Chinese Revolutionary Cinema

A Newsweek article published on 30 September, 1957, ‘Red China’s Big Push’, demonstrates how Chinese film was portrayed by the American media during the Cold War. The article was illustrated with a film still featuring a Chinese soldier loading his gun, captioned ‘A Chinese Communist movie: In Asia, the movies are Redder than ever’.¹ ‘Red’ movies as ‘an instrument of political propaganda’ were ‘socialist’ and ‘anti-American’: ‘Almost all Communist movies exalt China’s “socialist” experiment and many carry a pointed anti-American message.’² While the language and visual representation of the article reinforced the idea of ‘Red’ as socialist, militant and anti-American, a worried undertone of competition and crisis permeated the text. American movies were ‘losing out’ to those made by the Chinese in the burgeoning Southeast Asian market: ‘In Cambodia […] Peking’s movies have moved into second place in popularity, close behind the Indian films that have dominated the market for years. The traditional runners-up, French and American films are now farther behind than ever.’³ The article described the ‘Reds’ as ‘pushing hard’ and ‘winning an important ideological battle’.⁴

During the interwar period and throughout the Cold War, the highly contested and historically contingent term ‘propaganda’ was often mobilised to describe the art of the enemy other. In her study of the development of propaganda film theory in wartime Chongqing (1937–45), Weihong Bao points out that the ‘othering’ of propaganda was partly a Cold War construction:

Propaganda is probably the worst nightmare of cinema and media, popularly conceived as manipulations of mass affect and public opinions, a terrifying brainwashing in support of authoritarian rules. Yet propaganda should not be considered a distinct genre belonging to enemy others or a nightmarish past, the concept of which is a postwar construction during the Cold War era […] Instead of relishing the radical promise of cinema as an antithesis of propaganda, we should be mindful of the dialectical relationship between them.⁵

Propaganda is often seen as an ideological weapon mobilised by the propaganda state; but it should also be understood as an aesthetic experiment, involving trial and error and critical and theoretical evaluation by intellectuals and film-makers who also served as cultural bureaucrats. Between 1949 and 1966, various campaigns were initiated as part of the Chinese propaganda state’s aesthetic experiment: 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). At the heart of these campaigns, aesthetic experiments in screenwriting, cinematography, screen acting and the representation of heroic characters were proposed, discussed and vehemently debated in Party speeches, conferences, discussion sessions and film journals. In these campaigns, a new socialist culture of film criticism that included self-criticism and the ideological remoulding of film artists emerged, together with a new socialist film theory that negotiated the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

Is it possible to trace and locate a theory of propaganda film? An emerging key term in Chinese film studies, ‘propaganda film’ queries the relationship between propaganda and film aesthetics. Matthew Johnson defines it broadly, as referring to ‘all films produced by the state, particularly during the era of high socialism’; institutionally speaking, the film industry was part of the wider ‘propaganda system’.⁶ For instance, film censorship was undertaken by the Film Bureau, the Ministry of Culture and the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee.⁷ ‘Propaganda’ thus refers to the institutional context for a wide range of artistic and film-making activities related to ideological education.⁸ It is in this sense, Johnson notes, that the term is employed most widely by researchers and cultural observers today.

Propaganda film theory in Chinese cinema can, however, be traced back to Lu Xun’s 1930 translation of the Japanese Marxist film critic Iwasaki Akira’s ‘Film as a Tool of Propaganda and Provocation’ (宣傳、煽動手段としての映畫, a chapter of Iwasaki’s 1931 work Film and Capitalism). Lu Xun critiqued Hollywood cinema as hegemonic, capitalist and commercial propaganda that reinforced colonial subjugation and dependency on transnational capitalism. Likewise, Iwasaki’s chapter title drew attention to the interdependent relationship between propaganda and provocation.⁹ In Chinese, the term xuanchuan refers not only to propaganda, but also to publicity and advertising. In the afterword to his translation, Lu Xun pointed to the circulation of Hollywood movies and their advertising phrases in semi-colonial Shanghai:

Every day in Shanghai newspapers, there are two gigantic film advertisements, bragging about their casts of over ten thousand actors and budgets of several millions – ‘flirtation, romance, seduction, sex, humour, love, passion, adventure, bravery, knight errantry, gods and ghosts […] the biggest blockbusters of all time’ – as if one would die with regret if one didn’t make it to the movies.¹⁰

At stake was not only money (the concentration of the means of mechanical reproduction in the hands of colonial powers and transnational capital), but also representation and reception, as seductive and provocative advertising language and images restructured spectatorial desire and reinforced colonial subjugation:

Having watched a war film about a ‘valorous knight errant’, one unconsciously admires the martial look of the master and cannot help but remain a lackey. Having watched a ‘very flirtatious and romantic’ blockbuster, one is aroused by the sexy bodies of young women and cannot help but feel inferior – though it is possible to console oneself by chasing after a white Russian prostitute.¹¹

Lu Xun drew attention to the corporeal effects of advertising phrases to dramatise how film enacted civilisational competition in flesh and blood. War films reinforced unconscious admiration of the master, whereas romance fed sexual desire and reinforced the inferiority of the Chinese. In an interesting rhetorical move, Lu Xun described cinematic affect in racial, civilisational and gendered terms and spoke of the power of Hollywood movies to release and restructure repressed desire in a way that is pleasurable and seductive to the senses. In doing so, Lu Xun echoed Iwasaki’s description of film as a ‘tool of propaganda and provocation’. Lu Xun saw this tool of propaganda and provocation as being in the hands of the ‘propertied class’ (youchan jieji) in the politically and economically hegemonic capitalist world order dominated by the United States.¹²

The very choice of translation suggests Lu Xun’s interest in film as an ideological form perpetuating the economic and cultural hegemony of capital-driven Hollywood cinema. Iwasaki, a prominent Japanese film-maker and film critic who organised the Proletarian Filmmaker’s League (Prokino) in 1929, was the ‘house theorist’ at Prokino, with a stake in theory and a ‘desire to stress its inextricable connection to practice’.¹³ Activists from Prokino often filmed demonstrations and strikes and screened their work illegally in Japan. Film and Capitalism was Iwasaki’s second book, intended for those with an interest in proletarian culture. The chapter ‘Film as a Tool of Propaganda and Provocation’ was published separately in Shinko geijutsu in 1930, a year before the publication of Film and Capitalism.

In translating Iwasaki’s essay, Lu Xun redirected Iwasaki’s Marxist critique of film to his local audience in Shanghai. Lu Xun considered the circulation of Hollywood movies in semi-colonial Shanghai as first and foremost a problem of political economy. Accordingly, he retitled his translation ‘Modern Film and the Bourgeoisie’ (Xiandai dianying yu youchan jieji) and added an afterword targeting the consumption of Hollywood movies in semi-colonial Shanghai by ‘petty urbanites’ (xiao shimin) – a broadly and vaguely defined social class whose emergence intersected with the rise of cinema as a new mass medium in Shanghai and beyond. According to Zhang Zhen, xiao shimin included traditional and modern non-agrarian workers, small merchants, an emerging class of white-collar workers, and the petty bourgeoisie:

The majority of them occupying lower or lower-middle class positions are xiao or ‘petty’ because of their non-elite socio-economic status (not, however, at the bottom of society), young age (often because of their immigrant origins) and limited education and outlook (yet endowed with a measure of cosmopolitan spirit).¹⁴

Some of the May Fourth intellectuals regarded petty urbanites as an ‘anarchic social body corrupted by both “feudal” values (because of the rural origin of many migrants) and modern evils of the city’, because petty urbanities were both ‘fostered and exploited by consumerism’.¹⁵ In his afterword, Lu Xun called attention to the mutual dependence between petty urbanites and Hollywood movies in semi-colonial Shanghai: the latter articulated spectatorial desire, while the former facilitated American capital accumulation.

