Chinese Revolutionary Cinema

Socialist Glamour: The Socialist Star Craze, Stanislavski’s System and Cinematic Iconography of the Gaze

The year 1962 was a glamorous moment in star culture on a global scale. Audrey Hepburn’s performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961) made her a twentieth-century fashion icon. Holly GoLightly’s world of things – her little black dress, cat’s-eye sunglasses, necklace and trench coat – became enduring must-haves in women’s wardrobes. In May 1962, the Japanese film magazine Screen featured Hepburn, voted best foreign actress, on its front and back covers.¹ But Hollywood wasn’t alone in producing stars: in the same year, Kinema Junpo featured mini photo spreads of 237 Japanese actresses, selecting top Japanese actors and actresses for its ‘star graphics’.² Star culture also began to emerge in the socialist world. In 1962, China launched its ‘22 Big Movie Stars’, a phenomenon inspired by the Soviet Union.

One might assume that Chinese star discourse, which had its roots in Republican Shanghai cinema, had been eliminated after the establishment of the PRC in 1949. In fact, it survived in a different form. Capitalist star culture and socialist star culture function differently, with different vocabularies: the former is associated with commodity fetishism, the latter with political propaganda. Yet the two types intersect in many ways. The cinematic production of glamour in Chinese revolutionary film, like that of Hollywood, emphasised youth, beauty and femininity. In both cinemas, gendered discourse on casting and acting redefined femininity through the creation of female icons of sexual morality.

Chinese star discourse peaked in 1962 with the state-sponsored nationwide promotion of ‘22 outstanding screen actors’ (colloquially, ‘22 Big Movie Stars’), which created a vogue for movie stars in the PRC. The socialist star craze was to be cut short two years later by the Poisonous Weeds Campaign, but its brief and intense popularity revealed the deep roots of film stars and the artistry of screen actors. The role of the movie star in socialist China can be traced back to the early 1950s, when Stanislavski’s system was adopted as an ethical foundation for actors’ training and political cultivation.

Unlike Hollywood star discourse, which is premised on the logic of secrecy and enigma that surrounds an actor’s private life (including scandals), socialist star discourse performed an ethical and ideological function in the PRC.³ A logic of authenticity revolved around socialist actors’ off-screen personae, which were produced in sync with the actors’ on-screen personae and performances as model citizens. In the socialist context, glamour produced through cinematography, lighting and acting tangibly reflected what was often referred to as the socialist ‘spirit’ (jingshen), embodying heroism in actors’ glittering eyes with a symbolising force like that of religious icons, but evoking the sacredness of spiritual communion with the Party. The cinematic and iconic gazes of heroes and heroines were constructed as the locus of glamour, through which spectators gained access to actors’ interiority and therefore to socialist truth.

In September 2012, a special exhibition was held at the Chinese National Film Museum in Beijing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of 22 Big Movie Stars. There are many stories and rumours about the origins of the star-studded list. None of the major newspapers and film magazines of the time published a list, nor did the stars themselves know about it. Veteran actress Tian Hua recalled that one day she was asked by her boss to sit for a professional portrait and therefore had her hair permed specifically for the photo shoot. It was not until she encountered her own portrait at the theatre that she discovered that she had made it onto an ‘all-star roster’.⁴ For film-goers and actors alike, the unveiling of the 22 Big Stars was not a red-carpet event. Instead, in spring 1962, posters of 22 well-known actors were mounted at theatres and workers’ clubs throughout the country, replacing posters of Soviet film stars and sparking photo-album printing, sharing and collection nationwide. The 1962 star craze in socialist China seemed at the time to be unintended and inconsequential.

In fact, the emergence of the 22 Stars was orchestrated by various powerful forces at a particular historical conjuncture. Those powerful forces blurred the lines between official and unofficial, formal and informal, the Party and film artists, stars and the star-watching/making crowd. The star craze began as a Party decision to replace Soviet stars with Chinese ones. It tapped into a pre-existing star culture, however, which made it a much larger phenomenon. The star-making process unleashed unexpected enthusiasm and creative energies within different levels of society.

‘Stars’ had become a topic of concern in Zhou Yang’s speech at the 1961 National Conference on Fiction Film, held at the Xinqiao Hotel in Beijing. The Xinqiao conference, as discussed in Chapter One, took place at a historical moment of political relaxation, when film production had slowed down after the Great Leap Forward. One critical issue under discussion was film artists’ dissatisfaction with bureaucratic regulation of their creative work. Zhou Yang acknowledged the problem and set goals for improving Chinese film – the four excellences – mentioning, too, the need to train and promote emerging young actors:

We are against star-ism, but we need stars. Our most experienced actors, such as Bai Yang, Zhao Dan and Qin Yi, have solid reputations and are undoubtedly our greatest assets, but in the past 12 years, we should have trained new actors who made similar impressions on the audience.⁵

Zhou Yang called for star-making in the context of a Chinese cinema dominated by aging actors, whose youth was slowly fading in the 1950s (posing problems for typecasting, an issue explored later in this chapter), and a new generation of emerging actors with little experience on the screen.

The Sino–Soviet split created a need to distance Chinese cinema from Soviet models, providing another impetus for star-making. Following his speech at the Xinqiao conference, Zhou Enlai hosted 30 bureaucrats and film artists for a meal in his home. On this informal occasion, Zhou Enlai said, ‘Mounted at our nation’s theatres are posters of 22 Soviet stars. It’s been 12 years since the establishment of our nation, how come we don’t have posters of our own stars? We’d better have our own stars. Comrade Xia Yan, don’t you think so?’⁶ A week later, the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party provided a day off amidst a tight schedule of conference meetings. Zhou Enlai invited the same group of film artists on a 1st July hiking trip in Fragrant Hills Park and had similar conversations, chatting with the actors as they hiked. When they came to a resting place, he remarked, jokingly:

You are all artists. Artists’ reputations are great among the masses. When I rode in the car with Zhang Ruifang and Bai Yang in Chongqing, the film-watching crowd rushed towards them for autographs, leaving me alone. Can you imagine how influential cinema is for the masses?⁷

Zhou Enlai’s apparently casual remarks were notable for their acknowledgement of the privileged position of actors as sought-after public figures. Again he mused: ‘The Soviet Union and North Korea have People’s Artists. Don’t we need them as well?’⁸ These provocative observations and rhetorical questions, in official and unofficial settings, signalled Zhou Enlai’s acute awareness of the unique position and untapped potential of highly visible actors. They also demonstrated his cognisance of star culture in world cinema at a time when displaying Soviet posters no longer made sense politically but there were few, if any, Chinese stars on the level of Hollywood or Soviet counterparts.

