year-old man who’s wife, a teacher, was beaten to death by 16 year-old schoolgirls at the school where she worked in 1966 – apparently a contentious story, according to a blog discussion I’ve read. At the time of her death he photographs her body & documents the big character posters of denunciation on their apartment doors. Watching it at the Broadway Cinematheque screening, I thought it was too long, the cinematography was too obvious, the editing too loose.

But there is a quite extraordinary scene – the one which forcefully returned to me later – in which the man pulls out a suitcase containing the clothing his wife was wearing when she died, the bloodied & soiled clothes and bandages. It’s sheer abjection, but it has a strange force, this presentation of the traumatic experience of history not so widely seen I think (or acknowledged – a film festival in Yunan was banned earlier this year, when the film was programmed there). The parents of my mainland students would be the same age as those schoolgirls; I don’t yet know what they think of the film – but the whole thing is available on YouTube and there’s an interview with Hu Jie in Senses of Cinema a couple of years back.