Chinese Revolutionary Cinema

Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, initiated the mass campaign ‘Follow the Examples of Comrade Lei Feng’ in 1963, creating fictional People’s Liberation Army soldier Lei Feng, a perfectly self-disciplined socialist hero, for everyday mass emulation. A cursory look at the film Lei Feng (Dong Zhaoqi, 1964) gives us a sense of the everyday version of heroism that permeated popular discourse at the time. The film chronicles Lei Feng’s good deeds: volunteering at a construction site in a school, escorting an elderly woman and her grandson on a rainy day, donating money to a village and sending money to his comrade’s sick mother. Approaching the end of the film, Lei Feng donates 100 yuan (his monthly stipend is 6 yuan) to a village that is recovering from a flood, but the head of the village refuses to accept the donation and asks Lei Feng to send the money to his family instead. Lei Feng, an orphan who has no biological family ties, begins to tear up as he hears the word ‘family’:

No longer an orphan, Lei Feng feels a new sense of belonging, underscoring the ubiquitous presence of the Party and Mao as the film’s ideological and moral anchor. The film’s transitions are sprinkled with Mao’s quotations and Lei Feng’s reading notes, promoting the nationwide study of Mao’s works. The film’s Lei Feng embodies the socialist work ethic. He studies Mao’s works religiously. He has no romantic love life. His good deeds are too perfect to be true. In a diegetic voiceover, he explains: ‘In the eyes of the Party, I am forever a little child. Yet, in the eyes of children, I have already become an adult.’ In popular discourse, Lei Feng was constructed as a role model, an exemplary socialist citizen, a legendary hero who died young, and an orphan dependent on the nurturing love of the Party and Mao. The cinematic construction of Lei Feng, model citizen, presented a heroic ideal that prefigured the even more radical sense of heroism promulgated during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).

This book tells the story of how this heightened sense of revolutionary heroism evolved in a body of work that I call ‘Chinese revolutionary cinema’. These fictional films, produced during the ‘Seventeen Years’ (1949–66), celebrate the creation of heroes and heroines that represented the Mao era (1949–76).

In their study of 1930s Stalinist propaganda, Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger highlight the persistent effort by the Soviet state to rewrite narratives of heroism. Stories about Old Bolsheviks, Red Army commanders, industrial shock workers, champion agricultural labourers and historic figures from the pre-revolutionary period such as Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Aleksandr Nevskii, Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Lev Tolstoi, were rewritten and appropriated to adapt to the ideological needs of the Stalinist state.¹ Heroic tales were used to inspire and rally ‘by example’ because they provided a ‘common narrative – a story of identity – that the entire society could relate to’.² On a similar trajectory, Laikwan Pang, in her study of creative production during the Cultural Revolution, suggests ‘cloning’ as a metaphor to describe the creative process (as well as the subversive potential) of copying, emulating and reimagining heroic and exemplary figures that embodied the ideals of the Chinese revolutionary state.³ Despite differences in disciplinary and geographical focus, these scholars suggest the central role heroic narratives played in subject formation and shaping mass consciousness in socialist propaganda states.

‘Propaganda’, stripped of its Cold War pejorative connotations, is used in this study as a neutral term, referring to the mass dissemination of ideological, religious, cultural and artistic forms that reinforce the hegemony of the state, religious institutions or transnational capitalism. As a propaganda state, the newly established People’s Republic was heavily invested in testing and stretching the limits and possibilities of cinema through a series of aesthetic experiments devoted to telling heroic tales on screen.

During the Seventeen Years of 1949–66, multiple radical aesthetic campaigns and experiments were carried out through trial and error to create a revolutionary aesthetics of heroism. Each chapter of this book deals with an aesthetic experiment that redefined a major aspect of fiction film-making: screenwriting, cinematography or acting. The revolutionary aesthetics of heroism created by film artists working under the auspices of the state was not only transformational, experimental and visionary, but also simultaneously national, international and socialist in style and scope. These aesthetic experiments transformed the relationship between the state and film artists. The state created the pressure-cooker conditions under which the artists’ creativity thrived or withered, while the artists provided the insights, expertise and skills without which the state could not have sustained its aesthetic experiments.

The revolutionary aesthetics of heroism is national in form, and socialist and internationalist in spirit. Chinese film-makers’ selective appropriation of the film languages of Hollywood and the Soviet avant-garde made Chinese works accessible to a domestic (including the illiterate peasantry) and international audience. Film discourse in Chinese film journals articulated visions of socialist internationalism and China’s self-image in the context of world cinema. As Chinese film-makers (many of whom also served as cultural bureaucrats) creatively manoeuvred between Hollywood, the legacy of the Soviet avant-garde, global star culture of the 1960s and the rise of Third Cinema in the post-Bandung anti-colonial movements, they communicated a revolutionary aesthetics of heroism that could potentially serve as an alternative aesthetic in world cinema. This study traces the evolution of that alternative aesthetic.

The period known as the ‘Seventeen Years’ after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 was a time of abundant film production under the communist regime. The period witnessed one of the most daring aesthetic and political experiments in film history. As early as 1942, Mao Zedong, quoting Vladimir Lenin, described proletarian literature and art as ‘cogs and wheels’ in the revolutionary machine.⁴ After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Communist Party’s immediate priority was to nationalise the film industry and produce films that would serve socialist ideals and win the hearts of its people. Film, as a form of education and entertainment, was given the social mission of moulding Chinese citizens into new socialist subjects.

