Another Clapping
25 minutes, color, stereo sound, DV, 2000
Production: Canada/USA
Awards
Won Best of Film Festival, Thaw International Film and Digital Media Festival, Iowa City, IA, 2003
Finalist Award for Media Arts, Illinois Arts Council, Chicago, IL, 2002
Best Documentary Short, Georgetown Independent Film Festival, Washington, DC, 2001
Finalist Award, Asian American Film and Video Showcase, Chicago, IL, 2001
National Film Tours, Asian American International Film Festival, New York, NY, 2001
Film Distribution
Video Data Bank (VDB), The School of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 2001–present
Synopsis
Another Clapping presents the triangular relationship between a daughter, her mother, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It is based on a documentary of her mother’s violent experience of traumatic political history and living in her unsuccessful marriage. Their subsequent experience as immigrant in Canada provides the family a complexity of reviewing and remembering the past. Ultimately, it is about the intimated and sublime relationship between the mother and daughter, and struggle between the actual history and the collective memory of family issues and public trauma. It is about the personal, political and conceptual implications of the traced and displaced identity.
Credit
Produced, Directed, Cinematography and Edited by Chi Jang Yin
Reviews
“Another Clapping » présente la vie de l’artiste ou comment un jour, elle s’est arrêtée de pleurer en voyant son père battre sa mère.”
Carte blanche à l’underground chinois, Cabaret Aléatoire, Marseille, France, 2005
“‘Another Clapping,’ from 2000, is a mother-daughter coming-of-age piece by Chi-Jang Yin. Unfolding in real-time, this film chronicles the tension between a Chinese woman both caught up in old social mores but enjoying her freedom far away from the husband who beat her, and a modern daughter struggling to prevent the erasure of her heritage. This documentary feels true—aided perhaps by it’s disjointed structure—providing both a candid picture of multicultural America and a compelling look at human resilience.”
Art Papers Magazine, November/December 2004 issue
“Yin’s ‘Another Clapping’ centers on her mother's longing to return to her homeland China, as a possible cure for the mother’s mental instability. [The] artist incorporates personal photographs that slowly transform or decompose in the viewing plane. These visual cues impart a sense of emotional distance, like watching your life roll by. The implementation of stillness in a format characterized by movement heightens the idea of frustration felt by [Yin], as [she is] unable to return to a place of past importance—locked out by either political climates or personal fears.”
Cheekwood Art Museum, Neither Here Nor There: Video Artists Navigate Cultural Displacement, curated by Terri Smith, Nashville, TN, 2004
“In ‘Another Clapping,’ Yin probes her mother’s tragic past, and the audience is simultaneously drawn in and startled by the intimacy as Yin's mother is interviewed.”
Asian CineVision's 24th Annual Asian American International Film, Florence Gould Hall, New York, NY 2001
“In the moving autobiographical meditation Another Clapping, Chi-Jang Yin uses fragments—voice-over, printed titles, phone messages, and old photographs, some with her father's image cut out—to tell the story of a family fractured by domestic violence and the forces of history and to explore the ambiguous feelings between mother and daughter. Footage from the Cultural Revolution, including shots of kids humiliating an old man, forms an eerie parallel to the daughter's alienation.”
Women in the Director’s Chair International Film and Video Festival 2001
Selected Screenings
Rondo Sztuki Gallery in Poland, The Memory Labyrinth. Faces of Evil, 1939–2009, sponsored by the Poland Cultural Institution of Ars Cameralis, Curator: Marek Zieliski, Katowice, Poland, 2009
The Nightingale, Fading out/Fading in–Identities in Transit, Curators: Casey Gibbs and John Lou, Chicago, IL, 2008
Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts, Experimental Films, Curator: Jeffrey Skoller (Professor of Film Studies at the University of California Berkeley), Beijing, China, 2007
Phoenix Art Museum, Asian Lives, represented by Video Data Bank, Phoenix, AZ, 2006
Friche Belle de Mai (Theatre Massilia), Un peu d'Alice, Carte blanche à l'underground Chinnois (A little Alice: White Chart With The Chinese Underground), Cabaret Aléatoire, Marseille, France, 2005
Guangdong Industry Technical College, USA & France International Video Art and Digital Animation, Curator: Chi Jang Yin, Another Clapping, digital video, Guangzhou, China, 2005
Sun Yat-Sen University in China, Women’s & Gender Studies Department, Philosophy Department, invitational film exhibition, Guangzhou, China, 2004
The Portland Mercury, The Know-Film Series, Peripheral Produce, curated by Sarah Halpern, juried international film exhibition, Portland, OR, 2004
Cheekwood Museum, Navigate Cultural Displacement—Neither here Nor There: Video Artists, Nashville Film Festival, represented by Video Data Bank, Nashville, TN, 2004
Film Art Foundation Film and Video Festival, San Francisco, CA, 2004
Germany Kasseler Dokumentarfilm-und Videofest, Kassel, Germany, 2003
Asian Pacific American Film Festival, Washington, DC, 2003
Georgetown Independent Film Festival, Washington, DC, 2003
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Brooklyn Arts Council 36th International Film and Video Festival, New York, NY, 2002
Thaw International Video, Film and Digital Media Festival, Iowa City, IA, 2002
Arizona International Film Festival, Tucson, AZ, 2002
Oculars Short Film, Brooklyn, New York, NY, 2002
Global Vision Film Festival, Vancouver, Canada, 2002
Asian American International Film Festival, New York, NY, 2001
NextFest Digital Motion Picture Festival, Saskatoon, Canada, 2001
Northern Visions Film Festival, juried international film exhibition, Toronto, Canada, 2001
Italy Del Corto in Sabina International Film Festival, Rome, Italy, 2001
Georgetown Independent Film Festival, Washington DC, 2001
Film Arts Foundation Film Festival, San Francisco, CA, 2000