Wednesdays, 5-7pm, K2.31 (Nash Lecture Theatre)
Semester 1
8th October 2025
Mingkun Li (KCL): “Peripheral Official Memory Work: Mediating Third Front Memories through Television Documentary in 1980s China”
Abstract:
The Third Front Students (1998) is a historical documentary series produced under the authority
of the Shaanxi provincial government, intended to commemorate and celebrate the patriotic spirit
of the child labourers, named the Third Front students, who participated in railway construction
between 1969 and 1972. Yet the film embeds numerous elements of blood, pain, and remorse,
which form a sharp paradox with its master narrative and ultimately undermine its propagandistic
aim. After its broadcast, the film not only failed to consolidate patriotic memory but instead
became a catalyst for subsequent protests and petitions by the Third Front student community.
This presentation, drawing on archive research and textual analysis, investigates the film’s
production process, the actors involved, and the cinematic construction of trauma. I first find that
although the series was officially presented as a government production, its actual filming,
funding, logistics, and political support were organised primarily by the Third Front student
community itself. Then, borrowing Thomas Elsaesser’s notion of parapraxis, I argue that the
documentary presents, on the poetic level, a ‘performance of failure’, namely the contradictions
between form and content in its constructing trauma; and, on the political level, a ‘failed
performance’, revealing how the producer—this community itself, comprising multiple political
and social actors—was itself entangled in ideological rupture and internal conflicts, and thus
struggled to assign stable meaning to trauma or to construct a unified identity. By dissecting these
paradoxes and fissures, this study seeks to reconceptualise the official media in a one-party state:
Rather than being a top-down dogmatic propaganda film, it is revealed as a media practice and
mediation process marked by internal and potential contradictions and tensions.
Bio:
Mingkun Li is a final-year PhD candidate whose research interests focus on the intersection
between screen media, memory, and politics. His doctoral project investigates how social actors
in post-socialist China (1978–present) have engaged with screen media to intervene in public
memory of the Third Front Movement—a large-scale Cold War-era campaign of military-industrial
construction and population relocation. His recent work on memory, documentary, and digital
activism has been published in Memory Studies.
https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/mingkun-li
Chair: Chris Berry
Followed by drinks reception in the room
22 October
Nezih Erdoğan (Istinye University Istanbul): “Adventures in Modernity and
Spectatorship: Early Years of Cinema in Istanbul”
https://iletisim.istinye.edu.tr/en/kadro/8874
Chair: Iain Smith
12 November
Neda Genova (University of Southampton): “Politics of Surfaces: Humour,
Mediation and Abstraction on the Terrain of Sofia”
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/65mb96/doctor-neda-genova
Chair: Daniel Mann
26 November
Christian Keathley (Middlebury College): “Cinephilia and History, or The
Mystery of William Keighley”
https://www.middlebury.edu/college/people/christian-keathley
Chair: Tom Brown
3 December
Lawrence Alexander (University of Oxford): “Face Value in Contemporary
Moving Image Art: Aesthetics and Politics in Harun Farocki, William
Kentridge, and Hito Steyerl”
https://www.rsa.ox.ac.uk/people/lawrence-alexander
Chair: Jinhee Choi
Semester 2
28 January 2026
Kay Dickinson (University of Glasgow): “From Background to Binary:
Migrant Extras Amidst Labour Market Upheavals”
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/staff/kaydickinson/
Chair: Erica Carter
4 February
Xin Peng (University of Cambridge): “James Wong Howe’s Chinese Picture”
https://www.mmll.cam.ac.uk/dr-xin-peng
Chair: Elena Gorfinkel / Chris Berry
18 February
Farshad Zahedi (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid): “Asian Ecocinemas and
the Anthropocene”
https://www.uc3m.es/ss/Satellite/DeptComunicacion/en/DetallePersonalDept/1371320073513/idu-81644
Chair: Victor Fan
4 March
Martine Beugnet (Université Paris Cité): “Ghost Touch: Film, Tactile Screens
and the Memory of Gestures”
https://larca.u-paris.fr/en/membre/beugnet-martine-en/
Chair: Erika Balsom
18 March
Book event (KCL): Participants and Titles TBC
Followed by drinks reception in the room