Films produced during the Seventeen Years, prior to the Cultural Revolution, were generically diverse: animation, comedy, documentary, newsreels, opera and science education. These genres vary in theme and aesthetics and deserve separate studies, which have begun appearing in recent years.⁵ Here, I examine the evolution of a revolutionary aesthetic in a body of fiction films that feature revolutions and evoke a heightened sense of heroism.⁶ This group of films is aesthetically and thematically unified. Featuring narratives of revolution and heroism, they appropriate classical Hollywood narration and Soviet montage and employ stars and cultural icons to facilitate audience identification and emulation.

The roots of Chinese revolutionary film can be traced back to the early 1930s, when socially progressive and revolutionary films such as Daybreak (Sun Yu, 1933) were made to expose social ills and express support for the revolution. Those films were retrospectively associated with the left-wing cinema movement that began in the same period, marked by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). The year 1932 marked the re-establishment of Sino–Soviet relations by the Guomindang (GMD) government, followed by burgeoning translation of Soviet literature and film theory. Storm Over Asia (Потомок Чингис-Хана) (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1928) was the first Soviet feature film screened for public viewing in China in 1931, followed by the public screening of The Road to Life (Путëвка в жизнь) (Nikolai Ekk, 1931) in 1933.⁷ Based in semi-colonial Shanghai in a market dominated by Hollywood movies, many left-wing film-makers such as Hong Shen, Shen Xiling, Sun Yu, Xia Yan, Yuan Muzhi and Zheng Junli were sympathetic to the Soviet films introduced into China in the 1930s. The turn to Soviet ideas and aesthetics was not an isolated event after 1949; it has its beginnings in the 1930s as a response to imperialism and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The aesthetic experiment in film production during the Seventeen Years continued and evolved out of the modernisation project initiated with the May Fourth movement, an early twentieth-century cultural movement in response to imperialism. As Paul Clark suggests, film was ‘the dominant artistic mode in the continuing May Fourth meditation on the condition of modern China.’⁸ To understand Chinese revolutionary film from the Seventeen Years, one must trace the continuities and discontinuities of Chinese film-making as part of the modernisation project since the Republican era (1911–49).

Confining Chinese revolutionary film strictly within the historical period of the Seventeen Years, as has often been done, poses interpretive problems. As Yomi Braester and Tina Mai Chen suggest, the ‘assumptions that socialist film is categorically different from films produced in other political and ideological contexts also mean that studies tend to treat PRC film separately from pre-1949 Chinese film.’⁹ Braester and Chen call for a ‘historiographical rethinking of the relationship between pre- and post-1949 history’ and highlight film as not merely reflecting but also participating in ‘articulating Chinese socialism and the PRC as a nation state’.¹⁰ Miriam Hansen explores early Shanghai cinema under the framework of ‘vernacular modernism’ to refer to ‘the diversity of ways in which Hollywood cinema was translated and reconfigured in local and translocal contexts of reception.’¹¹ On the same trajectory, Zhang Zhen, using the framework of ‘vernacular modernism’, traces the beginnings of early Chinese cinema and its entanglements with Hollywood cinema in semi-colonial Shanghai.¹² However, little attention has been paid to the Soviet presence as a competing alternative to Hollywood in Chinese film history. This study traces the Soviet presence in Chinese film history throughout the Seventeen Years as an alternative historiography of Chinese film.

Beginning in the early 1930s, Soviet Russia was seen by many Chinese left-wing film-makers as providing the answer to questions that confronted Chinese cinema. Despite the brute political fact of Russian imperialism in China, the October Revolution in 1917 excited many Chinese intellectuals and film-makers, who perceived in literature and film an affinity between China and Soviet Russia that allowed them to circumvent politics and refashion perceived similarities aesthetically. This refashioning did not mean aesthetics was insulated from politics; rather, aesthetics was an ideological arena that allowed another kind of politics to be manifested and represented. The affinity with Soviet Russia fashioned by Chinese intellectuals and film-makers was cultural and aesthetic. The translation and introduction of Soviet films to China allowed Chinese artists to construct and represent that aesthetic affinity.

The public screening of the Soviet film The Road to Life (Путëвка в жизнь) (Nikolai Ekk, 1931) in Shanghai in 1933 was enthusiastically welcomed by many Chinese film-makers, who wrote extensive commentaries and held a discussion session on the film. Set in Moscow in 1923, The Road to Life is about a group of orphaned railway workers in the Soviet Union. A group of orphans-turned-criminals are arrested by the police and later assigned to the task of building railroads for the new country. When the railroads are successfully completed, one of the most courageous workers is murdered by an enemy from their previous criminal life. The film ends with the train running on the new railroads, transporting the corpse to the celebration venue.

The advertising poster for The Road to Life suggests the attractions of the Soviet film. The poster calls the film ‘an illustration of Soviet Russia’s successful Five-Year Plan’ and ‘a people’s film with a heroic and pedagogical mission’.¹³ The middle of the poster features a child’s smiling face, surrounded by four slogans in big fonts: ‘A kind teacher who encourages production’, ‘A reference for reforming society’, ‘No ladies’ thighs!’ and ‘No gentlemen’s top hats!’¹⁴ The bottom of the poster says: ‘A vital, powerful and stimulating film’.¹⁵ The terms ‘pedagogical mission’, ‘teacher’, and ‘reference’, juxtaposed against the absence of ‘ladies’ thighs’ and ‘gentlemen’s top hats’, evoke the tensions between the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ appeals of film, and between education and entertainment.¹⁶

In his commentary on The Road to Life, Xia Yan (under the pen name Huang Zibu) described how the film allowed its audience to ‘experience a breath of fresh air’:

