Digital documentaries, making memory, solitary spectatorship

Book section : Chapter

The sociology and sociality of film spectatorship remain an understudied field; but the consensus so far is that watching together is the most meaningful mode – and this is especially true of filmmaking which revives memories of repressed pasts. By contrast, watching films alone is considered sad sport, especially since streaming has ushered in borderline pathological practices of binge-watching linked to insomnia, depression, anxiety and disordered eating. This chapter explores digital documentaries from China to suggest the opposite. It argues that solitary spectatorship has hugely expanded as the state has cracked down on public exhibition of independent film and as COVID-19 has fragmented audiences into states of isolated confinement. And as technologies from hand-held camcorders to responsive touchscreen devices to grid-view videotelephony platforms narrow the distance between documentary subjects and their viewers, the meanings of watching alone in an increasingly haptic digitised mediascape are changing. More than this, solitude itself is not simply the state of forlorn atomisation from others. It can also be a time of generative reflection, particularly when filmmaking is politically provocative. As suggested by the Shanghai lockdown video, Voices of Spring (2022), it may even be connected to vital expressions of online and offline activism.

Authors: Hillenbrand, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Host title: The Digitalisation of Memory Practices in China: Contesting the Curating State
• Pages: 239-256
• Chapter number: 12
• Place of publication: Bristol
• Publication date: 2025-09-29
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.51952/9781529253610.ch012
• EISBN: 9781529253610
• ISBN: 9781529253597
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter