Afternoon Hearsay is a film about film. The Chinese artist Peng Zuqiang reminds us that cinema is a succession of moving images, the same way history is a compilation of personal and collective stories and memories.

Peng Zuqiang composes a fragmented montage of film strips in motion to recompose the forgotten history of 8.75mm celluloid. 8.75mm was a filmmaking format produced exclusively in China between the 1960s and 80s, developed by the Chinese state as a cheap way to spread educational, cultural and political propaganda to rural areas. A format without a dedicated camera to prevent people from filming back.

Who has been telling the story of China’s past? How are and were narratives created and circulated? Peng Zuqiang contests the state’s historical and ongoing grip on collective memory, its control over what and who is made visible, and so what and who is remembered.

To do this, Peng Zuqiang turns to Super 8, 8.75mm’s mass counterpart, designed so ordinary people could shoot their own movies. By blending different filming techniques Afternoon Hearsay echoes the plurality of ways to record history. We finally hear and see from the perspective of those who were denied a camera.

Essayistic in both content and form, Afternoon Hearsay is both an auditive compilation of voices, hearsay, sound, and a visual collection of photochemical abstraction, texture and colour. A journey through Chinese rural counter-history but also a call to the present. A present in which image production and circulation are governed less by the state alone than by algorithms and capital, pointing to the ongoing need for alternative image-making practices and screening spaces.

GVN