In official Chinese historiography, Lu Xun’s translation and afterword are canonised as important works of film criticism in the left-wing cinema movement. Xia Yan described Lu Xun as a pioneer who had the ‘prescience’ to see the intricate link between imperialism, capitalism and film.¹⁶ Similarly, Hong Dao, writing in 1956, applauded Lu Xun’s ‘rare foresight’ and described his translation and afterword as the earliest and most important works of film criticism.¹⁷ Writing in 1979, Gu Yuanqing and Gao Jinxian called Lu Xun a ‘heroic revolutionary, thinker, and writer’, who made an ‘irrefutable contribution to Chinese cinema’.¹⁸ In singling out Lu Xun’s translation, my intention is not to resuscitate Lu Xun as a forerunner of the left-wing cinema movement, as the official historiography suggests; rather, my intent is to situate his translation and film criticism within interwar Marxism and the international discourse on film and capitalism in the age of mechanical reproduction.

For Lu Xun, the appeal of Iwasaki’s essay lies in its poignant observation of the specificity of film as a medium due to its immediacy, international reach and popular appeal in the age of mechanical reproduction. Iwasaki described film as an ‘international text’ (kokusai-teki katsuji) because he considered film a ‘new print technology’ that ‘imprints moving pictures on celluloid’.¹⁹ In his translation, Lu Xun retained the Japanese kanji in Chinese: guoji de huozi. Huozi can be translated as ‘movable type’ (a system of printing and typography that uses movable type to reproduce elements of a document) or ‘moving script’, denoting film as a new medium comparable to and yet distinct from verbal and written language. As Lu Xun translates:

Instead of transmitting concepts to readers, the moving script transmits concepts using image and motion. Because of the immediacy of the visual, the moving script is the most popular and the most impressive form. It is an international moving script because of the principle absence of language.²⁰

The adjective ‘moving’ captures what Iwasaki described as the motion, immediacy, straightforwardness and even transparency of film in making images appeal at the level of the senses, overcoming the mediation of verbal or written languages as well as their untranslatability.

To Iwasaki, the international reach and popular appeal of the moving image were particularly well-suited to propagating imperial ideology in maintaining a capitalist world order. Iwasaki described the American Civil War film The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915) as a ‘double deception’, a ‘hypnotising pill’ that promulgated the ‘dignity of the national flag’ and ‘individual heroism’ to the petty bourgeoisie, who willingly paid for deceptive and hypnotic entertainment at the movie theatre.²¹ He considered film a highly malleable ideological form in the hands of the economic and cultural hegemon: ‘The massive audience that film has control over, and the immediacy and international reach of film, mean that film, in terms of both quantity and quality, is a superb tool for mass propaganda and provocation.’²² Like Iwasaki and many of his other contemporaries, Lu Xun considered film an ideological and economic tool due to its international reach and mass appeal.

Lu Xun’s critique of Hollywood cinema as a form of capitalist and commercial propaganda within consumer culture was published during the interwar period, when post-Russian Revolution Soviet aesthetic experiments and Fascist aesthetics (in film, literature, theatre, painting, sculpture, architecture, etc.) alike were part of state propaganda. The twentieth century, in particular the interwar period, was an age of visual propaganda. The interwar period witnessed the rise of totalitarian regimes that organised mass support through political propaganda as a form of aesthetic experiment. Between World Wars I and II and throughout the Cold War, in various national contexts, the highly contested and historically contingent term ‘propaganda’ shared blurry boundaries with art, entertainment, pedagogy and ideology. For instance, Soviet montage, as an avant-garde and modernist aesthetic, served an ideological end in the newly formed communist regime in the 1920s, while fascism represented a ‘third way’ with respect to capitalist and communist development during the interwar period: ‘the logical outcome of Fascism is an aestheticizing of political life’, as Walter Benjamin put it.²³ Fascist aesthetics – the use of aesthetic sensibilities for political purposes – can be understood as part of a larger European formation of totalitarian and political modernism during the interwar years.

Fascist propaganda’s power of fascination has been the subject of much study, including a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History, ‘Fascinating Fascism: The Aesthetics of Fascism’, which explores and reconstructs the operations of what Alice Yaeger Kaplan calls fascism’s ‘binding machine’.²⁴ Within modernist aesthetics, the Italian Fascist regime used aspects of Expressionist angst for its own ideological ends, offering totalitarian versions of Expressionist aesthetics. According to Emily Braun, the Italian fascist regime continued to tolerate Expressionist styles even after its alliance with Nazi Germany in 1939 because it could not negate the modernist legacy which it had openly supported for 20 years. Mario Sironi, for instance, was ‘arguably the most visible of artists working in an Expressionist idiom, and the most demonstrably fascist artist of the period’.²⁵ In both Soviet montage and Italian Expressionism, a modernist aesthetic of distortion and exaggeration is inseparable from the age of mechanical reproduction, which allowed for the deformation, defamiliarisation and remaking of reality in state propaganda.

Propaganda states’ co-optation of aesthetics in political life served to remould subjectivity and articulate utopian desire and spirituality. George L. Mosse suggests that the aesthetic of Italian fascism can be understood as a civic or political religion, which makes use of the ‘beauty of holiness’ for the purposes of a revolution in government.²⁶ In ‘Fascist Aesthetics Revisited’, Lutz P. Koepnick suggests that fascism ‘constitutes a phase of capitalist modernization in which the political dimension itself becomes a market item’.²⁷ The politics of fascism should therefore be understood as a form of commodity aesthetics in the visual age of political symbols: ‘An ideological product – the Führer, folk community, or whatever – is supplied with a brand name and a trade-mark – the swastika – and a product-image is carefully designed.’²⁸

The interwar period can therefore be understood as a visual age of competing propagandas at the nexus of capitalism, communism and fascism in the age of mechanical reproduction, when film aesthetics, the specificity of aesthetic mediums, and ideology were all under rigorous discussion. Of particular importance to Chinese film-makers were the ‘anti-colonial energies of the Soviet idea’:

[T]he different mapping of influences and conceptual novelties from the interwar period eventually leads us to the forbidding subject of the Russian Revolution. This Revolution […] created a full-blown culture of anti-imperialism for the first time, and it is striking and deeply revealing that the topic has been so carefully avoided in the postcolonial discussion.²⁹

Beginning in the early 1930s, Soviet Russia was conceived by many Chinese left-wing film-makers as having the answers to questions confronting Chinese cinema. The 1933 public screening in Shanghai of the Soviet film The Road to Life (Nikolai Ekk, 1931) was enthusiastically welcomed by many Chinese film-makers.

The roots of Chinese revolutionary film include the left-wing cinema movement in the early 1930s, marked by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). In the midst of civil war between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party and Japanese invasion, aesthetics increasingly became tied to revolution and national defence. In 1935, the Chinese Communist Party made a series of declarations about resistance against Japanese invasion; in the following year, the Party suggested the slogan ‘national defence literature’ (guofang wenxue), inspiring left-wing writers, film-makers and dramatists to adopt similar slogans such as ‘national defence cinema’ and ‘national defence drama’. The Second Sino-Japanese War divided China into five geopolitical zones and film centres: Japanese-annexed Manchuria, semi-colonial Shanghai, the British colony Hong Kong, the communist ‘liberation zone’ in north-west China, and Chongqing, the Nationalist government’s wartime capital in south-west China after its relocation from Nanjing. According to Bao, propaganda theory in the semi-state-run Chongqing wartime resistance cinema from 1937 to 1945 displayed two major trends, both of which amplified the role of media: ‘one positing propaganda as a tool of information, the other conceiving propaganda as an instrument of affect.’³⁰ The former deals with the dissemination of truth claims; the latter the affective impact of aesthetic forms. Beyond the Cold War logic of ‘know thy enemy’, rethinking the historically contingent term ‘propaganda’, with its roots in interwar Marxism and modernism, allows us to understand state propaganda as first and foremost an aesthetic experiment that sought to achieve maximum affective impact and mass persuasion.