We had been spoiled by the sentimentalism and pornography of Euro–American film. In contrast, Soviet film is a breath of fresh air (kongqi). Soviet film depicts neither intellect nor psychological states (as in literature), but uses gesture to move the audience and convey the kinaesthetic force (li) of human activity. What excites our souls are the force and will of the collective. The new has replaced the old; healthy and direct emotions have replaced our depressed and desolate mood. Look – construction vs. destruction, vitality vs. deterioration, health vs. sickness, exaltation vs. lamentation, resolution vs. resignation, happiness vs. sorrow. How sharp are the contrasts!¹⁷

Xia Yan perceived a ‘fresh’ and indefinable ‘air’ in Soviet cinema; a refreshing, healthy alternative to the domination of Euro–American film. The sharp contrasts he asserted between Soviet film and Euro–American film (deterioration and decay vs. construction and vitality) rhetorically reinforce the sense of hope and optimism of the October Revolution. In Xia Yan’s eyes, the October Revolution was a landmark event in human history, a source of excitement and inspiration: ‘Fifteen years ago, the country that covers one-sixth of the world embarked on a change that human history has never experienced before.’¹⁸ Film commentaries like this function as a cultural rhetoric fashioning political, cultural and aesthetic affinity with Soviet cinema.

The attractions of The Road to Life, Xia Yan explained, lay not only in its healthy content, but also in its form: gestures and montage create a kinaesthetic force of the collective. Tactile gestures ‘touch’ (jiechu) the audience; gestures as a kind of emotional infection affects spectators at the level of the senses.¹⁹ Speaking of gestures that convey the kinaesthetic force of human activity, he refers to montages that create the kinaesthetic movement and force of the collective. Li, which can be translated as ‘force’, ‘power’, ‘strength’ and ‘energy’, lies at the core of the film’s attraction. Similarly, Chen Liting spoke of the ‘beauty of force’ (li de mei) in The Road to Life.²⁰ Jin Yan described the film as ‘simple but forceful’ (jiandan er youli).²¹ Shen Xiling said that ‘the power (liliang) of the film has enveloped my whole body and soul.’²² The beauty of force, as Cheng Bugao poignantly put it, is intimately tied to the cinematic depiction of the collective:

What human beings possess is strength (li). The film mobilises this strength and channels it into positive creation and construction. Using the power of the collective for the livelihood of the collective and to guide the life of the collective – this is truly a ‘road to life’.²³

The highly acclaimed Soviet film was also a metaphorical ‘road to life’ for contemporary Chinese cinema. Hong Shen and Zheng Boqi (under the pen name Xi Naifang), for instance, argued that ‘Soviet cinema not only offers the Chinese audience new and healthy entertainment, but also points out a suitable path for the Chinese film industry.’²⁴ In a similar fashion, Zhang Shichuan noted that The Road to Life gives the Chinese film industry ‘a new model’.²⁵ The ‘new type’ (dianxing), according to Zhang, was a cinema with a pedagogical mission: ‘Soviet cinema carries the important mission of educating the society. American film, in contrast, is nothing more than a “sedative”.’²⁶ The pedagogical focus of Soviet cinema provided Chinese cinema an alternative to the ‘sedative’ nature of Euro–American film and its system of representation, which offered ‘individual hedonism’, ‘hero worship’, ‘champagne’ and ‘ladies’.²⁷ Yet though pedagogy was considered a high priority, it was by no means the only priority of Chinese cinema.²⁸ In a later essay, ‘On the Pedagogical Value of Soviet Film’ (1948), Xia Yan construed pedagogy and pleasure as complementary benefits of his film-watching experience: ‘I’m being educated. I’m touched. Therefore, spiritually, I’m enjoying true entertainment.’²⁹ Xia Yan spoke of a cinematic attraction that is sensual, educational and pleasurable – an attraction Chinese revolutionary film continued to strive for during the Seventeen Years.

Soviet cinema was conceived as a model and a reference, providing answers to many questions confronting Chinese cinema in the Republican era: the tension between entertainment and education and the domination of Hollywood movies in semi-colonial Shanghai. The fashioning of an aesthetic affinity with Soviet cinema was accompanied by public screenings of Soviet films and translations of Soviet film theory. Xia Yan introduced Soviet montage theory to China by translating Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The Film Director and Film Material (Кинорежиссер и киноматериал) (1926) in collaboration with Zheng Boqi in 1933, as discussed in Chapter Three. Zheng Junli translated Constantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares (Yanyuan ziwo xiuyang) (1936), though publication was interrupted by World War II and it was not published in China until 1943 (discussed in Chapter Four).

The Seventeen Years of abundant film production under the communist regime in China have been called the ‘missing years’ in the historiography of Chinese cinema in English-language scholarship. Currently there is only one book-length study in English that is exclusively devoted to Chinese cinema in the socialist era: Zhuoyi Wang’s Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979.³⁰

Why is film production from the Seventeen Years under-researched in English-language scholarship? One cannot answer this question without mapping the institutionalisation of film studies in the 1970s and 1980s as an academic discipline in North America and Europe, and the canonisation, translation and anthologisation of film theory as it entered the university curriculum. Soviet montage theory and Bazinian realism, canonised in the West, became two major strands of film theory. By the 1970s and 1980s, when film studies were institutionalised as an academic discipline, many Soviet-era films (especially from the Stalin era) and archival materials had been made available for research and translation into English.³¹ However, the same cannot be said of Chinese film produced during the Seventeen Years, which was deemed ‘poisonous’ and banned during the Cultural Revolution. Many Chinese films produced during the Seventeen Years were inaccessible to the West in the 1970s, when film studies began to emerge as an academic discipline.