Zhou Enlai’s public speech, followed by a series of behind-the-scenes conversations, blurred the lines between official and unofficial ideas, and between Party officials and film artists like Xia Yan, who also served as bureaucrats. Why did Zhou Enlai expose himself in order to articulate the need for stars, explicitly and implicitly, in official and unofficial settings? Why the extra little pat on Xia Yan’s shoulder? Why bother to hike and chat with actors? The thinking behind his motives is unclear: perhaps he was manoeuvring politically, or perhaps he felt that star-making should not be an exclusively top-down process. Appointing stars in the context of film-makers’ dissatisfaction with bureaucratism would seem self-defeating, and using the enemy’s language of star culture in official discourse was likely ideologically dangerous. What we know for certain, though, is that once posters of the 22 Chinese film stars were released and became part of the media’s public discourse, they went viral.

A red-carpet event, created as a testing ground, became a prelude to the final 22 Big Stars launch. In 1961, shortly before the creation of the list, People’s Cinema (Dazhong dianying) held a poll for the Hundred Flowers Award (Baihuajiang) to the best actor and actress of the year. In just three months, the poll received more than 100,000 votes, and in April 1962, People’s Daily announced the results. The awards for the best actor, actress and supporting role went, respectively, to Cui Wei, Zhu Xijuan and Chen Qiang (the last two having starred in The Red Detachment of Women [Xie Jin, 1961]). People’s Cinema published the winning actors’ thank-you letters as well as readers’ letters. The actors received their awards at the Hundred Flowers Award ceremony in May 1962 – and the three awardees also became part of the 22 Big Stars.

The star craze in the spring of 1962, in the form of nationwide photo-album printing, sharing and collection, resulted from a combination of Party endorsement, film studio recommendations, bureaucratic approval and individual initiatives. After the Xinqiao Conference, Xia Yan began to get the stars aligned behind the scenes. Based on polls, audience feedback and promotional models from Soviet cinema, the China Film Distribution and Exhibition Corporation proposed to the Ministry of Culture an idea: mounting outsized portraits and posters of the most popular Chinese actors at theatres, playgrounds and other artistic venues around the country.⁹ Xia Yan approved the proposal and the China Film Distribution and Exhibition Corporation drafted a select list of active actors, sending it to various film studios, most notably the Beijing, Shanghai, Changchun and August First Film Studios, for suggestions.

It must be emphasised that the real purpose of the circulated list was hidden from the studios. Studio managers and actors were told that the list was prepared for the purpose of photo shoots, and the four big studios submitted their modified lists to the China Film Distribution and Exhibition Corporation. The list was then forwarded to the Ministry of Culture and Zhou Enlai for final approval. In winter 1961, the China Film Distribution and Exhibition Corporation requested that the short-listed actors participate in photo shoots, still without informing the studios and selected actors of the purpose of the photography sessions.¹⁰

Yet far from being a monolithic top-down Party decision, the star-making process unleashed unexpected enthusiasm and creative energies at different levels of society. In spring 1962, the first posters of the 22 Stars were mounted at the workers’ club on Guangqumen Outer Street in Beijing, replacing posters of 22 Soviet stars.¹¹ The business-savvy Beijing Art Company, after soliciting the approval of Chen Huangmei, head of the Film Bureau, obtained the original portrait negatives and designed glossy 3″×4″ pocket albums by adding representative film stills of each star below their portraits. More than 710,000 pocket albums were sold in eight months. Given the strong demand, the China Picture Company created a single image containing the set of individual portraits and offered it for sale nationwide.¹² A copy-and-paste printing craze supplied the market with more posters and photo albums, adding local flavours and endless spin-offs. Some presses rearranged the order of stars on their products, and others added additional actors not among the ‘official’ 22 Big Stars, like Five Golden Flowers’ Yang Likun and Hu Die, who had been a star in Republican Shanghai cinema.¹³

This type of product differentiation is typical of consumer culture. It catered to regional tastes and different segments of local markets, indicating the scope and reach of the star craze that had been set off by the star-watching and star-making crowd. Not a red-carpet event, the launch of 22 Big Stars in 1962 was initially a discreet matter. It became a public craze through the coalescence of multiple forces: Party officials, film artists and bureaucrats, studio managers, the printing press, merchants and, indispensably, the star-watching/making crowd.

The 1962 socialist star craze resembled the 1930s Republican-era star craze in semi-colonial Shanghai. Awards for best actor and actress had not been unheard of in China: as early as 1933, Jin Yan and Hu Die had been crowned ‘movie king’ and ‘movie queen’ by the magazines Mingxing ribao and Diansheng ribao. The socialist star craze’s roots in the legacy of Republican Shanghai cinema warrant a brief digression; I will focus in particular on the way female stars in 1930s Shanghai functioned as icons of capitalist modernity and sexual morality.