The term ‘propaganda film’ expresses the ‘identification of historical connections between the party-state, Maoist cultural policy and film-making’.³¹ After 1949, the Party sought hegemony in political, economic and cultural life by creating a socialist and revolutionary aesthetics. By projecting revolutionary heroism on screen, cinema participated in defining what that socialist and revolutionary aesthetics was. The first three years of the film establishment and its transition to the new regime, from 1949 to 1951, were marked not so much by repression as by collaboration and negotiation between artists (from both the Shanghai and Yan’an film-making traditions) and Party, as the latter had to rely on the former with their specialised skillsets and experience.³² Yuan Muzhi, for instance, was appointed director of the Central Film Bureau. Cai Chusheng and Shi Dongshan served as members of the Film Guidance Executive Committee. A diverse range of films, with various subject matter, were produced and released during the transitional period; it was not until 1952, after the Campaign against The Life of Wu Xun (Sun Yu, 1951) and the Rectification Campaign, that the film industry was nationalised.³³ Laikwan Pang argues that the two nationwide campaigns created a ‘new criticism culture’ and a ‘national cultural criticism apparatus’.³⁴ Similarly, Yomi Braester highlights a culture of debate and film criticism as a defining feature of what he calls the ‘cinephilia’ of the 1950s.³⁵ In his discussion of Chinese film theory, Victor Fan has suggested that film criticism took the form of critique and judgement (pipan) in the Mao era, often as precursors to broader cultural and political critiques and persecutions, but he does not probe into the way film criticism and film theory could emerge from pipan in a new culture of criticism (and self-criticism) rather than being simply repressed.³⁶ In fact, the new culture of criticism and self-criticism that emerged as a result of political campaigns put film aesthetics – especially screenwriting, cinematography and acting – at the heart of intense debate.

The political campaigns and aesthetic experiments throughout the Seventeen Years were characterised by alternating moments of tightened control, which demanded strict intellectual orthodoxy, and political relaxation, which directly encouraged creativity. Through trial and error, the Party’s grip on aesthetics alternately tightened and loosened. Film-makers were critiqued for neglecting ideology and for their petty bourgeois class standing, said to cloud their aesthetic view in the Rectification Campaign (1951–2); but the First Five-Year Plan (1953–7) and the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956–7) unleashed attempts to rescue aesthetics from overt propaganda, an effort best encapsulated by Zhong Dianfei in 1956, with his notion of the equal emphasis on the ideological, aesthetic and box office value of film. Aesthetics was once again put on the back burner amidst the ‘more, faster, better, cheaper’ (duo kuai hao sheng) experimentalism of the Great Leap Forward Campaign (1958–61), followed by a commercial turn in cinema during the unique Blooming and Contending of 1961–2 after Zhou Yang advocated ‘walking on two legs’ – conveying ideology through aesthetic forms – in literature and art. Chinese cinema’s forceful melding of propaganda and film aesthetics, which exist in tension, constitutes a major aesthetic experiment in the twentieth century.

Required to undergo ‘ideological remoulding’ (sixiang gaizao), intellectuals continued to participate in cinema after 1949, as screenwriters, directors and bureaucrats. Through trial and error, they developed a new kind of film theory and criticism that cooperated with the Party’s ideological priorities. The term ‘ideological remoulding’ came from deputy minister of the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee Hu Qiaomu’s November 1951 speech on the Rectification Campaign (wenyi zhengfeng). In the speech, titled ‘Why Artists Should Undergo Ideological Remoulding’, Hu based his ideology on Mao’s Yan’an talks: ‘Comrade Mao pointed out that […] artists should be on the side of workers. Those who are not on the side of workers should diligently remould (gaizao) themselves in order to “move from one class to another class”.’³⁷

It is important to note that this remoulding includes emotional reform. Again quoting Mao, Hu said: ‘We artists from the intellectual class must transform and remould our thoughts and emotions in order for our work to achieve popularity among the masses.’³⁸ Hu’s speech, which initiated the Rectification Campaign, was aimed at artists who had received a ‘bourgeois and petty bourgeois education’.³⁹ These artists, in particular those from the Shanghai film-making tradition, were urged to acquire the perspective of workers, peasants and soldiers (gongnongbing) in order to serve them. Two days after Hu’s speech, Mao officially endorsed the nationwide Rectification Campaign, which must ‘initiate serious criticism (piping) and self-criticism (ziwo piping)’ among cultural workers.⁴⁰ The notions of criticism and self-criticism were predicated on existing flawed ideology (cuowu sixiang), which had to be overcome. For film-makers, the Rectification Campaign and ensuing political campaigns demanded a series of self-corrections that induced them to articulate a new socialist film theory and criticism.

The 1951 Rectification Campaign was preceded by the Campaign against The Life of Wu Xun and succeeded by nationalisation of the film industry in 1952. As Zhuoyi Wang has suggested, the campaign against The Life of Wu Xun, often misunderstood as a manifestation of ideological differences between Yan’an-trained artists and Shanghai-based film-makers, is better understood in terms of the Party’s first and foremost economic priority: to target private film studio artists in nationalising the film industry.⁴¹ The critique against The Life of Wu Xun (Sun Yu, 1951) was initiated by Mao himself, and the ensuing Rectification Campaign ensured the integration, centralisation and nationalisation of the film industry by 1952. Criticisms of art and artists, and self-criticisms articulated by artists during the Rectification Campaign, set the stage for the First Five-Year Plan (1953–7), which set goals for screenwriting, directing and acting.

Part of their ideological remoulding during the Rectification Campaign, artists’ self-criticisms revolved around two issues: class standing and aesthetics. As early as August 1949, Xian Qun, in an essay titled ‘On the Question “Can We Write about the Petty Bourgeoisie”’, talked about the necessity for artists to adopt the perspective of the proletariat, rather than that of the petty bourgeoisie, because art serves workers, peasants and soldiers.⁴² During the Rectification Campaign, the question raised in Mao’s Yan’an talks in 1942, ‘whom does art serve’, became as important as the question of ‘by whom is art made’. The class standing of artists, especially those from the Shanghai film-making tradition, became the locus of self-examination (ziwo jiancha). In their self-criticisms during the Rectification Campaign, directors from the Shanghai tradition like Cai Chusheng, Lü Ban, Shi Dongshan and Zheng Junli recognised their class standing as petty bourgeois intellectuals influenced by Hollywood film-making.

In a self-criticism titled ‘I Recognised my Flawed Ideology’ (1951), Lü Ban, often referred to as the ‘Chinese Chaplin’, admitted his class standing as a petty bourgeois whose creative method was inspired by Hollywood. Lü Ban criticised his film The Lüliang Heroes (Lü Ban and Yilin, 1950) for its humorous scene in which Chinese soldiers leave a chamber pot among the landmines for Japanese soldiers to dig up. He regretted the scene, which satisfied the petty urbanite penchant for ‘low-brow entertainment’ (diji quwei), and attributed that tendency to his ‘emphasis on form rather than content, technique rather than ideology’.⁴³ In other words, Lü Ban’s class standing rendered his aesthetic view problematic.

Class standing and aesthetic view were also at the centre of Cai Chusheng’s self-criticism, ‘Remould Our Thoughts to Realise Chairman Mao’s Vision of Literature and Art’ (1952). Reflecting on his career, Cai Chusheng wrote: ‘Permeating my oeuvre is petty bourgeois ideology.’⁴⁴ He expressed regret over the dramatic effects of The Spring River Flows East (Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli, 1947), which ‘catered to the needs of petty urbanites’: ‘The main flaw of the film is that I instilled my petty bourgeois soul and emotions in the female protagonist, who commits suicide as a so-called “accusation” of society. But in fact what it achieved is a profoundly pessimistic despair.’⁴⁵ Cai Chusheng found that his earlier evocation of universal values such as ‘sympathy’, ‘humanism’ and ‘human nature’ could not transcend the worldview and aesthetic view of the petty bourgeoisie: ‘All I could achieve was “sympathy” instead of adopting the attitude of the proletariat.’⁴⁶ Like Lü Ban, Cai Chusheng conceded his films’ Hollywood influences and excessive emphasis on form and technique.

