Digitalizing <i>Xianchang</i> : documentary experiments on Shanghai COVID lockdown

This article explores the expanded indexicality of documentary image and audio in the digital era. It analyzes the awarded Chinese documentary The Memo (2022) responding to the Shanghai COVID lockdown. The documentary reconstructs a digital xianchang (lit. the present and the site of happening, being there) of personal witnessing, collective testimony, trauma healing, and conceptual thinking during the Shanghai lockdown. The documentary exemplifies confined xianchang, instant archived xianchang, digital mapping of censored xianchang, AI-generated audio xianchang, multi-dimensional imaginary xianchang, collective testimonial xianchang, and healing xianchang. Limited production conditions due to deepening authoritarianism have encouraged innovative digital technology interventions, rhetoric, and modes of filmmaking. By providing first-person witnessing and collective testimony, showing the speechless close-ups of faces of ordinary people, and using cinematic irony, the filmmakers’ cinematic interventions weave a humanistic veil to counter the cruelty and dehumanization of the Shanghai COVID lockdown. This article highlights how digital technology has activated, enhanced, and altered the indexicality of audio-visual materials. Thus, the concept of digital indexicality alters the epistemology of xianchang in truth-claiming.