The Hollywood star system required certain conditions in order to emerge. Screen acting had to be legitimised as both art and profession; ‘actor’ had to emerge as as a professional category, as actors rose from anonymity to ‘picture personalities’ with histories of appearances in films and plays and personalities gleaned from those appearances.¹⁴ Other conditions included the expansion of an extrafilmic and autonomous discourse that insisted on the actors’ private identities outside of film, including their love lives, sexual scandals and political persuasions, and the construction of a star identity that existed ‘as something of an enigma, something always in the process of being figured out’.¹⁵ Hollywood star discourse, as Richard deCordova has explained, was ‘a system of discourse driven by a logic of secrecy’ that ‘light[s] upon the sexual as the ultimate secret’.¹⁶ Hence, as both cinematic apparatus and interpretative schema, the star system is ‘closely tied to the constitution and deployment of sexuality in modern times’.¹⁷

DeCordova’s interpretative model of the Hollywood star system can also aid our understanding of star discourse in semi-colonial Shanghai, with its thriving capitalist consumer culture and heated debates on modernity and the new woman in the 1930s. Acting was traditionally associated with prostitutes, and China’s earliest screen actresses used pseudonyms before acting was legitimised in the 1930s as both art and profession. In the 1920s, screen actresses were characterised as ‘dangerous women’: ‘degenerate, corrupted, and deceptive “starlets” – amateurs who, like prostitutes, were morally and sexually suspect’.¹⁸ The first generation of female picture personalities, women like Wang Hanlun and Yang Naimei, ‘were not recognized and rewarded for acting well, but rather for acting good and acting like “themselves”’.¹⁹ ‘Acting good’ referred to the cliché of the ‘good girl’ in media discourse: chaste and doll-divine. The emergence of youthful actresses, and their performances of girlhood (and motherhood), were part of cosmopolitan Shanghai’s construction of the feminine ideal in the 1920s and 1930s, a cultural phenomenon preceded by classical Hollywood cinema. The ‘juvenated femininity’ of performances of girlhood by stars such as Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple and Elizabeth Taylor, as described by Gaylyn Studlar, was closely tied to the ‘feminization and eroticization’ of actresses.²⁰ As the gendered discourse on screen acting emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, the Shanghai film industry, like Hollywood, literally capitalised on actresses’ youthful exuberance, utilising a growing promotional apparatus to turn actresses into stars, icons of capitalist modernity and sexual morality.

Chinese female stars were not individually celebrated for their talent until the 1930s, when a sophisticated discourse on realist screen acting (as distinct from stage acting and Peking opera) emerged.²¹ Jason McGrath has defined the realist tradition in fiction film as ‘the set of conventions of mimetic fictional realism’ in ‘classical Hollywood narration in the 1910s’, conventions that ‘quickly became the global standard for mainstream fictional filmmaking’.²² According to McGrath, by the ‘golden age’ of Shanghai silent cinema in the early 1930s, screen acting had been firmly distinguished from stage acting. Screen acting emphasised ‘a verisimilar performance style in keeping with the norms of classical Hollywood’.²³ The quest for verisimilitude and realism did coincide with the infiltration and popularity of Hollywood movies, which displaced traditional performance art like Peking opera and the more modernised ‘civilised play’ (xinju/wenmingxi). Traditional theatre had developed numerous techniques of exaggeration or amplification, techniques that, by the early twentieth century, were perceived as insufficient to the new aesthetic of realism that was embraced by reformers.²⁴

Beginning in the 1920s, a new terminology for screen acting was invented to accommodate the demands of the new filmic medium, seen as having the highest degree of realism among all the arts. Feng Xizui explained two such terms – ‘interior performance’ (neixin biaoyan) and ‘facial performance’ (mianbu biaoyan) – that he saw as essentially equivalent:

What we call interior performance is the sincere transmission of pleasure, anger, sorrow and happiness from the heart to the face so that the audience, by looking at the actor’s facial expressions, can feel the actor’s emotions at heart. Hence, interior performance is also called facial performance.²⁵

Premised on a logic of interiority and authenticity, ‘interior performance’ and ‘facial performance’ gave rise to the enormous popularity and success of female stars like Hu Die and Ruan Lingyu. These actresses’ ability to communicate different levels of emotion with their eyebrows in, respectively, Twin Sisters (Zheng Zhengqiu, 1933) and The Goddess (Wu Yonggang, 1934) established them as ‘stars’.

Feng’s equation of interior performance with facial performance was predicated on a new relationship between actors and spectators, brought about by the cinematic convention of the close-up. As a film term, ‘close-up’, translated as da miankong (big face) and texie (special inscription), was introduced to the Shanghai film industry by film-makers like Cheng Bugao, whose short biography of the American director D. W. Griffith was published as a series in the film magazine Dianying zazhi in 1924.²⁶ To this day, the close-up remains one of the most important filming techniques of the Hollywood star system. Close-ups and pinups of female stars allowed the corporeal body to be conceived as a picture – reproducible and disseminated for global consumption in the form of motion pictures, film stills and advertisements in the global marketplace.

Together with the circulation of star images, an extrafilmic discourse was developed to construct female stars’ off-screen and private identities. This discourse supposedly revealed their love lives and sexual scandals in a voyeuristic and fetishistic manner. By the mid-1930s, the ‘“private lives” of movie actresses became “public” and were packaged and paraded for a mass audience to both see and judge.’²⁷ Female stars’ private and public personae were the creations of an expanding promotional apparatus and a gendered and moralised discourse. When scandalous gossip contradicted their on-screen personae as ‘good’ and ‘authentic’ women, female stars were targeted and subjected to moral critique. Ruan Lingyu’s performance as Weiming in The New Woman (Cai Chusheng, 1934), and her suicide in 1935, are examples of the ways in which Republican star discourse was driven by the revelation of the private and the sexual.²⁸ The logic of secrecy that permeated this fetishistic system of Republican star discourse was to be replaced by a new logic of transparency and authenticity in the ethical system of socialist star discourse.

Republican commercial star culture and socialist star culture were not identical, however. A key difference between them was the socialist emphasis on actors’ socialist self-cultivation. A socialist actor had to act well, act good and be good. ‘Acting well’ refers to skill and training; ‘acting good’ refers to establishing a morally good and politically correct on-screen persona. To ‘be good’, an actor had to adhere to a socialist ethics of acting – cultivating an off-screen identity as a socialist actor and citizen.