After Mao’s death in 1976, film studies began to emerge as an academic discipline in China during the ‘Reform and Opening’ era of the 1980s. The Chinese films that first gained international and scholarly attention were not the ‘Red Classics’ from the socialist era, but ‘fifth-generation films’ of the 1980s, which favoured the use of long shots, long takes and bold colours as a new form of post-socialist realism, in contrast to the socialist realism endorsed in previous decades. In the 1980s, as China reopened to the West (especially the United States and western Europe), Bazinian film theories were once again translated into Chinese, and Hollywood and European art films began to be imported, shaping the consciousness of a new generation of film-makers. These ‘fifth-generation’ film-makers, such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, subverted the film language of the socialist era and experimented with new techniques in Yellow Earth (1984) and Red Sorghum (1988) respectively. Winning major awards at international film festivals, the fifth-generation film-makers’ international acclaim spurred English scholarship, the most representative of which is Rey Chow’s Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema.³² Moreover, though the visual and archival materials of post-1980s post-socialist cinema remain more accessible to scholars in both China and the West, films and criticism from the silent era have become increasingly available in the digital age, and the millennium has begun to see the production of critical studies of the silent era. The most exemplary of these is Zhang Zhen’s An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937.³³

Yet despite the burgeoning study of early cinema in semi-colonial Shanghai and post-socialist cinema, the Seventeen Years can still be described by scholars like Braester and Chen as ‘missing years’ due to a dearth in scholarship in both Chinese and English.³⁴ Archival materials and films deemed ‘poisonous’ during the Cultural Revolution remain difficult to access, not to mention the tendency to associate films from the Seventeen Years with propaganda, seen as a malevolent form of persuasion. There remains a lack of historical and critical distance from what many refer to as a historical trauma. The Cultural Revolution and the Seventeen Years preceding it have been lumped together as a historical aberration and abnormality.

Recent work is beginning to challenge this omission. As Braester and Chen have pointed out, conceiving of Chinese cinema from 1949 to 1979 as a missing period ‘risks defining it in negative terms: lacklustre compared to old Shanghai movies and the post socialist avant-garde; its creativity politically repressed; and its revolutionary fervour as foreign to Western audiences as to market-minded contemporary Chinese audiences.’³⁵ In their introduction to a special journal issue (2011) dedicated to this era of mainland Chinese cinema, they explicate the reasons for this critical oversight in scholarship:

Jian Heyan, in his recent History of Chinese Film Concepts (2010), puts his finger on an important factor: the early, productive years of the PRC were later bundled together with the Cultural Revolution, which many Chinese would like to forget. The harsh repression during the Cultural Revolution was projected onto the earlier period, despite its output of excellent movies. Similar dynamics, we may argue, influenced reception in the West. Rooted in area studies, China scholars had a hard time reconciling between Maoist totalitarianism and the flourishing of revolutionary art. It was convenient to believe that ‘brainwashed’ artists working under strict control could produce nothing good.³⁶

This study demonstrates that chronology and periodisation have their limits. Far from being an abnormality and a rupture in history, the Seventeen Years continued the Soviet turn in Chinese film discourse from the Republican era and the May Fourth modernisation project initiated by intellectuals who, since the Mao era, had had to work under the auspices of the state. They were censored and repressed, but intellectuals were also rewarded when their creativity found its way out. The revolutionary fervour that characterised the Seventeen Years may seem less foreign to us if we discern its investment in socialist star culture, part of the global star culture of the 1960s. With the disappearance of the free market, socialist actors had new status as state employees, but they still had to compete for visibility and acting opportunities, and to deter aging: a camera face still mattered. What we think we know about film culture in the Seventeen Years is just the tip of the iceberg.

Significant and serious scholarship on Chinese socialist cinema has only just begun. Recent years have produced special issues, an increasing number of journal articles that explore the period, and two book-length studies: Zhuoyi Wang’s Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema 1951–1979 and Cai Xiang’s Revolution and its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966.³⁷ One especially noteworthy effort is Ban Wang’s treatment of pleasure and desire in Chinese revolutionary film. Wang highlights the sublimation of romance to higher political goals and argues that romance and ideology worked hand-in-hand in Chinese revolutionary film to lure spectators into an aestheticised politics.³⁸ Addressing film method, Chris Berry considers Chinese cinema during the Seventeen Years as pedagogical cinema, pointing out that it drew heavily upon classical Hollywood narrative methods – for instance, the use of narrative causality, goal-oriented protagonists, narrative suspension for metatextual analysis, elliptical montage sequences, and shot/reverse-shot patterns – for pedagogical, rather than libidinal, purposes.³⁹ Stephanie Donald’s idea of the ‘socialist realist gaze’, a gaze projected to an off-screen space, provides a critical language for analysing Chinese socialist film and Soviet film.⁴⁰ Equally important is Tina Mai Chen’s historical research on the circulation and dubbing of Soviet film in China during the Seventeen Years.⁴¹

In the last few years, there have also been innovative efforts to explore under-researched genres of Chinese socialist cinema. Highly informed by the theoretical apparatus of film studies, scholars have combined close reading, archival research and theoretical nuance to complicate our understanding of Chinese socialist cinema. For instance, a 2010 special issue of The Opera Quarterly offers multiple perspectives in reading Chinese opera film from the Seventeen Years and model opera film (yangbanxi) from the Cultural Revolution. In this special issue, Weihong Bao and Xinyu Dong, with theoretical vigour and historical attentiveness, explore Chinese film-makers’ creative negotiation with operatic and cinematic modes of expression.⁴² Jason McGrath draws on the realist tradition and performance studies in his analysis of Cultural Revolution model opera film.⁴³ On a slightly different trajectory, the spring 2011 special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas features articles on little-known film genres from the ‘missing years’, such as counter-espionage and science education film (kexue jiaoyupian): Qi Wang uses an interdisciplinary approach to look at architecture and interior design in the historical space of counter-espionage film, while Matthew Johnson situates science education film within China and beyond.⁴⁴ Collectively, these works search for new theoretical and analytical paradigms that reveal the complexities of Chinese socialist cinema rather than defining it, pejoratively, as mere propaganda.

