One-Second Memory: The Cultural Revolution, Censorship, and Cinema in Zhang Yimou’s One Second

Abstract

This article examines Zhang Yimou’s One Second (2020) as a qualitative single–case study situated at the intersection of Cultural Revolution memory, cinematic experience, and the negotiated regime of cultural production under censorship in Xi-era China. It argues that the film’s aesthetic strategy—compressing the Cultural Revolution into the fragile trace of “one second” of footage rather than an epic historical narrative—renders visible the contemporary politics of memory and the conditions under which the past becomes representable. Drawing on scholarship on collective/cultural memory (Halbwachs, Nora, Assmann, Connerton, Erll), trauma and cinematic amnesia (Caruth, LaCapra, Elsaesser, Bao), and new cinema history, the analysis employs close reading to examine the materiality of film stock, the rituals of itinerant projection, scenes of collective labour, and micro-level power relations. The findings show that the newsreel reel functions simultaneously as the state’s propaganda archive, the father’s pursuit of personal testimony, and an object of everyday scarcity (the lampshade), thereby staging conflicts between overlapping memory regimes. The “cleaning the film” sequence, moreover, frames cinema-going as a ritualised, embodied practice of remembrance that persists even when images temporarily vanish. The film’s festival withdrawal and subsequent approval/release trajectory also suggests that censorship operates not only as prohibition but as a relational mechanism that shapes production through indirection and anticipatory self-limitation. Overall, the article positions One Second as an instructive case for understanding contemporary rewritings of Cultural Revolution memory and the aesthetics of filmmaking under negotiated censorship.