The Chinese socialist ethics of acting emerged out of Zheng Junli’s introduction of Constantin Stanislavski’s works to China in the 1940s.²⁹ As the discourses on stage and screen acting developed along realist lines in Republican China, Stanislavski’s acting system, seen as a representative work of Soviet socialist realism, was introduced into China. Zheng Junli translated Stanislavski’s seminal work, An Actor Prepares (1936), in the 1940s, but it was not until the 1950s that Stanislavski’s system was officially endorsed and widely embraced by Chinese actors. Zheng Junli also translated Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons (Yanji liujiang) (1933), publishing his translation in 1937. Boleslavsky was a student of Stanislavski; his six lessons, written in the form of a dialogue, not only shed light on the art of acting, but also touched upon the transition from stage acting to screen acting.³⁰ Zheng Junli’s translation of An Actor Prepares (Yanyuan ziwo xiuyang) was interrupted by World War II and not published in China until 1943.³¹ In 1947, Zheng published his own treatise on acting, The Birth of a Role (Juese de dansheng), based on what he learned from Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares.³²

After the establishment of the PRC, Stanislavski’s system was officially endorsed. Zheng Junli’s translations were followed in the 1960s by newer translations of Stanislavski’s works based on the Russian originals.³³ Hailed as a representative work of Soviet socialist realism, Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares was a must-have manual for every stage and screen actor during the Seventeen Years. Zheng Junli had translated the title as ‘An Actor’s Self-Cultivation’ (Yanyuan ziwo xiuyang), a translation much closer to the Russian original: ‘an actor’s work on him/herself’ (работа актëра над собой). As the Russian title suggests, in acting, the actor’s body is seen as both the object of mimesis and the means of mimesis – hence, an actor works on him/herself. Zheng Junli’s translated title, which was adopted by later Chinese translators, took on particular significance in the context of Chinese socialist cinema: acting was a kind of ‘labour’ (laodong), and an actor’s work on him/herself meant ‘self-cultivation’ – more specifically, ‘political cultivation’ (zhengzhi xiuyang), which was perceived as a prerequisite for any successful screen performance.

A few words of clarification about the label ‘actor’ (yanyuan) are needed here, for the label itself underwent radical transformation during the twentieth century. New socialist terms were coined that redefined the relationship between different cultural constituencies: ‘film worker’ (dianying gongzuozhe) and ‘film lovers/cinephiles’ (dianying aihaozhe) were preferred, while the terms ‘stars’ (mingxing) and ‘film fans’ (yingmi) – which had been in common usage prior to 1949 – were avoided.³⁴ The new socialist term ‘film worker’ emphasised the glory and usefulness of manual, creative and affective labour as well as equalising the contributions of various cultural agents on and off screen. For example, directors, cameramen, set designers, screenwriters and actors were all ‘film workers’. The term ‘film worker’ obliterated existing hierarchies in the film industry and put actors on the same social plane as other workers, as socialist subjects are all workers of various kinds. Importantly, the adoption of the label ‘film worker’, rather than ‘star’, abandoned the privileging of physical beauty, sex appeal, individual fame and materialism usually associated with the Hollywood star system.

If the more down-to-earth label ‘film worker’ represented a distancing from the ills of capitalist and commercial star culture, how are we to understand not only the continued success of stars like Bai Yang, Zhang Ruifang and Zhao Dan from the commercial legacy of Republican Shanghai cinema but also the emergence of a new generation of socialist ‘stars’ like Xie Fang and Zhu Xijuan, who rose to prominence in the late 1950s? In particular, how to explain the popularity of 22 Big Stars, crowned ‘outstanding screen actors of new China’, of whom film posters and pocket albums were sought after nationwide? To better understand the radical transformation of star discourse in socialist China, we turn to the gendered discourse on casting during the Hundred Flowers Campaign of the mid-1950s, during which actors negotiated with both a commercial film-making legacy and a new socialist ethics of acting. This gendered discourse on casting revealed an uneasy generational tension between ageing and youthful actors, and a greater tension between acting skill (substance) and physical appearance (looks).

As Richard Dyer puts it, casting is ‘a question of fit in terms of directorial choice of stars for parts’.³⁵ It is one of the most important stages in film production because a mistake in casting can destroy the unity of a film or compromise fictional realism. Many factors are taken into account, including appearance, physique, age, personality, demeanour and life experience. Casting is also an important factor in the construction of picture personalities: stars as actors establish a history of appearances in films and consistent personalities based on those appearances (a process known as typecasting). However, the aesthetic weight of a star’s accumulated image can become baggage and limit the roles an actor is allowed to play.

In the early years of the PRC, state studios employed a mixed cast of established actors and new talents recruited from stage drama. The cinematic representation of women was a persistent concern.³⁶ Experienced actors from former Shanghai private studios, such as Bai Yang, Shi Hui, Wei Heling and Zhao Dan, continued to star in major films, while new talents like Tian Hua and Shi Lianxing were recruited from stage drama. The White-Haired Girl (Wang Bin and Shui Hua, 1950) and Zhao Yiman (Sha Meng, 1950), both of which featured new female talents recruited from stage drama, were two of the earliest efforts to represent revolutionary heroines on screen. Female casting became a particularly thorny issue in the mid-1950s, as the youthful beauty of established actors from the Shanghai film-making tradition slowly faded with age, a problem compounded by widespread dissatisfaction with declining opportunities for younger actors.

The relaxed political environment of the Hundred Flowers Period unleashed the discontent and criticism among older actors, who were dissatisfied with the way youthful actors were favoured by directors. Actors with years of stage experience were not given the chance to try their hands at screen acting. In a 1957 discussion session in Beijing, organised by the editorial board of the journal Chinese Film (Zhongguo dianying), some stage actresses argued that even though they could memorise Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, their talent, studies and years of training would go to waste if they were not given an opportunity to put into practice what they had learned.³⁷ Some contended that the way actresses were chosen was just another manifestation of the Hollywood star system, in which an attractive face was the only thing that mattered.³⁸ These debates around casting point out an ambiguity in reframing actors as ‘film workers’. Hierarchy, favouritism and the fear of ageing continued to haunt socialist actors in the mid-1950s.