In Chinese language scholarship, there have also been recent noteworthy publications of full-length manuscripts and anthologies on the Seventeen Years. These works, which have emerged in the last two decades, benefit from the anthologies of research documents, memoirs and biographies that have emerged since the 1980s. A few worth mentioning here are Chen Huangmei’s Dangdai Zhongguo dianying (Contemporary Chinese cinema) (1989); Meng Liye’s Xin Zhongguo dianying yishu shigao, 1949–1959 (A history of new China’s film art) (2002); Qi Xiaoping’s Xianghua ducao: hongse niandai de dianying mingyun (Fragrant flowers and poisonous weeds: the fate of films during the red years) (2006); and Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1949–1979 (Research materials on Chinese cinema) (2006) and Mao Zedong shidai de renmin dianying (People’s film in the Mao era) (2010), both by Wu Di, who also writes under the pen name Qi Zhi.⁴⁵ Additionally, Hong Hong’s Sulian yingxiang yu Zhongguo shiqinian dianying (Soviet influence and Chinese cinema from the seventeen years) (2008) situates Chinese cinema in the historical context of Sino–Soviet exchange during the Seventeen Years.⁴⁶

The serious scholarship that has emerged both within and outside the PRC in the last few years accompanies increasing public awareness of, and renewed interest in, the ‘missing period’. Chinese socialist films are viewed, as Braester and Chen suggest, with nostalgia by Chinese audiences.⁴⁷ The edited volume Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution considers the communist revolution not as a historical abnormality but as an event with manifestations in contemporary cultural life.⁴⁸ Digital media have made films accessible to a wide audience, encouraging research, classroom use and even popular viewing both within and outside China: in the 2009 New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center screened an unprecedented series called ‘(Re)Inventing China: A New Cinema for a New Society, 1949–1966.’⁴⁹ In a similar fashion, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, in a 2009 celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, organised a film series called ‘The People’s Republic of Cinema’ that featured both revolutionary and post-revolutionary films.⁵⁰

The new scholarship on the Seventeen Years constitutes a major step in reassessing forgotten archives and historical trauma. Yet much work remains to be done. Zhuoyi Wang’s Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, the first comprehensive domestic history of Chinese socialist cinema in English language scholarship, challenges the assumption that Chinese cinema in the Mao era was a homogeneous body of film texts produced for an unthinking collective by a propagandistic machine.⁵¹ This book goes one step further, exploring the dialectical relationship between state propaganda and aesthetic experiment and discussing the implication of this relationship for internationalism and film theory in world cinema.

In his study of the Soviet Union as the world’s first propaganda state, Brandenberger uses the term ‘propaganda state’ to denote ‘political systems that distinguish themselves by their co-option and harnessing of mass culture, educational institutions and the press for the purpose of popular indoctrination.’⁵² This top-down governing paradigm was a revolutionary proposal advanced by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of 1917. A defining characteristic of propaganda states is the state’s investment in culture. Propaganda states foreground the stewardship of culture because culture is power: ‘the sphere of culture and ideology was the sphere of legitimation of the state […] The process of legitimation required using refined techniques for manipulating mass consciousness.’⁵³ In the age of mechanical reproduction, film in particular was chosen as a malleable visual and aural tool for shaping popular beliefs, attitudes and behaviour, as evidenced by the amount of time propaganda state leaders like Stalin and Mao spent reviewing books, film scripts and plays. In the Soviet Union, the propaganda state’s investment in culture and aesthetics constituted what Katerina Clark calls the ‘Great Experiment’, undertaken by a generation of intellectuals who in the 1920s sought to create ‘a truly revolutionary culture’.⁵⁴ The great experiment continued into the 1930s with a ‘cultural turn’: ‘Culture became an area where in the 1930s the rival states and rival world systems of Europe began to compete for the right to be considered the true leader of the continent.’⁵⁵ As a propaganda state, the Soviet Union under Stalin sought to create a national aesthetic and to rebuild Moscow into ‘the center of a new, transnational imperial formation of some kind, a “Rome”.’⁵⁶ Clark’s analytic paradigm of the Soviet experiment in revolutionary culture and national aesthetic provides critical insights for this study.

The PRC, also a propaganda state, was equally invested in culture. Mao’s various political campaigns took place in the realm of culture and aesthetics, as discussed in Chapter One. The 1951 campaign against The Life of Wu Xun (Sun Yu, 1951), the first nationwide mass campaign initiated by Mao himself as ultimate censor and textual authority, was a campaign to denounce the politically incorrect film and to target private film studio artists in nationalising the film industry under the state’s control.⁵⁷ The ensuing campaigns throughout the Seventeen Years – the Rectification Campaign (1951–2), the First Five-Year Plan (1953–7), the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956–7) and the Great Leap Forward Campaign (1958–61) – developed a new socialist culture of film criticism, one that included self-criticism and ideological remoulding of film artists. These campaigns also articulated quantitative and qualitative goals for aesthetic experiments in screenwriting, cinematography, screen acting and the representation of heroic characters. Striving for world recognition and a leadership role in the socialist bloc and the Third World, the PRC as a propaganda state sought to create a national aesthetic that was revolutionary, socialist and international.