In ‘Diligently Remould Myself through Serious Learning’ (1952), Shi Dongshan likewise reflected on his career: ‘Before liberation, the films I directed mostly represent petty bourgeois intellectuals.’⁴⁷ Shi Dongshan mistook The Spring River Flows East and Myriad of Lights (Shen Fu, 1948) as films for workers, peasants and soldiers, but four years later recognised that they were in fact films for the petty bourgeoisie. He critiqued his earlier essay ‘The Creation of Film Art for Now’ (1949), in which he wrote,

If the audience wants to see fights, it doesn’t hurt to have a fight scene. If the audience wants to see special effects and set designs, it doesn’t hurt to have them. If the audience wants to see everyday family life, it doesn’t hurt to show it. As a cultural worker with a petty bourgeois upbringing, I was quite thoughtful towards petty urbanites!⁴⁸

Shi Dongshan criticised himself for neglecting ideology, satisfying the tastes of petty urbanites, and excessively portraying romance: ‘I used to insist that we should value aesthetics, and so-called aesthetics […] is mostly techniques such as rhythm, structure, cinematography, and humour etc.’⁴⁹ At the end of his self-criticism, Shi Dongshan acknowledged that his incorrect class standing and ideological flaws clouded his aesthetic view of film, which should be first and foremost a ‘weapon for mass propaganda and education’.⁵⁰

Likewise, in ‘I Must Resolutely Remould Myself’ (1952), Zheng Junli admitted that he ‘unconsciously learned Hollywood’s “profit-making” skills’ and created dramatic effects and banal entertainment in films like Crows and Sparrows (Zheng Junli, 1949) and The Spring River Flows East.⁵¹ Echoing his collaborator Cai Chusheng, Zheng Junli recognised that his evocation of universal value catered to petty urbanite tastes while trivialising politics. Though The Married Couple (Zheng Junli, 1951), a film about the union between husband (intellectual) and wife (peasant-worker), used the day-to-day domestic life of a couple to convey a serious political theme, the film ended up presenting the couple’s fights over trivialities such as slippers, cigars and spare ribs. As Zheng Junli put it: ‘I want politics (zhengzhi xing) and human touch (renqingwei). I can’t have my cake and eat it too.’⁵²

A common thread of artists’ self-criticisms during the Rectification Campaign is that the unification of ideology and aesthetics is challenging, if not impossible. The underlying tension between ideology and aesthetics was apparent as early as July 1949, when Mao Dun’s report on revolutionary literature and art in the GMD-controlled area explained the pressing problem of unifying the political nature (zhengzhi xing) and aesthetic nature (yishu xing) of literature and art. Mao Dun asked: ‘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.’⁵³ He found that judgements of artistic value were as much about politics as aesthetics, but suggested that more attention should be given to aesthetics: ‘It is not that there is no politics in our works of art. On the contrary, there is too much of it. What we lack is aesthetics. That is why we have no representative works of art.’⁵⁴ A month later, Shi Dongshan wrote that ‘it doesn’t hurt if we combine romance (lian’ai) and revolution (geming)’, an aesthetic view he later rejected during the Rectification Campaign for appealing to petty urbanites.⁵⁵ In 1950 Chen Bo’er, a Yan’an trained artist working in the Northeast Film Studio, expressed her contrasting concern that ‘some comrades focus on form and technique, but neglect ideology and content’.⁵⁶ For Chen Bo’er, ‘any form or technique serves to communicate plot and ideology.’⁵⁷

As these examples and artists’ self-criticisms in the Rectification Campaign collectively demonstrate, political and aesthetic value judgements of film depended on artists’ class standing, the Party’s intention to nationalise private film studios, and the supposed aesthetic inclinations of the new ideal audience (workers, peasants and soldiers) that cinema was to serve. Tensions between ideology and aesthetics persisted through the Rectification Campaign. Criticism and self-criticism not only articulated challenges and tensions, but also anticipated the goals of the First Five-Year Plan.

The year 1953 marked the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan and the official adoption of socialist realism at the Second National Assembly of Chinese Literature and Art Workers. The ensuing five years witnessed a burgeoning discourse on screenwriting, cinematography and acting, partly as a result of artists’ ideological remoulding, trial and error, and self-criticisms in the Rectification Campaign. The problems and goals articulated in this period laid out a blueprint for Chinese cinema for years to come.

At the First National Conference on Screenwriting in 1953, Zhou Yang established the priority of film-making under socialist realism: to create ‘pioneering characters as a type’ (xianjin renwu de dianxing).⁵⁸ According to Zhou Yang, a type (dianxing) represented a social stratum, a class or a group, according to its fundamental qualities. The major problem confronting Chinese cinema, Zhou Yang emphasised, was that ‘writers do not dare to reveal weaknesses in heroic characters (yingxiong renwu)’, which are necessary in representing growth and individuality (gexing), because after all, heroes are not ‘celestial beings’.⁵⁹ Offering Chapaev (Georgi Vasilyev and Sergei Vasilyev, 1934) as an example of Soviet socialist realism, Zhou Yang suggested that the growth ‘in political worldview from immaturity to maturity’ revealed heroic characters’ individuality, so that characters are believable when they go through struggle and contradictions.⁶⁰ Zhou Yang not only emphasised individuality in the representation of heroic characters, but also encouraged writers to write about romance (lian’ai): ‘In our work, whenever we get to emotions (ganqing), we don’t dare to keep going, fearing that petty bourgeois emotions will come through.’⁶¹ His relaxed view of individuality, romance and emotion indicated a renewed emphasis on aesthetics, which had been criticised in the Rectification Campaign. In encouraging artists to overcome a ‘formulaic tendency’ in their creative endeavours, Zhou Yang articulated principles for the creation of heroic characters that were to be echoed and further developed by film-makers in the following years.⁶²

Accordingly, Chen Huangmei’s speech ‘On the Question of Screenwriting’ (1954) commented on the lack of good film scripts and the phenomenon of ‘stating a theme’ (shuo zhuti) in screenwriting: ‘Narrate a story, state the theme, and the job is done.’⁶³ Chen Huangmei observed that writers had forgotten about the principle of depicting people in literature and art, so that the heroic characters they created were often ‘without flesh and blood and could not move people’.⁶⁴ In particular, the actions, speech and emotions of Party leaders and cadres on screen were ‘infallible and completely correct’.⁶⁵ Chen Huangmei emphasised the need to represent the ‘spiritual features’ (jingshen mianmao) and psychological activities of heroic characters in work and family life.⁶⁶ His discussion of romance echoed Zhou Yang: ‘Our films rarely talk about romance (lian’ai). Now we are seeing some progress, but the representation of romance is not good enough. It is dry, boring, and not realistic enough.’⁶⁷ Chen Huangmei attributed these flat characters and weak film scripts to the Rectification Campaign: ‘During the Rectification Campaign, many people underwent self-criticism. They feel that they still have a lot of petty bourgeois thoughts and emotions. Therefore, they seal off those thoughts and emotions and no longer write about those things anymore.’⁶⁸

In a later speech, ‘On the Creation of Positive Characters’ (1955), Chen Huangmei again emphasised a neglect of aesthetics, urging artists to take advantage of film as a visual medium for depicting the spiritual features and interior worlds of heroic characters. He lamented a lack of love in heroic characters, some of whom ‘love machines because they themselves are machines – it is as if they don’t love anybody. They don’t love friends or spouses. They don’t love everyday life because they don’t have everyday life. For instance, positive characters in our films do not have family lives.’⁶⁹ Chen Huangmei argued that love was necessary to humanise heroic characters: ‘Heroes are just like us – ordinary and real people. They experience difficulties and obstacles in work and life. They experience joy, anger, sorrow and happiness.’⁷⁰ Defining love correctly was necessary, to differentiate it from petty bourgeoisie emotions; noting that class love (jieji ganqing), friendship (youqing) among comrades, and romance (aiqing) were lacking on screen, Chen Huangmei urged artists to depict exemplary characters’ social labour and social activities, including their everyday and family lives, so that social life and individual life would be unified in representation.⁷¹ He noted that a correct kind of love involved ‘sharing a common political outlook’: ‘A couple falls in love as they struggle for their ideals in work and social activities.’⁷² As shall be seen, Zhou Yang’s and Chen Huangmei’s perspectives on romance and love were to serve as a roadmap for the appropriation of classical Hollywood narration and its dual plot of romance and work in Chinese revolutionary film.⁷³

In his report on the Conference on Screenwriting, Directing, and Acting in Fiction Film in 1955, Cai Chusheng also addressed the formulaic representation of positive characters and the necessity of writing about love:

Romance (lian’ai) – the continuation of human life through heterosexual union and procreation – has an important impact in educating young people […] but we are not good at representing it […] Romance is an eternal theme of creative work. One ought to write about it with gusto.⁷⁴

Cai assigned explicit purposes to romance (lian’ai) – heterosexual union and the formation of family – for the emulation of young audiences. These goals would be reinforced later by Chinese film-makers’ appropriation of classical Hollywood narration in revolutionary film. Going further than Zhou Yang and Chen Huangmei, Cai Chusheng turned his attention to acting, especially the ‘exaggerated overperformance’ and ‘underperformance’ of actors who played positive characters.⁷⁵ Cai Chusheng acknowledged actors’ learning of Stanislavski’s system in acting troupes in Shanghai and Beijing; however, he observed that most actors are personality actors (bense yanyuan) who played roles similar to their real-life personalities and relied on their ‘true colours’ (bense).⁷⁶ Cai Chusheng believed that personality actors were unlikely to have a bright future, and urged them to reject formulaic performances for more nuanced and varied expressions of the interiority (neixin huodong) and spirituality of positive characters. He suggested Chinese actors learn from the best Soviet actors, who ‘have a distinct personality, spiritual feature, tone and gesture every time they play a role’.⁷⁷ This emphasis on acting and the representation of heroic characters initiated a discourse on screen acting that prefigured the 1962 socialist star craze.

As well as calling for the creation of positive characters through acting, the First Five-Year Plan laid out goals for screenwriting. Reviewing film production in 1954, Cai Chusheng noted a lack of both quantity and quality: only 14 fiction films were produced that year.⁷⁸ Chen Huangmei had set a production target of 12–15 film scripts per year in 1953 (including some accumulated during the Rectification Campaign), but anticipated a script shortage by 1955.⁷⁹ To broaden films’ subject matter, Chen Huangmei encouraged adaptations of May Fourth literature like Ba Jin’s novel Family (1933). The collective nature of socialist screenwriting, often requiring multiple revisions after review and censorship, was one cause of the script shortage. Chen Huangmei encouraged consultation, discussion and collaboration between screenwriters and bureaucrats and urged screenwriters to insist on their opinions and not fear bureaucratic leadership.

Chen Huangmei’s articulation of the tension between bureaucratic leadership and artists’ creative autonomy was echoed by Shi Dongshan that same year. In a 1954 discussion session on shooting scripts, Shi Dongshan claimed that film artists were ‘too eager to propagandise’ (xuanchuan): ‘They overtly propagandised, not paying attention to the way art operates in the unconscious.’⁸⁰ Like Zhou Yang, Chen Huangmei and Cai Chisheng, Shi Dongshan called for a renewed focus on aesthetics in articulating the First Five-Year Plan, one in which screenwriting would be given as much emphasis as the creation of positive characters. Quoting Soviet director and screenwriter Sergei Gerasimov (whose work was translated and published in the Chinese film journal Film Art Translations), Shi Dongshan elevated the film script as a literary and artistic form:

The task of film artists is to make film scripts (dianying juben) as important as a novella or a novel, so that a film script is no longer an application for film production or a draft for a future film, but the ideological and artistic foundation of a film.⁸¹

In fact, a film script was often called a ‘film–literary script’ (dianying wenxue juben) in Chinese. Shi Dongshan elevated the literary quality not only of film scripts, but also of shooting scripts (fenjingtou juben): ‘There is no need to write a shooting script as an application or a balance sheet, dividing action and dialogue into two sections. Such a shooting script lacks literary quality and cannot inspire actors and workers.’⁸² A shooting script, or shot division, constituted a second step in screenwriting, integrating a film script with shot division and enhancing the literary and visual quality of a film in its early conception: ‘We expect a shooting script to read like a novel […] Special effects and sound effects should be incorporated into the text of the shooting script with a mood that affects readers.’⁸³ Shi Dongshan advocated integrating dialogue, shot division and special effects in shooting scripts and rejected fragmentation between content and form. His emphasis on the literary and artistic value of film scripts and shooting scripts rescued aesthetics from what he viewed as overt propaganda that had neglected artistic techniques.

The problems and goals articulated during the First Five-Year Plan were part of a burgeoning discourse on screenwriting, cinematography and acting during a relaxed political environment that culminated in Hu Feng’s radical proposal to decentralise film-making. In Hu Feng’s ‘Report on the Practice and State of Art and Literature in Recent Years’, also known as the ‘300,000-Word Letter’, he suggested discontinuing national and regional publications such as Wenyi bao, Renmin wenxue and Wenyi yuebao and dissolving central and regional administrative entities and creative units.⁸⁴ This radical proposal set in motion the Anti-Hu Feng Campaign in 1955, during which Hu Feng was heavily critiqued and arrested; Shi Dongshan, Hu Feng’s close friend, committed suicide during the campaign.

The year 1956 witnessed a worldwide re-evaluation of socialism. Stalin’s death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 marked the beginning of the thaw and de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union, where repression and censorship were relaxed. The looser political environment served as a backdrop for Mao to launch the Hundred Flowers Campaign, ‘letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend’, encouraging open critical expression from film artists in 1956. The Hungarian Uprising in the same year triggered a crisis of socialism worldwide. Domestically, Mao’s campaign revealed tensions, weaknesses and the necessity of reforms, posing challenges to the Party’s centralised control of the film industry. The Hundred Flowers Campaign was to end abruptly, followed by another purge, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in 1957.

Criticism unleashed during the Hundred Flowers Campaign revolved around three major issues: screenwriting and censorship, the changing status of directors, and the changing identity of actors as state employees in a planned economy. The criticism must be understood in the context of a perceived lack of quantity and quality of domestic film, slow production and weak attendance. In November 1956, Wenhui Daily reported that a typical domestic film had an attendance rate of 30–40 per cent in a city like Shanghai with a population of six million.⁸⁵ The Daily stated that readers often wrote letters to criticise domestic films for their ‘narrow subject matters, similar plots and formulaic contents’.⁸⁶ Although film output had progressed since 1954, when 14 fiction films were made, only 36 fiction films were produced in 1956.⁸⁷ The limited number of films meant that screening schedules offered little variety and diversity, indirectly and inadvertently forcing audiences to watch specific films.⁸⁸ Weak box office, coupled with the lack of variety and choice, signalled a disconnect between film-makers and the audience.

When the film industry was nationalised, film production and distribution were separated. Film-makers and producers were not given data about box office, distribution income or audience reception. As Chen Liting explained, unlike pre-1949 commercial cinema, which considered audience preference so as to recoup costs and profit in a market-driven economy, planned-economy film-making fulfilled production targets:

A film studio is more like an administrative unit […] The official approval of a film has nothing to do with audience’s interest. A film acclaimed by officials may not be well received by the audience at all […] The relationship between film-makers and audience is severed.⁸⁹

Li Xing, manager of the Lingling People’s Cinema in a provincial town in Hunan, remarked that the quality of films about industry and agriculture was so poor that only 49 tickets were sold to workers for the screening of A Heroic Beginning (Zhang Ke, 1954) on International Workers’ Day. Screening of The March Forward (Cheng Yin, 1950) was cancelled because tickets were unsold.⁹⁰ In an essay that was heavily criticised during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Zhong Dianfei provocatively said that the audience cinema claims to serve – workers, peasants and soldiers – is an abstraction if there are only a few actual people watching film.⁹¹ Zhong Dianfei suggested that there should be equal emphasis on film’s ‘ideological value, aesthetic value and box office value’.⁹²

One major reason for the perceived qualitative and quantitative lacks, and slow production, of domestic film, was bureaucratic censorship of film scripts, which created tensions between screenwriters and bureaucrats. In an essay titled ‘Improve the System for Reviewing Film Scripts’ (1956), Tang Zhenchang laid out the complex process of reviewing film scripts. A film script had to go through seven or eight rounds of revision: from editors to studio leaders to the Film Bureau to directors. Reviewers and censors often had individual preferences, lacking an objective standard.⁹³ Mu Bai shared this view, listing a few ‘commandments’ from the top: a pet dog had to be removed because it was a petty bourgeois plaything; a doctor wearing glasses with black frames was not appropriate; children not knocking on the door or not saying ‘thank you’ showed a lack of courtesy.⁹⁴ Lao She, in an essay titled ‘Save our Cinema’ (1956), expressed similar concerns: ‘the original 40 per cent of aesthetics has been reduced to less than 10 per cent. A film script therefore slips into nothingness – no language, no plot, no style, no structure.’⁹⁵ Lao She offered a hypothesis to suggest that a film is no different from a staged lecture: ‘Suppose a couple falls in love, but in a second they turn around and talk about their study, work or world affairs.’⁹⁶ Shi Hui expressed his vexation as a director:

A revised script gives directors a headache: ‘How can I make a film out of it?’ The leader says: ‘It’s not easy to get a script approved. Use it and don’t change anything.’ In front of actors, directors cannot say anything bad about the script. They have no choice but to swallow their frustrations.⁹⁷

Film artists’ dissatisfaction with review and censorship of scripts pointed to a production mode that centred on executive leadership, under which writers and subject matter for film scripts were organised through executive orders.

