Collective Memory Construction In Documentary Reception

Twenty-Two is a Chinese documentary of Comfort Women victims.It has gained great attention since release and became the first ever Chinese documentary that earned over a hundred million Yuan box office in mainland China.A major catch phrase in the publicity and reception of Twenty-Two is "We face the pain,with no resentment,but remembrance".While mass media has always been considered as an important means to construct and transmit collective memory,study in its reception end is still relevantly lack of literature.Thus this thesis tried to analyze the audience's collective memory of "Comfort Women"history in the reception of Twenty-two,with the case of Douban online film review.Under the theoretical framework of cultural trauma theory,this thesis studied the narrative and visual representations of "Comfort Women" history in Twenty-Two,then took 300 online reviews as reception samples for content analysis.This thesis found that Twenty-Two did construct Comfort Women history as a cultural trauma through carrier groups' identification of relevant groups and their statement of trauma nature.Its personal angle and relatively multi-level representation gained highly preferred reading in reviews' reception,thus its trauma claim was recognized by broad audience.However,film rhetoric and selective representation in Twenty-Two also contained the conscious construction of its producers,which also entered into the memory of the audience,and then went into their memory and identification.Constrained by media representation,collective memory of the audience mainly conforms and supplements the official narration.Negotiated reception of the film consists of only a small fraction,and far from a form of counter-memory.