It is important to recognise that propaganda states’ top-down governing paradigm was not monolithic. Nor was state propaganda solely directed to the goal of delivering political messages for mass manipulation. As Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko emphasise, the intelligentsia was not an extrasystemic category. Intellectuals, some of whom also served as cultural bureaucrats, served an intermediary role between Party leadership and the populace at large: they were implicated in the workings of the state, which ‘not only “repressed” them but also rewarded them’.⁵⁸ As I shall demonstrate, the state and intellectuals were in a mutually dependent position in articulating and executing a series of aesthetic experiments. The state provided the directives, funding and resources, whereas intellectuals offered expertise, experience and creativity. Some intellectuals were condemned and committed suicide (Stalin’s Purge is a historical precedent in the world’s first propaganda state); some self-corrected and remoulded themselves according to the ideological needs of the time, successfully manoeuvring between contradictory forces at home and in the world. Zhuoyi Wang’s meticulous study of the dramatic shifts in revolutionary campaigns, or what he calls ‘revolutionary cycles’, reveals the diverse individual calculations and conflicting agendas of film artists, audiences, critics, bureaucrats and Party authorities as they negotiated and competed for power and meaning. Similarly, Pang’s study of the Cultural Revolution complicates our understanding of state manipulation: ‘the making of the propaganda involved much contestation and negotiation.’⁵⁹ Pang further notes that producing and reproducing propaganda (for example, writing and reading big-character wall posters [dazibao]) ‘involved not only the delivery of political messages but also the sharing of aesthetic skills and judgment’.⁶⁰ In fact, aesthetic skills and judgement carried the same weight as political correctness and judgement as early as 1949, when Mao Dun laid out the problem of unification between the political nature (zhengzhi xing) and aesthetic nature (yishu xing) of literature and art: ‘Is the former or the latter more valuable? It is not a matter of whether politics or aesthetics is more important. It is a matter of how to measure aesthetic value.’⁶¹

This study demonstrates that the political campaigns unleashed in the Seventeen Years were also aesthetic experiments, heavily invested in producing, measuring and claiming aesthetic value. Intellectuals and film artists, as specialists and bureaucrats walking a fine line between politics and aesthetics, were part of that experiment and discourse.⁶²

Each chapter of this book explores how various aesthetic experiments of Chinese revolutionary cinema stretched and reimagined cinematic possibilities. Chapter One explains the dialectical tension between propaganda and film aesthetics and shows how they were forcefully melded in a series of political campaigns that were also aesthetic experiments. Through trial and error, the state’s grip on aesthetics tightened and loosened in alternating periods of control that demanded strict intellectual orthodoxy and political relaxation that encouraged creativity. The fusing of propaganda and film aesthetics, which exist in tension, constitutes a major twentieth-century aesthetic experiment, recalling both Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aestheticisation of political life and the Soviet avant-garde experiment in honing aesthetic sensibilities for political purposes.

Chapter Two discusses aesthetic experiments in screenwriting. Many Chinese revolutionary films, including the Red Classics, have literary origins. Film adaptation of literature is a consistent and dominant mode of revolutionary film-making: revolutionary in the sense that film adaptations not only revolutionised literature and its literariness, but also revolutionised the family as a literary trope and an organised social unit. Beginning with the May Fourth Movement, literature fixated on the family as a microcosm of the nation, a site of tension between tradition and modernity, and a source of oppression for women. This focus on the family continued after 1949 in the cinematic genre of family melodrama, which negotiated with a legacy of family melodrama from the Shanghai film-making tradition. Chapter Two presents close readings of This Life of Mine (Shi Hui, 1950), The New Year’s Sacrifice (Sang Hu, 1956) and Revolutionary Family (Shui Hua, 1961), family melodramas that are also socialist film adaptations of literature. Adapting literature to film involved rethinking screenwriting and recasting classical Hollywood narration in Chinese literary terms, so this chapter also explores how incorporating classical Hollywood narration, heterosexual romance and melodrama facilitated socialist propagation of heteronormative romance and family.

Chapter Three turns to the aesthetic experiment in cinematography. For cinema invested in generating kinaesthetic force and provoking the senses for revolutionary action, montage had immense potential for persuasion and provocation. As a cinematic method that puts together images from different temporal and spatial contexts, montage evoked the memory and romance of revolution. In a period of intense engagement with Soviet montage film theory from 1949 to 1962, Chinese film-makers demystified the inscrutability of montage, which was often associated with the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, in an effort to broaden its scope to include all film editing methods, including Hollywood continuity editing. Through close reading of critical discourses and selected films, this chapter discusses how montage was creatively reinvented to cinematically construct a collective subject.

Chapter Four deals with the aesthetic experiment in screen acting. The year 1962 was a glamorous moment of star culture on a global scale. Although star culture functions differently in a capitalist system than in a socialist one, with different vocabularies – the former associated with commodity fetishism, the latter with political propaganda – the two kinds of star culture intersect in many ways. The cinematic production of glamour in Chinese revolutionary cinema packaged youth, beauty and femininity in socialist terms. Gendered discourse on casting and screen acting redefined femininity and created female icons of sexual morality. Though one might assume that star discourse was eliminated after the establishment of the PRC in 1949, in fact star discourse, which had its roots in Republican Shanghai cinema, survived in socialist China, in a different form and with a different vocabulary. The radical transformation of star discourse peaked in 1962, when the state-sponsored nationwide promotion of ‘22 outstanding screen actors’ (or colloquially, ‘22 big movie stars’) created a vogue for movie stars. The socialist star craze was cut short by the Poisonous Weeds Campaign in 1964, but its brief intense popularity reveals the deep roots of star discourse and the discourse on screen acting, traceable back to the early 1950s when Stanislavski’s system was adopted as an ethical basis for actors’ training and political cultivation.

