Public Secrets, Public Spaces

Book excerpt: Public Secrets, Public Spaces explores the possibility of symbolic public space in the context of Chinese cinema. Focusing especially on women, children, and the dispossessed, Stephanie H. Donald looks at the ways public space is constructed and occupied and how it interacts with Opublic secrets, O the unstated common-sense knowledges of everyday life, extraordinary to those who are not initiated into the routines of a particular cultural place and space. In traditional societies public secrets are organized through observable ritual; in modern societies they are embedded in the cultural discourse of the routine and the everyday. As we see in this perceptive book, film offers a rich medium for unearthing these secrets