Executive leadership of production tamed, if not endangered, the status of the auteur and his creative vision. The new production mode created a situation in which bureaucratic laymen managed film specialists, a hierarchical relationship between bureaucrats and directors that limited collaboration and creative freedom. In an essay titled ‘Directors Should be at the Center of Film Production’ (1956), Chen Liting emphasised the core identity of the auteur as the creator of film art: ‘Only directors can foresee the screen image of a film. Only directors can evaluate the individual talent of their crew members and designate tasks accordingly.’⁹⁸ Chen Liting claimed that artistic creation was unlike industrial production in that it depended on collaboration and communication among directors, screenwriters, actors, technicians and cameramen. Using pre-1949 Chinese cinema and foreign cinema as a yardstick, Chen Liting argued that a sophisticated director had screenwriters he often collaborated with and actors and cameramen he was familiar with.⁹⁹ Unfortunately, he said, ‘our leaders indiscriminately categorise directors, actors and technicians and select a film script from an executive perspective.’¹⁰⁰ Chen Liting described this top-down process as inhibiting directorial initiative, as if directors were to wait for ‘missions’ assigned to them.¹⁰¹

Similarly, in an essay titled ‘Respect the Aesthetic Tradition of Cinema’ (1956), Sun Yu called directors ‘commanders in chief’ who orchestrated screenwriting, acting, cinematography, sound and set design and turned them into an integrated and complete work of art.¹⁰² Likewise, Wu Zuguang’s controversial essay, ‘Party, Please Don’t Lead Artistic Work’ (1957) – targeted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign – highlighted the radical change in directors’ identity and status, as well as the dual identity of directors as bureaucrats: ‘Cai Chusheng and I were friends and we often had debates on art. But now he is a head, a leader. I can only execute what he says.’¹⁰³ Critiques of a new production mode that centred on executive leadership indicated a changing relationship between auteurs and the one-party state. Directors were stripped of their auteur identities and made the cogs and wheels of state propaganda – yet some of them were given the bureaucratic authority to lead artistic work. The survival and transformation of individual film-makers’ talents, as shall be seen, were to remain one of the top priorities of state propaganda.

This centring of executive leadership in film production had consequences for the identities, not only of directors, but also of actors as state employees in a planned economy. Unlike a market-driven economy where actors competed for work in a free labour market, socialist actors were state employees whose casting opportunities were contingent on the supply and censorship of film scripts. In an essay titled ‘Let Numerous Hidden Jewels Shine’ (1956), Shanggong Yunzhu, an actress from the Shanghai film-making tradition, identified what she saw as the ‘problem of actors’ work’.¹⁰⁴ Her notion of work included creative labour and artistic work in the realm of aesthetics: for example, casting, actors’ training and the maintenance of professional identity. Shanggong Yunzhu complained that in the seven years since 1949 most actors in the Shanghai Film Studio, especially actresses, had had only one or two shots on screen or stage appearances: ‘Actors are set aside and their skills are getting rusty.’¹⁰⁵ Le Yan from the Beijing Screen Acting Troupe saw the same problem: of 147 actors in the Changchun Screen Acting Troupe, only 40 had regular work. The rest were mostly without work in any given year. The situation for the Beijing Screen Acting Troupe was even worse; like the Shanghai Film Studio, some actors had had only one to two screen appearances since 1949, while some had been set aside since 1952 and others had remained ‘unemployed’ since their first day in the film industry.¹⁰⁶ Unlike unemployed actors in a free labour market, who might find alternative employment, socialist actors were state employees and had a regular income, so that their lack of work did not mean loss of income, but rather loss of market value and the erosion of their professional identity as actors. An existential crisis of being employed but without work hit many actors, who understood their lack of fulfilment as stemming from a bureaucratic lack of respect and understanding of actors’ work.

Hence, although the shortage of film scripts was a contributing factor to the lack of work opportunities for actors, actors pointed to the lack of understanding and trust from leadership as the root of their problem. Shanggong Yunzhu considered the shortage of film scripts a symptom of this underlying issue: ‘Leaders do not pay attention to actors’ lack of work. They do not treat it as a problem that is wasting away an artist’s creative life and youth.’¹⁰⁷ Actresses’ creative youth was a particular concern in casting decisions, though Han Fei, a comedic actor who moved from Hong Kong to Shanghai in 1952, expressed similar concerns: ‘As an actor, being away from stage and screen means losing my source of life. It is hard to live through idle days.’¹⁰⁸

Actors’ lack of fulfilment reflected the lack of work opportunities, but it also resulted from a lack of understanding, respect and trust from the leadership. Sun Jinglu, a screen actress with stage experience, recalled that a leader from her troupe was shocked to learn that she had performed in Sunrise (1936), a drama written by Cao Yu. Sun Jinglu asked: ‘Our leaders are so unfamiliar with our actors. How can they allocate work for us?’¹⁰⁹ Leaders’ unfamiliarity with and mistrust of actors’ experience haunted Shanggong Yunzhu, who spoke of an unhealthy assumption that actors from the old society did not have the ability to create new characters.¹¹⁰ Using the film For Peace (Huang Zuolin, 1956) as an example, Sun Jinglu noted that actors playing antagonists were not named in the opening credits of films.¹¹¹ These frustrations express a shared desire for more visibility and screen opportunities, and recognition of actors’ work and experience.

Even actors who had the opportunity to work found screen roles boxed in. Le Yan commented on the formulaic roles available: ‘[An actor’s] roles have the same flavour. Even the plots are the same. Therefore, s/he has no choice but to show a heroic face. What s/he worries about is that […] s/he will forever have this face only.’¹¹² Le Yan asked, ‘If people have labelled and limited what’s not even on screen yet, what’s left for actors to create?’¹¹³ Where Cai Chusheng spoke of the weakness of personality actors in 1955, Le Yan expressed a need of actors to act outside the box just a year later.

The criticism unleashed during the Hundred Flowers Campaign revealed these disconnects between bureaucratic leadership, film artists (directors, screenwriters and actors), and the audience. Zhong Dianfei’s idea of ‘box office value’ and Wu Zuguang’s critique of Party leadership were targeted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, in which Shi Hui, like Shi Dongshan in response to the Anti-Hu Feng Campaign, committed suicide. The campaign that was to follow – the Great Leap Forward Campaign (1958–61) – continued to confront the problems of screenwriting, the changing identities of directors and actors and the struggle to determine the ideological, aesthetic and box office values of film.

The Great Leap Forward Campaign (GLF), an ambitious socialist experiment, set targets for rapid industrialisation and collectivisation. Film production was part of the campaign. A new genre called ‘documentary-style art film’ (jiluxing yishupian) emerged, embodying the new utopianism. Under the slogan ‘more, faster, better, cheaper’ (duo kuai hao sheng), 103 fiction films (including 49 documentary-style art films) were produced in 1958, 2.5 times more than in 1957.¹¹⁴ Reflecting on the progress in film production, Xia Yan commented that the first two years of the GLF surpassed total film output since 1949: 180 fiction films had been produced since the GLF began, compared to 171 films from 1949 to 1957. Average production time for films shortened from one year to five months or less during the GLF. The average production cost of a black-and-white film decreased in 1956–8, from RMB$ 200,000 to RMB$ 110,000; a documentary-style art film cost as little as RMB$ 57,000.¹¹⁵

Most of the machines and equipment for film production (except for film negatives) were made domestically in the PRC rather than imported. Along with setting production targets, the Ministry of Culture set targets for film screening and attendance, proposing 4 million film screenings to an audience of 3 billion in 1958.¹¹⁶ The ministry targeted a 20 per cent increase in film screenings by projection teams and a 12 per cent increase in theatrical screenings.¹¹⁷ In 1957–8, the number of projection units increased by 25 per cent, from 9,965 to 12,374.¹¹⁸ The economic and ideological rationale of the GLF in film production was to popularise film and enhance its capacity to reach the masses, propagating the heroic feats and myths of the campaign.

Behind the encouraging numbers was the new genre, created to capture the fervour of the GLF. According to Chen Huangmei, the purpose of documentary-style art films was to quickly capture and reflect the new reality.¹¹⁹ Low budget, short length and concision allowed quick production for a mass audience. For Yuan Wenshu, documentary-style art films were characterised by ‘simplicity and rawness’ because they were based on real stories of the GLF without excessive polishing or fictional elements.¹²⁰ As a form of mass education, documentary-style art films served to ‘propagate (chuanbo) heroic feats’.¹²¹ Subject matter included heavy industry, factories, railroad construction, the people’s commune and the people’s liberation army. Huang Baomei (Xie Jin, 1958), for instance, is a documentary-style art film based on the real life of a textile factory worker.¹²²

Although the genre used a documentary style typical of newsreels, on-location shooting was not a must. Characterisation and fictional plots were common. In terms of style and method, Cai Chusheng described documentary-style art film as an ‘independent genre situated between fiction and documentary’.¹²³ The guiding principle of the new genre was to combine ‘revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’, proposed by Mao in 1958. The slogan replaced socialist realism that had been adopted since 1953, when Sino–Soviet relations were strong. Chen Huangmei emphasised that documentary-style art films should ‘reflect revolutionary hope for transformation and revolutionary romanticism’.¹²⁴ The new slogan and film style captured the experimental, futuristic and utopian rhetoric of the GLF.¹²⁵ Qi Zhi (Wu Di) uses the term ‘experimentalists’ (shiyanpai) to refer to those who advocated unprecedented socialist experiments like the GLF.¹²⁶

The radicalness of the GLF experiment in film production lies in its complete mobilisation to maximise output, production speed and ideological impact. The ideological priorities of propaganda came to the forefront. GLF stories invested in simple plots, heroic characters and heroic feats with a politically motivated claim to truth. As Cai Chusheng put it, the ‘direct, immediate and strong political effects’ of documentary-style art film set it apart from other genres.¹²⁷ The Hundred Flowers Campaign had unleashed a desire for progressive reform via return to the past (the pre-1949 Shanghai film-making tradition) during a period of political relaxation. The GLF, in contrast, set off a radical and revolutionary experiment during a period of tightened control.¹²⁸

Notwithstanding the stylistic innovations of films created during the GLF, aesthetics were temporarily neglected in the fervour to churn out documentary-style art films, which were half of the fiction film output in 1958. In experimenting with this new genre, popularisation ran counter to raising standards. Increased film production and bigger projection teams were intended to boost attendance and popularise film among the ideal audience (peasants, workers and soldiers). However, increased quantity was achieved at the cost of quality. In his 1958 report on ‘gift presentation films’ (xianli pian) for the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the PRC, Xia Yan noted that ‘our recent works have no problems politically […] but [do] have flaws in aesthetics.’¹²⁹ His call to ‘pay attention to quality’ must be understood in the context of the Party’s request to produce seven films of ‘high ideological and aesthetic value’ for the national celebration.¹³⁰ Quoting Deng Xiaoping, Xia Yan considered gift presentation films as a means to ‘introduce and propagate (xuanchuan) to the world the Chinese revolution and socialist construction’.¹³¹ To better achieve this goal, Xia Yan reintroduced the importance of aesthetics, emphasising that ‘aesthetics and politics can’t be separated’.¹³² A few months later in March 1959, the Ministry of Culture announced that annual film output was on a par with the Soviet Union (which produced 103 fiction films in 1958) and proposed slowing down film production because the country’s infrastructure, equipment and projection units could not keep pace with the exponential increase in film output.¹³³ By 1959, the general consensus of film-makers and bureaucrats alike was that aesthetics and film quality had been neglected in the midst of experimentalism.

Together with the Film Bureau’s 1959 report on raising artistic quality, Zhou Enlai’s ‘two legs’ speech recognised the weaknesses of documentary-style art films, laid out future principles for film-making, and anticipated potential problems confronting the film industry. In his speech, Zhou Enlai advocated ‘walking on two legs’ in literature and art: ‘Ideology should lead, but that doesn’t mean that aesthetics is not important. Ideology is conveyed through aesthetic forms.’¹³⁴ In combining revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, ‘idealism and romanticism should lead’ because art was dry without a sense of idealism.¹³⁵ Zhou Enlai’s formulation – ‘walking on two legs’ – and its emphasis on revolutionary romanticism was to serve as a guiding principle for an aesthetics of heroism that culminated after the GLF.

The Film Bureau endorsed the policy of ‘walking on two legs’ in its ‘Report on Raising Artistic Quality’ (1959), highlighting the tendency in producing documentary-style art films to ‘neglect quality for quantity’ and ‘aesthetics for politics’.¹³⁶ The bureau identified a number of problems with the new genre: ‘superficial pursuit of quantity’, ‘overly tight production schedules’, ‘violation of artistic norms’ and a ‘bureaucratic mode of production’.¹³⁷ These problems were expressed in timekeeping slogans such as ‘every second counts’ in film studios, and in big character posters where discussions of film scripts took place.¹³⁸ They led to narrow subject matter and monotonous and repetitive forms that lacked originality, style and technique, weakening their impact on the masses.¹³⁹ The Film Bureau advised slowing down film production to pursue higher quality, proposing a projected annual output of about 70 films in the next two to three years.¹⁴⁰

Along with bringing aesthetics back into the picture, the Film Bureau anticipated a manpower shortage and the need to nurture a new crop of talent within an emerging generational shift in the film industry. The bureau voiced concern for a lack of successors: there were no more than ten competent screenwriters and no more than 60 promising directors in the country.¹⁴¹ Cinematographers, set designers and sound-recording technicians were scarce, and there was a lack of make-up artists and fashion designers. The Film Bureau noted that the average age of actors in the Shanghai Film Studio was 37.¹⁴²

Also echoing Zhou Enlai’s ‘walking on two legs’, in 1960 Xia Yan specifically called for representing pioneering characters in an essay titled ‘We Must Raise the Quality of Film Art’. According to Xia Yan, most documentary-style art films were limited by representing real stories and did not ‘condense, fictionalise and concentrate on the typical’.¹⁴³ Xia Yan highlighted The Red Detachment of Women (Xie Jin, 1961) as exceptional in its successfully fictionalised female lead, Wu Qionghua:

Qionghua […] has character. She is such a strong-willed and rebellious peasant young woman. Filled with class hatred, she is determined to join the revolution. Her personality is distinct and touching. The film catches the audience’s attention because of this character.¹⁴⁴

Xia Yan also applauded a number of films that were well-received internationally: The White-Haired Girl (Wang Bin and Shui Hua, 1950), The New Year’s Sacrifice (Sang Hu, 1956), Lin Zexu (Zheng Junli, 1959), Nie Er (Zheng Junli, 1959) and Five Golden Flowers (Wang Jiayi, 1959). Notably, some of these films represent idealised heroic characters, a type that was to become commonplace following the GLF.

Reflecting on the development of Chinese cinema since 1949, Xia Yan also noted that in various campaigns – the Campaign against The Life of Wu Xun, the Rectification Campaign, the Anti-Hu Feng Campaign, the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward – the film industry had been in a ‘two-line struggle between aesthetics and politics’.¹⁴⁵ This struggle had its highs and lows and alternated periods of relaxation and radicalness. A period of relaxation and re-evaluation took place in 1961–2: some of the policies of the Hundred Flowers Period were reinstated after the disastrous famine that caused the death of roughly 30 million during the GLF.¹⁴⁶ Many conferences and discussions on film were held in 1961, resulting in a number of drafted documents and directives published in 1962. In the years after the GLF a revolutionary aesthetics of heroism blossomed, reaching its height in the short-lived 1962 socialist star craze: the result of years of experimentation in screenwriting, cinematography and acting.

Conferences and discussions held in 1961 responded to many of the unresolved problems voiced in the Hundred Flowers Campaign: the challenges of screenwriting under censorship, the identities of directors and actors, and the tensions between ideology and aesthetics. At a conference at the Beijing Film Studio in 1961, Chen Huangmei argued: ‘From now on, we should tighten the grip on politics and lessen it on aesthetics.’¹⁴⁷ Loosening the grip on aesthetics, like Zhou Enlai’s ‘walking on two legs’, would guide the formulation of new objectives and policies.

During another discussion session at the Beijing Film Studio and the August First Film Studio, Chen Huangmei tackled the problems of screenwriting, directing and acting head on, arguing that what determined the success of a film was not subject matter or theme, but character. Assigning subject matter or theme from above put the cart before the horse. Chen Huangmei encouraged screenwriters to prioritise the screen image of their characters and the conflicts and contradictions their characters dealt with.¹⁴⁸ Even minor subject matter could reveal a profound message. Using Five Golden Flowers and The Red Detachment of Women as examples, Chen Huangmei argued that romance (lian’ai) was an important subject because ‘it cultivates socialist moral values (daodeguan) among our young people.’¹⁴⁹ Like many who voiced similar concerns during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Chen Huangmei argued for reducing the multiple levels of censorship on film scripts and encouraged cinematic adaptations of literature, from classical to the May Fourth period to contemporary.

Chen Huangmei brought directors and actors, who had been marginalised due to bureaucratic interference with creative work, back to the centre of film production. He did not shy away from terms such as ‘master’ (dashi) and ‘star’ (mingxing), associated with art cinema and Hollywood entertainment: ‘Of course we shouldn’t encourage labels such as “master” and “star”, but as comrade Zhou Yang says […] an outstanding work requires outstanding talent.’¹⁵⁰ Chen Huangmei recognised the talent of individual directors, auteurs whose style is the result of experience. He emphasised that filming scripts fell under the role of the director, as ‘the centre of film production’.¹⁵¹

If encouraging directors to produce outstanding work meant raising standards and film quality, nurturing actors would ensure popularity among the film-going audience. Chen Huangmei extended his emphasis on individual talent, saying: ‘We should nurture our proletarian masters and proletarian stars.’¹⁵² Although he disapproved of the way capitalist societies sought after stars, Chen Huangmei advocated tapping into the reputation and trust that an actor had established among the audience. He lamented that Tian Hua’s debut on screen in The White-Haired Girl was quickly forgotten, with Tian waiting eight years for a new screen image in Daughter of the Party (Lin Nong, 1958). Chen Huangmei’s concern that the ‘audience’s impression would fade’ reflected actors’ lack of star status.¹⁵³ He saw a need to capitalise on an actor’s successful debut, to continue investing in the actor in order to establish a proletarian star. Chen Huangmei saw outstanding talent as a sign of an aesthetic peak, asking rhetorically: ‘In the last 11 years, how many outstanding talents have we nurtured?’¹⁵⁴ Offering Xie Fang’s popularity in Japan after her debut as Lin Daojing in Song of Youth (Cui Wei and Chen Huaikai, 1959) as an example, Chen Huangmei highlighted the importance of youthfulness: ‘If we set aside this actress [Xie Fang] for a year or two, she will be forgotten […] Her youth will be gone.’¹⁵⁵ Youth, femininity and the importance of a fresh face were to become crucial elements of the 1962 socialist star craze. In the years after the GLF, a period of relative political relaxation, both Party and film industry would reach for aesthetic heights.

Within the Seventeen Years from 1949 to 1966, prior to the Cultural Revolution, there were two periods of political relaxation – the Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956–7) and the Blooming and Contending of 1961–2 – during which film criticism and film theory emerged, as bureaucrats, film-makers and critics articulated critiques and suggestions. In June 1961, the Ministry of Culture and the Propaganda Department of the CCP Central Committee organised the National Discussion Plenum on Artistic Work and the National Conference on Fiction Film, also known as the Xinqiao Conference, held in the Xinqiao Hotel at the Chongwenmen intersection in Beijing. Its objective was to reinstate some of the agendas and policies of the Hundred Flowers Campaign. Discussions and speeches at the Xinqiao Conference focused on aesthetics, resulting in the drafting of ‘Thirty-two Articles on Film’ (also called ‘Opinions on Strengthening the Leadership of the Creation and Production of Art Films’) and ‘Eight Articles in Literature and Art’ by the Ministry of Culture, in 1961 and 1962 respectively.¹⁵⁶ At the Xinqiao Conference, Zhou Enlai re-emphasised the political question of ‘whom to serve’, adding the aesthetic question of ‘how to serve’. Zhou Enlai encouraged the use of aesthetic form to serve workers, peasants and soldiers, who ‘seek entertainment and relaxation’ in film.¹⁵⁷ He argued that film, as a form of propaganda, should be both ‘educational’ and ‘entertaining’.¹⁵⁸

At the Xinqiao conference, Zhou Yang suggested ‘four excellences’ as objectives: ‘excellent story, excellent actors, excellent cinematography and excellent music’.¹⁵⁹ He spoke of these four excellences as expectations of the audience. Cai Chusheng supported the objectives because they addressed the audience experience. He described film watching as first and foremost a sensual (ganxing) experience, followed by rational (lixing) understanding that would influence thoughts and behaviour.¹⁶⁰ For Cai Chusheng, the director’s task was to bring these aspects together, like a conductor in an orchestra: ‘The four excellences are achieved under the orchestration of the director.’¹⁶¹ The concept of the four excellences responded to audiences’ aesthetic expectations; it also brought directors back to the table as the architects of cinematic success.

Along with placing directors at the centre of film production, the Xinqiao Conference spotlighted actors. Zhou Yang talked about the need for ‘stars’ and the phenomenon of star adulation: ‘Foreigners talk about “craze” (kuangre). Some cinephiles are drawn to a film because of a particular actor. We should discover and nurture actors who have such drawing power.’¹⁶²

The Xinqiao Conference re-emphasised the power of aesthetics to attract audiences and maximise the ideological, entertainment and box office values of film. This recognition, as Zhuoyi Wang suggests, constituted a ‘commercial turn’ in cinema that was partly inspired by cinema in capitalist societies.¹⁶³ Cai Xiang suggests that the early 1960s witnessed a crisis of socialism: the establishment of urban-centred socialist culture, emerging middle-class and consumer culture and value identification with the West together generated political anxiety, which would set off another rectification in 1964 before the onset of the Cultural Revolution.¹⁶⁴

The Rectification Campaign focussed on class standing and ideologically remoulding film artists before nationalising the film industry. The First Five-Year Plan and the ensuing campaigns, however, centred on aesthetic form: screenwriting (of both literary and shooting scripts), cinematography and acting in the representation of heroic characters. These aesthetically-centred campaigns changed the relationships between the state, bureaucrats and film artists. From 1949, periods of political radicalness and relaxation had alternated; they would continue to do so through 1966, as the state tightened and loosened its grip on aesthetics and the creative autonomy of film artists. Dialectical tensions and co-optation between political propaganda and film aesthetics were consistent throughout the Seventeen Years, culminating in the ideas of ‘walking on two legs’ and ‘a combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’. The GLF’s reassessment of low-budget documentary-style art films was followed by a commercial turn in the early 1960s, during which revolutionary fiction film reached an aesthetic peak, propagating revolutionary heroism. The following chapters look more closely at aesthetic discourse and experiments in screenwriting, montage and acting, tracing the evolution of a heightened sense of revolutionary heroism in Chinese revolutionary film.