| Abstract: | How can film become a tool of ‘conservation of remembrance’ and be a part of rescuing and rebuilding of cultural and communal memories? Taking a cue from recent ecologically oriented debate on modernity, this paper will focus on memories through films on rural localities that intently counter the trauma of urban migration and dislocation in and around local ‘dwellings’. By looking at recent Chinese films like Dai Sijie's Little Chinese Seamstress and Huo Jianqi's Postmen in the Mountains, I discuss the directors' emotive re-imaging of local and folk architecture and landmarks so as to dispel feelings of displacement resulted from frenzied urban booming, and posit an emotive ‘embedding’ linking urban migrants to their nostalgic home dwellings. These visual narratives consciously negotiate over the emotive terrains between memoirs of local landscape and nagging issues of poverty and backwardness, between tourist exoticism and ‘emotion pictures’, between progress and preservation, and between the lure of global consumer culture and the beckoning of local and nascent ‘dwellings’. |