Director Cheng Yin argued that there are two major ways to cast an actor: select an actor with the necessary credentials and acting skills, or base selection on his or her physical resemblance to the fictional character.³⁹ A perfect fit would include both. However, finding a perfect fit presented a particular challenge in the mid-1950s, as many experienced actors from the Shanghai film-making tradition approached middle age, diminishing their potential for portraying much younger characters. Age and authenticity in casting became a contested issue, especially for actresses. For example, Bai Yang was cast as Xianglin Sao in The New Year’s Sacrifice (Sang Hu, 1956) and Song of Youth (Cui Wei and Chen Huaikai, 1959), when she was in her mid-thirties. With the aid of make-up and superior acting skills, Bai Yang’s performance did not jeopardise revolutionary realism despite the challenge of casting her as a dying woman. Yet though she improved with age, Bai Yang had a difficult time securing the leading role of Lin Daojing in Song of Youth, a cinematic adaptation written by Yang Mo, Bai Yang’s sister. Bai Yang especially valued the opportunity to be cast in a role written for the screen by her sister, and enthusiastically prepared for the audition. An experienced actress with a proven record, Bai Yang had come of age in the tumultuous 1930s, giving her the life experience to support her performance in the role of youthful graduate Lin Daojing, but her age led to her withdrawing from the audition.⁴⁰ In contrast, the actor Zhao Dan managed to be cast as twenty-something revolutionary composer Nie Er in Nie Er (Zheng Junli, 1959), although he was in his early forties, because of his acting skills and real-life friendship with Nie Er. The gendered contrast of these examples demonstrates the unforgiving nature of the socialist obsession with youth and juvenated femininity when it came to mature actresses.

Director Chen Huaikai captured the difficulty of such casting decisions in the following manner:

Established actors (laoyanyuan) have more life experience and can easily manage the thoughts and emotions of the 1930s. Their acting is more solid. Some believe that casting them is a more cautious approach. New actors (xinyanyuan) closer to the age of the characters have more youthful passion. Although their acting would be more challenging, it would be easier to achieve down-to-earth realism.⁴¹

The major attraction of Song of Youth was to be youthfulness itself. A fresh face, rather than the aesthetic talent of experience, was demanded. Chen Huaikai and Cui Wei, the film’s directors, solicited popular opinion after a discussion session organised by Beijing Wanbao, and popular opinion preferred new actors, a preference supported by the higher-ups.⁴² To create a new female icon of revolution, Song of Youth’s creators invested in the youthful libidinal energies and ideological malleability of youth. Xie Fang, in her early twenties, provided a fresh ‘camera face’ (yinmu xingxiang) that was felt to be needed.⁴³ With only a few years of stage experience, having played the role of the white-haired girl on stage, Xie Fang’s youth and intellectual appeal led to her being cast as the youthful graduate Lin Daojing in Song of Youth despite her lack of screen experience.

Similar decisions to take on the risk of employing new talent were common in the late 1950s, setting in motion a socialist star craze that would culminate in 1962. Zhu Xijuan’s casting as Wu Qionghua in The Red Detachment of Women provides another example. Like Xie Fang, Zhu Xijuan was in her early twenties and was chosen based on her physical resemblance to the fictional character. Director Xie Jin’s first priority was to find a perfect pair of eyes, which he considered ‘the most important characteristic of Qionghua’s physical appearance’.⁴⁴ In the literary script, Qionghua’s eyes were ‘fiery’ (huolala) and ‘fearless’, ‘gazing into the horizon like radiating lights’.⁴⁵ Similarly, in the shooting script, her eyes were ‘shining radiant lights’.⁴⁶ Zhu Xijuan, then a student at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, captured Xie Jin’s attention because of her wide eyes, boyish temperament and stage training.

Along with physical resemblance and personality, Xie Jin considered ‘creative youthfulness’ a factor in casting.⁴⁷ Xie Jin defined creative youthfulness not by age, but by the accumulated image and aesthetic weight an actor carried. According to Xie Jin, being typecast by previous roles would jeopardise creative youthfulness and freshness. Because they lacked already established picture personalities, Xie Fang’s and Zhu Xijuan’s on-screen personae as their characters underwent socialist transformation were more down-to-earth, refreshing and believable. Their freshness made them ‘simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, accessible to the viewer as objects of desire, but just outside the viewer’s reach’.⁴⁸ In casting both Song of Youth and The Red Detachment of Women, favouring physical appearance over credentials was not something to be frowned upon. It was justified by the necessity of authenticity in casting and constituted a daring socialist experiment in screen acting.

Xie Fang and Zhu Xijuan were considered ‘personality actors’ (bense yanyuan) because they were cast in roles similar to their real-life personalities. Xie Fang’s intellectual appeal was a perfect fit for the youthful graduate Lin Daojing, and Zhu Xijuan’s boyish temperament was what the director was looking for in the role of Qionghua. The contrasting term, ‘character actors’ (xingge yanyuan), refers to actors whose on-screen personalities are remarkably different from their real-life personalities (casting against type). As personality actors chosen for their looks and personalities, Xie Fang and Zhu Xijuan lacked the socialist criteria of life experience (shenghuo tiyan) and self-cultivation (ziwo xiuyang). Both women were born in the mid-1930s and cast in fictional roles representing a previous generation. Unlike Zhao Dan, who personally knew Nie Er in real life and could draw from his memory and life experience, Xie Fang and Zhu Xijuan did not have personal experience of the revolutionary era to draw on, but the Chinese socialist appropriation of Stanislavski’s system allowed experience to be cultivated. Stanislavskian training turned these two prominent Chinese socialist actresses into a suicidal graduate and a hot-blooded slave of the 1930s and allowed them to achieve immediate success as socialist icons, despite little experience in screen acting.

