THE HALL
Documentary as part of the Ripple Ripple Rippling film trilogy
Colour HD, 3mins 40secs., 2024.
Co-directed by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Chen Zhan, and Mengfan Wang
Cinematography by Chen Zhan, Mengfan Wang
Editing by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Chen Zhan
The People’s Commune Assembly Hall was an iconic site for political gatherings and propaganda during China’s national collectivisation period, spanning from the 1950s to the 1980s. Standing at the central spine of the village, it witnessed the prime years of the now-elderly women whom we call grannies, yet remained almost invisible to the children.
We chose this site to organise a collective happening with villagers in Shigushan at the outskirts of Wuhan, in the summer of 2023—whom we’ve been working with since 2015. Through immersive spatial projection in the long-abandoned commune hall, we screened back to the village community footage of their beautiful lives and the co-created improvisations, as part of the RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING project. Almost the entire village came, and together we transformed the commune hall from a once political site into a theatre of everyday life.
This experimental short film amplifies the inherent narrative capacity of the commune hall by juxtaposing its physical space, the projected space, and the reconstructed filmic space. Temporalities and worlds collide: the commune hall as a symbol of the socialist ideal, the decades of abandonment after the commune system was abolished, the beginnings of its new life marked by the recent renovation, and a subversion of its loaded history through the collective happening.
Unique to film as a medium, what is reconstructed is one step out of reality but not yet into fiction—a delicate, peculiar state that embraces the commune hall’s extraordinary inarticulacy and complexities without imposing any singular or lucid narrative. The space speaks for itself.
Ripple Ripple Rippling