Chapter Five turns to the rhetoric of internationalism in Chinese film journals, which articulated and propagated internationalist visions in the shifting terrain of the Cold War, when competing strands of socialist and liberal internationalisms emerged within and beyond the socialist bloc in the wake of decolonisation. Striving for world recognition and a socialist and Third World leadership role, the PRC as a propaganda state was heavily invested in developing visions of internationalism and the emancipatory potential of cinema as an integral part of its aesthetic experiment. Key to understanding cinema’s revolutionary potential was the rhetoric of ‘solidarity’ in creating an anti-colonial imaginary that boosted socialist China’s image at home and abroad. Chinese film journals extensively covered film festivals, film delegations, film theories and films from abroad, constructing an ideal socialist and non-socialist audience with an international subjectivity and worldview that were explicitly anti-colonial and anti-imperialist. In doing so, Chinese film journals remapped world cinematic space, shifting its centre of gravity from the ‘West’ to the ‘East’ and eventually to Asia, Africa and Latin America after the Sino–Soviet split in the 1960s.

In studying socialist film culture, an international perspective is indispensable. Socialist propaganda states, far from being xenophobic, pursued cultural appropriation of various kinds in order to make their cultures recognised by the world. As Katerina Clark observes, when the Soviet Union was perceived as the most self-enclosed, it was ironically the most outward-looking: ‘Paradoxically, even as the Soviet Union became an increasingly closed society, it simultaneously became more involved with foreign trends.’⁶³ Clark calls the Soviet openness to Western European culture a kind of cosmopolitanism.⁶⁴ On a similar trajectory, Nicolai Volland considers Chinese socialist literature of the 1950s as an example of ‘socialist cosmopolitanism’, mapping the literary exchange and translation of foreign literature in what he calls the four concentric circles of the Chinese literary universe: the Soviet Union at the core, encircled by socialist countries in Eastern Europe and Asia, then the Third World, with progressive literature from Western Europe and the United States on the periphery.⁶⁵ Primarily focused on literature, these studies both explore the outward-looking nature of the socialist project in building a socialist culture. In discussing the ideological and political permutations of the term ‘internationalism’, this book seeks to complement and complicate overlapping sensibilities of internationalism, cosmopolitanism and nationalism at the height of the Cold War.

In particular, given China’s ties to the Soviet Union and its unravelling new ties with Asian, African and Latin American countries after the Bandung Conference in 1955, consideration of internationalism is crucial to putting Chinese revolutionary cinema in perspective. Chinese film journals articulated visions of internationalism in two major movements: learning from the Soviet ‘elder brother’ in accordance with the policy of ‘leaning to one side’ after 1949, and envisioning Afro–Asian–Latin American solidarity in the post-Bandung era after the Sino–Soviet split in the 1960s. After the Sino–Soviet split, the PRC asserted itself as the socialist bloc and Third World leader, against the Soviet Union and the United States in peaceful coexistence. Creating a Chinese revolutionary film aesthetic was part of the self-positioning of the Chinese film establishment in opposing the West during the Cold War.

However, in contrast to the logic of Cold War binarism, creating a Chinese revolutionary film aesthetic meant not an open refusal to adopt the enemies’ cinematic conventions, but translation and tacit appropriation of them. Although Hollywood movies were officially eliminated in the PRC after 1951 and Soviet socialist realism was no longer officially endorsed after Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation, subtle forms of classical Hollywood narration, Soviet montage and Stanislavski’s system persisted in Chinese revolutionary film, as Chinese film-makers appropriated them to create a revolutionary aesthetic of heroism as an alternative aesthetic in world cinema.

Creating this Chinese revolutionary film aesthetic was an aesthetic experiment with highly political implications. During the Seventeen Years, film production was a way of demonstrating the young PRC’s artistic heritage and potential for technological development. Film was a visual showcase, making the nation’s culture recognised by the world. Film, because of its mechanical reproducibility, became a privileged aesthetic form for propaganda. The indexicality, reproducibility, and visual and audio capacity of the filmic medium rendered the immediacy of art to the masses effectively. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, Walter Benjamin suggested that technological reproducibility shatters the aura of art – originality, authenticity and ‘here-and-now’ – and opens up possibilities of bringing art to the masses.⁶⁶ In his 1942 talks on literature and art at the Yan’an forum, Mao explained that revolutionary art should serve the masses: ‘Since our literature and art are basically for the workers, peasants, and soldiers, “popularization” means to popularize among the workers, peasants, and soldiers, and “raising standards” means to advance from their present level.’⁶⁷ Mao answered the important question of whom art should serve by signifying new concern for a rural mass audience. How to make film accessible, pedagogical and pleasurable for that audience? As simple as the question may seem, it involved radically rethinking what constitutes cinematic attraction and reformulating film method, from screenwriting to cinematography to screen acting. The rethinking and reformulation of those theoretical and technical issues negotiated foreign cinematic precedents with Chinese aesthetic traditions, creating a full-blown revolutionary film aesthetic.

Chinese revolutionary film represents an alternative aesthetic. It is an alternative to the hegemonic cultural form of Hollywood cinema that travelled in the name of the global. The strongest resistance against the hegemony of Hollywood was staged by proponents of Third Cinema that began in the late 1960s. Written in 1969 by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema’ put forward the tenets of the Latin American film movement and articulated decolonisation in the 1960s as a ‘new historical situation’: ‘Ten years of the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese struggle, and the development of a worldwide liberation movement whose driving force is to be found in the Third World countries.’⁶⁸ As a movement against neo-colonialism and capitalism, Third Cinema included the Cuban documentary film movement and underground or semi-public showings of cinema such as ‘pamphlet films, didactic films, report films, essay films, witness-bearing films’, and other documentary and educational films in Third World countries such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.⁶⁹

The idea of ‘third cinema’ was directly opposed to ‘first cinema’; that is, Hollywood entertainment film: ‘The 35 mm camera, 24 frames per second, arc lights, and a commercial place of exhibition for audiences were conceived not to gratuitously transmit any ideology, but to satisfy, in the first place, the cultural and surplus value needs of a specific ideology, of a specific worldview: that of US finance capital.’⁷⁰ Solanas and Getino criticised first cinema as a ‘surplus value cinema’ for capital accumulation.⁷¹ According to them, first cinema, as a form of consumer good and entertainment, played the ‘acculturating role of the colonization of taste and consciousness’.⁷² Third cinema, as opposed to first cinema, employed film for political ends and resisted the separation of politics and art. In contrast to ‘second cinema’, European art film or auteur film, third cinema was not ‘a vehicle for personal expression’, but a ‘collective revolutionary activism’ and a ‘cinema of liberation’.⁷³

To broaden the historical and theoretical scope of the alternative aesthetic to Hollywood cinema at the height of the anti-colonial movements in the 1960s, this study recognises third cinema as a frame of reference, rather than subsuming Chinese revolutionary cinema under it. Chinese revolutionary cinema was implicated in the framework of first, second and third cinema at a time when anti-colonial movements and post-Bandung Third World solidarity were at their height in the 1960s. Like third cinema, Chinese revolutionary cinema was oriented against Hollywood cinema and away from European auteur cinema. Yet Chinese revolutionary cinema cannot be subsumed under the third cinema movement. Instead, it should be situated along the spectrum of alternative aesthetic that resisted or deviated from Hollywood cinema, despite its tacit appropriation of certain Hollywood conventions for different ends.⁷⁴

In his illuminative study, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema, Markus Nornes places translation at the centre of cinema, whose history is ‘one of endless border struggles’.⁷⁵ Echoing Lawrence Venuti’s contestation of the invisibility of translation as a derivative and secondary activity, Nornes redefines translation as a form of authorship and scholarship in the domain of film theory and criticism.⁷⁶ Victor Fan’s Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory, a pioneering effort to create a comparative dialogue between Euro–American film theory and Chinese film theory, locates the ontology of Chinese cinema by tracing the itinerancies of key terms such as bizhen (approaching reality), yishi (consciousness) and xieyi (sketching ideation).⁷⁷ Yet little attention is paid to the discussion of film theory during the Seventeen Years. By critically examining the translation, circulation and dissemination of Euro–American film theories in China during the Seventeen Years, and looking at how Soviet montage and Stanislavski’s realist acting system were introduced into China through the work of translation, my study fills an important gap in the global circulation of film theory.

As Nornes puts it, ‘the global volume of translation is marked by inequity when broken down by language group.’⁷⁸ The inaccessibility of film theories and criticisms that originate from areas not traditionally included in the canon, due to language barriers and power inequality, results in a unidirectional translation traffic: from Euro–America to East Asia, rather than the other way around. I aim to uncover the ways that Chinese translators and film critics entered a historical dialogue with other canonical texts and played off against one another, acquiring cultural capital and displacing previous conventions and current competitors in world cinema. When Nornes suggests that ‘the inability to access the original actually amplified the translation’s transformative power’, he asserts that linguistic distance actually allows translators and film critics creative and interpretative space in making an intervention in the global circulation of ideas.⁷⁹ Mistranslation or misprision, then, can be creative, productive and transformative: this is what happened in the translation and reception of Soviet montage in China.

The invention of film in the last decade of the nineteenth century gave rise to multiple modernities in the twentieth century. As technology, in the words of Andrew Jones, ‘traveled roughly at the speed of the steamships that plied colonial trade routes’ from the Western metropolis to the semi-colony of Shanghai, many Chinese film-makers were preoccupied with the question of catching up with the West because of the perceived belatedness of China’s modernisation.⁸⁰ One response to that perceived belatedness was the struggle to create a national cinema in order to negotiate the presence of the foreign, often through translation and appropriation of other cinematic modes. By looking at how Chinese film-makers and critics actively engaged with various film theories, aesthetic trends and cinematic precedents in both theory and practice, this book interrogates the dissemination of the canon of film theory and the ways in which Chinese film history is intimately connected to what we know as film history today. Highly informed by international film theory, Chinese film-makers who were active during the Seventeen Years were not passive recipients of film theory, but active participants in rereading, redefining and reinventing some of the major theoretical issues and film methods in international film discourse.

Lei Feng:	Family?
Village chief:	What? You don’t have a family? [followed by a close-up shot of Lei Feng’s scars, which remind him of his family’s suffering before liberation]
Lei Feng:	No. I have a family. The Party and Chairman Mao are my parents. The People’s Commune is my family. All of China is my family. Now that my family here is affected by the flood, I have the right and responsibility to help my family. Please accept my donation […] What parent wouldn’t accept a son’s good will?