In socialist actors’ reminiscences of their acting careers, many described acting as a soulful process, in which actors gave birth to a new spirit with a new identity. The new spirit represented a new socialist subjectivity: film-making and film-viewing were constructed as ideological and aesthetic experiences that moulded actors and spectators alike into new socialist subjects. Yu Yang described the experience of creating a heroic character as ‘an experience of purifying the soul’,⁴⁹ and Wang Danfeng regarded the work of a film artist as ‘the work of a soulful person’.⁵⁰ In socialist China, acting was constructed as an ideologically and socially transformative process in which actors cultivated both acting skills and socialist values. Accordingly, Stanislavski’s system was appropriated as an ethical system of acting, as reflected in the Chinese title ‘An Actor’s Self-Cultivation’ (Yanyuan ziwo xiuyang).

Stanislavski’s system is premised on a logic of authenticity in training and performance. Its appeal for Chinese socialist cinema lay in its premise of realism and claim to truth. Soviet socialist realism was rooted in literary and theatrical realism. To create an illusion of transparency and real life laid bare on stage, Stanislavski urged actors to ‘act truthfully’ and strive for ‘spiritual communion’ (jingshen jiaoliu) with spectators (Table 4.1).⁵¹ In the socialist context, ‘acting truthfully’ included acting according to political truth, and ‘spiritual communion’ included communion with the Party. Stanislavski’s directions therefore took on particular political and ethical implications in China.

Chinese dramatist Huang Zuolin described the appropriation of Stanislavski’s system in explicitly political terms:

We should not copy Stanislavski’s system in a wholesale manner […] We must develop it […] [Stanislavski’s system] should be revolutionised (geminghua), nationalised (minzuhua) and popularised (dazhonghua). Revolutionisation refers to the proletariat. Nationalisation refers to the Chinese opera tradition. Popularisation means serving workers, peasants and soldiers.⁵²

In understanding how Stanislavski’s system was appropriated in the Chinese socialist context, one must keep in mind Mao’s radical redefinition of art. To create a cinema that would serve workers, peasants and soldiers, inspiration and raw materials had to be drawn from the masses. The saying, ‘actors should learn from life’ (yanyuan yao xiang shenghuo taojiao), encapsulated the primary importance of ‘life’ (shenghuo) as the foundation of an actor’s creative work.⁵³ ‘Experience life’ was the first step by which actors could learn from the masses and cultivate themselves politically and ethically.

Table 4.1 Major principles of Stanislavski's system.

Observation is not disembodied in Stanislavski’s system. Seeing engages with other forms of sensation to constitute a sensory and embodied experience as part of an actor’s training. Reflecting this idea in ‘Life is the Source of Artistic Creation’, Zhu Xijuan highlighted two major challenges she faced in her training due to her lack of life experience. At first, Zhu Xijuan did not fully understand her character Qionghua’s hatred of the landlords. On the island of Hainan, she heard personal stories of slavery, suicide and escape, and saw the overwhelming tears of storytellers and witnesses in Hainan. These experiences, Zhu Xijuan explained, enriched her ‘revolutionary education’, imagination and affective memory.⁶³ For socialist actors, training their sensory faculties, imagination and affective memory took on political and class overtones – the collective memory of revolution often aroused actors’ creative moods as they immersed themselves in and merged with their roles (rongru juese). Seeing witnesses and hearing their stories allowed Zhu Xijuan to enter a community of feeling and enrich her affective memory – another tenet of Stanislavski’s system.

Socialist actors were not only observers; they were also expected to exercise the flesh and bone of their bodies to embody and achieve fusion with their fictional roles. Zhu Xijuan’s second challenge was to toughen her personality and temperament to overcome the gap between herself and her fictional role. A young actress who grew up in Shanghai and spent most of her life within the comfortable confines of the theatre academy, Zhu Xijuan was challenged by being cast as a soldier. Zhu Xijuan recalled that her director, Xie Jin, advised her to carry a rifle at all times during her training in Hainan:

Every day we trained in military uniforms and sandals from dawn to dusk. At the beginning we couldn’t get used to it because we were used to wearing sneakers and leather shoes in Shanghai. Climbing in sandals blistered our feet; the rifles strained our shoulders. But we persevered in living our roles at all times […] At the beginning carrying a rifle was like fumbling with a burning torch, but after much training and practice, we started to resemble our characters. The training not only transformed our temperaments (jingshen qizhi), but also allowed us to act with ease.⁶⁴

Zhu Xijuan’s cosmopolitan youth, beauty and femininity were tamed so that her boyish temperament could be toughened during her training in Hainan. She spoke of achieving resemblance to the physical form (xing) of her role, and to its spiritual manifestation (shen). While the former might have been achieved with costume and make-up, the latter was more elusive, visible only to the beholder with a trained eye.

Director Cheng Yin, who studied in Soviet Russia in 1954, described an actor’s preparation as like a ‘pregnancy’, nurturing and birthing a role.⁶⁵ This gendered metaphor of pregnancy, nurture and birth emphasised the embodiment of socialist acting. The Chinese term tixian (to exemplify bodily) literally means ‘body’ (ti) and ‘manifestation’ or ‘revelation’ (xian). Tixian means to render the invisible visible, by giving it expression through embodiment. In Chinese revolutionary film, tixian involved not only embodiment but also exemplification, requiring actors to engage in self-transformation both on and off screen, setting an example for the audience to emulate. Laikwan Pang suggests two terms – mofan and yangban (both translatable as ‘model’) – to characterise the Cultural Revolution model of culture, premised on mimesis and emulation.⁶⁶ Mofan refers both to abstract principles and actual persons as teachers (as in the 1963 campaign to ‘Follow the Examples of Comrade Lei Feng’). It can also be understood as the act of mimesis.⁶⁷ Creating heroes and heroines in revolutionary film was a way to erect models that served as exemplars. Chinese revolutionary film strove not only to represent, but also to exemplify: iconic role models were ideals, types and individuals. To experience life and to ‘embody and exemplify an ideal’ (tixian lixiang) for an audience’s emulation were the cornerstones of Chinese revolutionary screen acting.⁶⁸ Hence, Zhu Xijuan’s Stanislavskian training produced an off-screen personality in sync with the on-screen personality of her character, Qionghua, a moral and revolutionary exemplar. Zhu Xijuan’s perseverance in living her role at all times while in Hainan reflected an understanding of Stanislavski’s notion of ‘fusion’. As Xiaoning Lu has argued, ‘fusion’ in Stanislavski’s system became a ‘regulatory force’ for actors to ‘engage in self-transformation in accordance with socialist ideology’.⁶⁹

Zhu Xijuan’s preparation for and performance in The Red Detachment of Women were presented as historically real in accordance with a politically motivated claim to truth. Although Qionghua was not a real historical figure, the logic of authenticity underpinned her journalistic and biographical representation. The logic of authenticity likewise supported Zhu Xijuan’s on- and off-screen performance as an embodiment of Qionghua. Liang Xin, the film’s scriptwriter, described Qionghua as a ‘composite’ character that was created through the selection, merger and creative transformation of various figures he encountered in his real life and research: colleagues he worked with, the deceased revolutionary Liu Qiuju, who was from Hainan, and a female martyr from the red detachment in Hainan.⁷⁰ Echoing Liang Xin’s statement that ‘there are millions like Wu Qionghua in life’, Zhu Xijuan described Qionghua as a representative ‘type’ (dianxing) of Hainan working women (laodong funü).⁷¹ Although Qionghua was fictional, the ‘composite’ nature of the ‘typical’ strengthened the film’s claim to fictional realism because the role of Qionghua was said to be derived from many real-life personalities. As Zhu Xijuan put it: ‘Rather than imitating life mechanically, experiencing life means combining the different personality traits of veteran soldiers, the commander Feng Zengmin, and the red detachment, and exemplifying them through the fictional role of Qionghua.’⁷² The rhetoric of experience, embodiment and exemplification shown here in Zhu Xijuan’s self-cultivation was, like her performance as Qionghua, exemplary: her example exemplified the transformative power of acting as an ethical system that developed actors into socialist icons.

Originally a devotional portrait of a saint in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages, the term ‘icon’ acquires new meaning in the modern, secular world of advertising and commerce. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright offer a useful definition that bridges the term’s modern and medieval meanings: an icon is ‘an image that refers to something outside of its individual components, something (or someone) that has great symbolic meaning for many people. Icons are often perceived to represent universal concepts, emotions, and meanings.’⁷³ From the early Christian cult of saints to Hollywood pin-up girls of the 1940s and 1950s, the power of religious or cultural icons lies in their ability to captivate their beholders – devotees, fans or consumers. Hollywood pin-ups were sex symbols and symbols of the capitalist star system; socialist glamour shots, however, hearkened back to the icon’s original religious overtones with their gaze of veneration. Climactic moments in Chinese revolutionary film were iconic moments, in which socialist actors’ eyes were cinematically illuminated as actors became socialist icons.

Socialist icons represented the socialist realist gaze as a gaze of veneration. Consider David Morgan’s discussion of the religious veneration of icons, in which he defines the ‘devotional gaze’:

Religious seeing commonly involves a visual relation that does not engage the viewer in a reciprocal exchange, but absorbs one nevertheless in a kind of ocular adoration. This devotional gaze is evident in rapt absorption of devotees before the cult image, which they regard with a way of seeing that can recall the longing of the lover for the beloved.⁷⁴

In the religious context, the intense absorption of the devotional gaze enhances prayer, contemplation or imagination and may lead to states of consciousness in which seeing ceases, as in meditation.⁷⁵ In film studies, the gaze exists as a mode of inquiry and analysis, a way of seeing, conditioned by the camera and cinematic apparatus that structures social relationships by mediating desire, fear and authority. In Chinese revolutionary film, the ‘socialist realist gaze’ looks to the horizon, signalling the political consciousness of Party members and leaders, as discussed in Chapter Three. The socialist realist gaze can be understood as the cinematic version of a devotional gaze, addressed not to a saint or deity, but to the Party. Because of the affinity between devotional images and socialist cinematic images in terms of visual structure, the socialist realist gaze is a kind of cinematic iconography in which lighting illuminates the eyes of socialist actors to transform them into socialist icons.

In early 1960s discourse on portrait photography, the eyes of actors and other subjects of portraiture were perceived as illuminating windows upon the socialist spirit. Discussions emerged on the ‘temperament’ (qizhi) and ‘spiritual features’ (jingshen mianmao) of positive characters (zhengmian renwu).⁷⁶ Zhu Jing argued that the representation of heroes and heroines would not be complete without both ‘form’ (xing) and ‘spirit’ (shen).⁷⁷ Physical form was visible on screen, but temperament and spirit were much more intangible and elusive; actors’ eyes came to play a central role in manifesting spirit and temperament, a function expressed by the saying, ‘the eyes manifest the spirit’ (meimu chuanshen).

Accordingly, the actress’s eyes were often the focus of camera movement and montage in key sequences showing a heroine’s progression along the path to political consciousness. In Song of Youth, a montage sequence depicts Lin Daojing in a series of close-up shots as she is enthralled by the Soviet novel, The Iron Flood (Aleksandr Serafimovich, 1924). The sequence culminates in an extreme close-up shot of Lin Doajing’s face as her eyes look to the horizon, followed by an ‘empty shot’ (kong jingtou) of blooming flowers against the blue sky (Plate 1).⁷⁸ Lin Daojing’s sparkling eyes suggest her psychological transformation: as the book opens up a new world of knowledge and faith, she first looks out towards an unseen horizon, then upwards, as if in veneration.

