Though I Am Gone (Wo sui siqu) del regista Hu Jie: una riflessione preliminare sul documentario personale in Cina

The paper focuses on the analysis of the family archival footage featured in the documentary Wo sui siqu (Though I Am Gone, DVD, 66 min, 2007) by Hu Jie, a 1958-born author and filmmaker known in China and abroad for focusing his works on the light and shades of the individual and collective history of the Chinese people. The first part of the manuscript is about the definition of found footage itself to systematize the plural aesthetic dimensions created by the use of “recycled images” and clarify what is meant when we discuss documentaries based on archival material. I will then place Though I Am Gone in one of the proposed aesthetic and theoretical macro-categories: personal cinema. I will highlight how it is precisely the reuse of archival material that suggests an experience of a new past, and not the re-presentation in the present of a past event. Specifically, I aim to reflect on the narrative strategies implemented by Hu Jie to communicate memorial events, questioning how the experience of Though I Am Gone operates in the re-creation of memory and its transmission, in the hope of contributing to academic research on contemporary Chinese documentary cinema, the culture of remembrance, and the use of new technologies in today’s China.