Representing Tibet in Chinese Independent Documents: New Aesthetic of Space and Time

The 1990s witnesses a second boom of Tibetan documentary in China. The documentary films produced in the 1990s by some independent documentary filmmakers, such as Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue, Wen Pulin and Ji Dan, changes the aesthetic and politics of temporality and spatiality in representing Tibet. This thesis explores the new aesthetic of space and time in No.16 Barkhor Street (1997) and Gongbo’s Happy Life (1999). Changing from “place” to “space,” from “standard time” to “local time,” the new Tibetan documentary goes beyond the modern/primitive assumption and the temporal asymmetry between the Han majority and the minorities, and presents a Tibet not restricted in the past, but rooted at the present, moving towards a future.