The films in Our Future is Not a Dream use different memories of the Cultural Revolution to create narratives that, among many things, helped construct national identity, responded to the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, and grappled with the rapidly changing conditions of contemporary Chinese life. In each decade, these films relied on narratives of the Cultural Revolution to bridge the gap between past and present and address new concerns for meaning and belonging. By splicing together scenes from temporally disparate interpretations of the same period into a repetitive sequence, Weng Fen creates a kaleidoscopic refraction of Cultural Revolution memory that allows the viewer to gain a dual experience: the present mnemonic weight of all its multilayered interpretations, but also, emerging beyond the refractions, a real sense of hope from the internal world of the characters.

Our Future is Not a Dream is a work of video art composed of scenes spliced together from a selection of movies that depict the Cultural Revolution period. Each scene focuses on the particular aspirations of the individual rather than large-scale political struggle. Almost all feature conversations between characters with close relationships to one another, particularly couples and father-son pairings. The following is a table of the films that corresponds to each scene: 

Fig. 1. Timestamps of each scene and corresponding film information.

Weng orders the films in a rough chronological order based on release date. In this essay, I group the films into four time periods: films from the Cultural Revolution, 1980s scar dramas, Fifth Generation films, and new box office successes. 

Fig. 2. Film groupings.

Interpretations of the Cultural Revolution

Weng begins Our Future is Not a Dream with Sparkling Red Star (1974), the only film in the video from the Cultural Revolution. After a pause in film production from 1966–1970, 1974 saw a revitalization of filmmaking reoriented around a national style (minzu xingshi) that drew upon the theoretical “three prominences”: positive characters, heroes, and the main hero (Clark 310). Sparkling Red Star was one of these films, and the leadership of its heroic main character, Pan Dongzi, garnered widespread acclaim and admiration during the Cultural Revolution. In a collective essay titled “Learn from Pan Dongzi and Become Revolutionary Adventurers” published in the Beijing Daily, an elementary school group wrote, “‘Like Dongzi’s sparkling red star…we will grow and temper ourselves in the struggle’” (Xu 381). As a mechanism for the formation of China’s national identity, Sparkling Red Star played an active part in the creation of the Cultural Revolution narratives which formed the basis of future memories. By placing Sparkling Red Star at the beginning of the video, Weng uses it as the foundational memory to which the later nostalgic films in the video all refer.

As the era of Mao came to an end in the late 1970s, history—and the memory of that history—became a site of political struggle (Yang 16). The new Deng regime cultivated a state-sponsored memory regime surrounding the Cultural Revolution to their political advantage (Yang 18). The Cultural Revolution became a historical foil necessary to legitimizing Deng’s regime within the larger narrative of the PRC. According to Yang, the official policy for writing histories of the Cultural Revolution, as decided in June 1981 by the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh CCP Central Committee, was that the Cultural Revolution was a “ten-year disaster,” and to “leave it at that—above all, do not be nosy about the details” (Yang 14). A Wedding on Execution Ground (1980) and Narrow Street (1981) are examples of scar literature, a genre that emerged at the same time immediately after the Cultural Revolution as a vehicle for intellectuals to “publicly purge bitter emotions” about the disappointment and suffering they experienced (Yang 45).

The 1990s saw a proliferation of Cultural Revolution cultural products that took on a different, more nostalgic tone. Nostalgia as defined by Miao Hui is “one’s relationship to the past, to the imagined community, to home, to one’s own self-perception. It is a personalised concept that stands in contrast to the official collective account” (Miao 107). During the 1990s, “narratives, images, sounds, sites, bytes, and voices of Cultural Revolution memory…multiplied, presenting numerous tantalizing and forbidden details of various aspects of the Cultural Revolution” (Yang 15). However, these narratives of nostalgia in 1990s Chinese cinema were a departure from the perspective in scar literature. Nostalgia narratives were more personal, and often more emotionally ambiguous, and thus became a counter-narrative to the ‘official narrative’ of the 1980s. This shift was driven by a different generation: the zhiqing, a generation of educated youth who were “sent-down” during the 1970s. The next group of films—To Live (1994), In the Heat of the Sun (1994), Narrow Street (1981), Happy Times (2000), and The Strangers in Beijing (1995)—were made by the Fifth Generation directors, a movement referring to the 1982 graduating class at Beijing Film Academy, the first since the end of the Cultural Revolution. Fifth Generation directors who belonged to the zhiqing generation offered a wider diversity of retrospective narratives than in the cultural products produced a decade earlier (Yang 25).

More than just functioning as a counter-narrative, however, nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution arose in these Fifth Generation films as a specific mechanism for dealing with the rapid social and economic transformations occurring in the 1990s in China (Miao 101). These changes led to a widespread feeling of alienation and loss of belonging, particularly because of the perceived gap in personal narrative caused by the abruptness of the transformation (Miao 106). In reacting to decades of upheaval—first the pain of the Cultural Revolution itself, then the alienation caused by rapid transformation—nostalgic repetitions of the Cultural Revolution narrative had a Freudian function. For Freud, the repetition of traumatic events allowed the integration of those events into psychological and symbolic order (Foster 131). Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution thus functioned as a way of bridging that gap by “seek[ing] continuity with the sense of belonging from the past in order to sustain the sense of belonging for the present” (Miao 106).  

This nostalgia, however, does not elide the pain of the Cultural Revolution. To Live, for example, is a devastating and unflinching account of a family’s struggle through the political upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, the ambiguity of Chinese grammar means that the film’s name in Chinese, huozhe, suggests the process of living—not merely staying alive, but also going about one’s daily business of living (Liang 3). The complex mix of grief, ambivalence, and hope expressed through the Fifth Generation’s films reflects how nostalgia had sometimes contradictory effects: “a warding away of traumatic significance and an opening out to it, a defending against traumatic affect and a producing of it” (Foster 132). When viewed collectively, narratives that were nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution, were not “false histories” that misrepresented the Cultural Revolution—their repetition became a social practice that attempted to engage with present struggles through recourse to past struggles (Miao 107).

Feng Xiaogang, who was born a couple years after the Fifth Generation directors, pioneered a new genre of commercially successful film in the late 1990s: he sui pian, Chinese New Year celebration films. Despite facing a declining contemporary Chinese film industry in which Hollywood blockbusters dominated the box office, Feng’s The Dream Factory was the first film produced within mainland China to achieve significant returns, topping the box-office chart for the year (Kong 178). All of Feng’s subsequent he sui pian achieved high, if not the highest, box-office return of the year (Miao 154). Feng himself claimed, “If you consider the market effect of films, from 1997 to 2000, it was my movies that saved the Chinese film industry, not Chinese film that saved me” (Kong 178). This newfound monetary success—made possible by capitalist economic transformations dissonant with the original principles of communism—required that Feng’s films negotiate a different relationship with the past than those of the Fifth Generation directors.

The popularity of Feng Xiaogang’s he sui pian was driven in part by a cultural exclusivity that created a sense of community belonging. His films recycle quotations from historical characters and classic films well known to Chinese audiences, then place those references within a local and contemporary context in a way that would be incomprehensible to a viewer without prior cultural knowledge. Feng’s films are thus addressed to an exclusive community with not only common experiences, but a shared, local understanding of the transformation of the past to the present (Miao 152). The audience remembers a shared history while viewing Feng’s films, which create a sense of belonging to a community that exists in both past and present (Miao 158). This strategy for dealing with a lost sense of belonging is a departure from that of the Fifth Generation filmmakers. Rather than repeating different but specific Cultural Revolution narratives many times, Feng constructs a cohesive cultural narrative made of a wide-ranging array of references. In this sense, relying on a “totally Chinese context” for his films is somewhat recursive: in order to feel a sense of belonging, the present Chinese audience uses the model of a past Chinese culture—which Feng created and which may never have existed—to circle back and solidify the cohesion of the present Chinese community.

Weng Fen’s Reinterpretation

In Our Future is Not a Dream, Weng Fen splices together scenes from these ten films. The first decision Weng made was in choosing the films. As established above, these films are different in time, context, message, and plot, but by placing them together, Weng makes the films appear quite similar. The second decision was choosing the particular scene from each movie, which he again selected to be conversations about largely similar topics. Both decisions combined have a repetitive effect, which creates a new second layer of repetition: Weng repeats films which repeat Cultural Revolution narratives (which themselves were constructed). The interpretation of this dual repetition also changes based on whether the viewer is part of a cultural ingroup.

The interpretation from a general audience not already familiar with those particular films—or with Chinese cinema at all—is that the splicing is repetitive, because the movies all seem to be from the Cultural Revolution, and the scenes are roughly the same. If the scenes are taken at face value as hopeful conversations between close relations about their aspirations for their lives under communism, the repetition creates a dampening effect. Here repetition functions as “both a draining of significance and a defending against affect” according to Foster (Foster 131). There is no narrative progression in the work, and after watching repetitive scenes of earnest and hopeful characters discussing their aspirations without ever seeing them fulfilled, the “draining of significance” from the repetition leaves the viewer feeling emptier.

The interpretation from the in-group—those who recognize the films as not being from the Cultural Revolution—has some added complexity. This in-group is highly limited because it is specific to people who were watching Chinese movies when these films were released, not just everyone who is Chinese. The first in-group interpretation is that Weng Fen’s splicing actually collapses the films—the viewer sees things they know to be different appearing to be the same. This collapse functions by differentiating between types of time. Within Our Future is Not a Dream, there are two different times: the internal time within each scene and the time of each film’s production (1974–2001). Splicing and repetition effectively negate the time of production, leaving only the internal time that is the same across all the scenes: the Cultural Revolution period. Under this interpretation of the splicing, Weng erases the different memory functions performed by films in different time periods.

However, collapse is perhaps an oversimplification of Weng’s manipulation of time. There is a second in-group dependent  interpretation of the splicing in Our Future is Not a Dream that analyzes the cyclicality and refracting of the narrative. Rather than making the scenes look the same, placing them next to each other highlights the minute differences across each film’s depiction and interpretation of Cultural Revolution aspirations. Because of the proliferation of narratives across multiple decades, “…it has become increasingly difficult to speak of the Cultural Revolution. A thousand Cultural Revolutions have blossomed” (Yang 15).

To help understand the dual action of the repetition that arises from Weng’s interpretive splicing of interpretive films, I propose that we use the metaphor of a kaleidoscope. When a kaleidoscope—or any wheel—is rotated in place, the net distance traveled is zero, but the tube itself has still traveled. The repetition in Our Future is Not a Dream does not have to lead to a collapse of time periods—net zero distance—even if films spliced together were originally from different contexts. Weng specifically chose films that look back to the past with characters who look forward to the future. The relationship between past and present in the work thus becomes one of continual, circular movement characterized by repeated reflections of each other. However, as each scene in the work continually looks to the future and the time of production moves forward, eventually what one scene refers to as the future becomes what a later scene refers to as the past. The effect of the repetition then is the refracting of Cultural Revolution memories, as opposed to the “blossom[ing]” that Yang describes (Yang 15). The concept of refraction helps make sense of the tension in  Our Future is Not a Dream as a viewer between knowing the distinct origins and contexts of each film, but seeing similar conversations on screen. A person looking through the eyepiece of a kaleidoscope sees constantly changing patterns from refracting the same collection of glass beads. In this way, each memory out of the proliferation of memories remains distinct, even as the broad outlines of the narrative are always the same.

Using Rolande Barthe’s concept of a punctum, we see that the model of repetition as refraction constitutes an attempt to access a ‘real’ Cultural Revolution. Only one film Weng selected is actually from the time of the Cultural Revolution, Sparkling Red Star (1974), but even that was a self-conscious project of building a national identity at the movement’s end, and is thus a somewhat oblique look at the Cultural Revolution. Weng’s choice to repeat narratives—and not search for one real or authentic documentary—is essential, because there is of course no ‘real’ representation of the Cultural Revolution: “the real cannot be represented; it can only be repeated, indeed it must be repeated” (Foster 132). Narratives or images thus evoke the real through repetition:

…repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic. But this very need also points to the real, and at this point the real ruptures the screen of repetition. It is a rupture less in the world than in the subject—between the perception and the consciousness of a subject touched by an image (Foster 132).

This point is what Barthe calls the punctum. This concept is useful specifically because of its relation to the traumatic—in this case, the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and then the subsequent trauma of the dramatic changes in Chinese society. Repeating the narratives screens the “first order” of trauma, as in the case of the general audience interpretation, but it also “produce[s] a second order of trauma, here at the level of technique, where the  punctum breaks through the screen and allows the real to poke through” (Foster 136). Only through repetition—and specifically, the repetition of repetition—do the images and narratives in Our Future is Not a Dream touch us as subjects.

I argue that the real which touches us, and which Weng Fen is communicating through his choice of characters, is a sincere utopianism. The real that pokes out from underneath layers of interpretation must be found in the isolated world within each scene in the video—not from analyzing the larger message of the films. If we take the scenes at face value—if we believe the real can be found within the scenes of the work—then the viewer is left with characters who are expressing sincere hope. The title itself, “Our Future is Not a Dream,” could be interpreted through a cynical lens to mean “as characters who know our futures, we declare that the future is bad.” But it could also mean that “as characters in the present, we will make our aspirations a reality.” Although the ambiguity of the title is likely intentional on Weng Fen’s part, I argue that the latter is more accurate to the real in Our Future is Not a Dream. Many of the films Weng selected critique the present, but he omits that critique in the work. In fact, Weng omitted all the instances where a character’s dreams might be disappointed, and unlike other critiques of utopian impulses in contemporary Chinese art, Weng does not juxtapose the optimistic title and dialogue with a pessimistic view of the present.

The world within Our Future is Not a Dream is limitless in this sense—although the past and present are refracted for us as viewers, for the characters, this future has not yet happened. The layers of memory, and the interpretive weight they carry, remain our primary experience of the work as viewers, but the experience of the characters must also be that punctum which breaks through the screen to touch us.