In Song of Youth, special effort was made to ensure that a singular sparkle, a reflection from a carefully-supplied light source, appeared in the pupils of the actress’s eyes.

Normally, there is only one bright spot in a pupil. However, there are many sources of light in the studio. When the lights are reflected in the characters’ eyes, several white spots appear in the pupils, damaging the gaze (yanshen) of the character. As a result, the gaze (muguang) is dispersed […] We should change the position of lighting and aim for the proper reflection of a bright spot in a character’s eye […] We can also spot the light on the pupil with a suitable angle, so that the character comes to life.⁷⁹

Significantly, the Chinese terms for ‘eyes’ (yan, or mu) are associated with the terms ‘spirit’ (shen) and ‘light’ (guang). The singular sparkle in the pupil was perceived as that which enlivened the spirit of the inspired heroine. A lighting set-up that achieved this effect was described by an artistic metaphor: ‘dotting the dragon’s eyes’ (hualong dianjing). Originally a painting tradition dating back to the Northern and Southern dynasties,⁸⁰ ‘dotting the dragon’s eyes’ became a cinematic lighting technique to illuminate the eyes of heroes and heroines, who were compared to painted dragons.⁸¹ The illuminating eye was thus part of the charm and magnetism that heroes and heroines were expected to exude on screen.

The cinematic act of dotting the eyes involved careful and specific lighting and the use of close-ups. Just as Chinese film-makers adopted the phrase ‘dotting the dragon’s eyes’ from Chinese painting, Hollywood cinematography has also been associated with painting: the American Society of Cinematographers defines cinematography as ‘painting with light’.⁸² The particular use of cinematography to create cinematic glamour means that lighting often operates along gender divisions in visual representations ranging from portraiture to film. In portraits and Hollywood silent film close-ups, various lighting conventions are mobilised to enhance characterisation and accentuate features that are constructed in gender-specific ways: delicacy of complexion is usually associated with females, strong contrast of light and dark with males. As Patrick Keating puts it: ‘A woman’s face would feature “gentle” gradations, while a man’s face would express virility with stronger contrasts.’⁸³ Low-contrast lighting smooths out the facial features of a female subject, and a frontal light eliminates wrinkles that may have been more apparent with side lighting. Keating points to the hyper-aestheticised and heavily diffused close-ups of Lillian Gish in Way Down East (D. W. Griffith, 1920) to illustrate how low-contrast, soft frontal lighting enhanced pictorial beauty, glamour and feminine characterisation. Backlighting was often used with lens diffusion to intensify the ‘halo’ effect by making the edges of blond hair glow.⁸⁴ These gender-specific lighting conventions succeeded in enhancing glamour in the Hollywood silent era, so much so that ‘some female stars began to request heavy diffusion on all their shots’.⁸⁵

In Republican Shanghai cinema, similar lighting conventions had been employed to accentuate the glamour of female stars like Ruan Lingyu. In a series of close-up shots in The Goddess, low-contrast, soft frontal lighting emphasised the actress’s femininity and delicacy of complexion at the height of her career (Plate 2). As early as the 1900s, lighting in photography had been conceived as having the ability to capture character and even ‘peer into the soul’ of a subject.⁸⁶ However, ‘character’ is not to be confused with ‘appearance’: ‘Appearances may change from moment to moment, but each subject has a more-or-less consistent character.’⁸⁷ Ruan Lingyu’s acting career and on- and off-screen persona constructed her as a consistent character, the new woman and an iconic figure of modernity, established as a result of the complex interplay between acting, cinematography, characterisation and larger social issues in modernising Shanghai.

In Chinese revolutionary film, a similar use of gender-specific Hollywood lighting conventions aestheticised the image of heroines, but towards a different end. In Song of Youth, Lin Daojing is often depicted in close-up shots with low-contrast, soft frontal lighting that accentuates her femininity and glamour. When Lin Daojing conveys her new joy and commitment to the revolution to her friend, with a slightly upturned chin as her eyes gaze at the horizon, she is depicted in close-up (also a low-angle shot) as she speaks. The sky at dusk provides a natural backlight and creates a glamorous ‘halo’ effect (Plate 3). Rather than conveying Lin Daojing as a sex symbol, however, lighting here evokes the romance of revolution.

When Lin Daojing is admitted to the Party, she is depicted in a medium shot as she vows her loyalty. Wearing a red sweater passed on to her by the martyr Lin Hong, Lin Daojing’s make-up and red cheeks add colour to her image and enhance her glamour in a specific allusion to her new socialist ‘red’ identity. The use of backlight creates shadows and patterns in the interior and makes Lin Daojing’s hair glow, as if light is emanating from the heroine: she is a socialist icon (Plate 4).

The gendered nature of this glamourous socialist iconography is demonstrated by the fact that none of the male characters in Song of Youth is given a similarly aestheticised treatment. Male characters recede into the background (Lin Daojing’s former mentor and the martyr Lu Jiachuan), or at least shine less (Lin Daojing’s later mentor Jiang Hua), as Lin Daojing takes on a prominent role as the vanguard of revolution. Katerina Clark has suggested the terms ‘the structure of apprenticeship’ and ‘the structure of confrontation’ as ways to understand Soviet socialist realist fiction: ‘The novel of socialist realism is a novel of work, with a hero who gives himself a task; he will join with allies; he will meet with opponents.’⁸⁸ In Song of Youth, the heroine replaces the hero. Soviet fiction often situates protagonists in ‘the tension between spontaneity and consciousness’ as they learn to discipline themselves under the guidance of mentors on the path to transformation.⁸⁹ Lin Daojing evolves from ignorant youth to glamorous woman and new Party member under the guidance of her mentor – and implied lover – Jiang Hua, who functions in Lin Daojing’s apprenticeship as a supporting character rather than a hero.

In Song of Youth, Lin Daojing is the only character with a prolonged socialist realist gaze. In a montage sequence juxtaposing the Party flag with Lin’s socialist realist gaze, a close-up of Lin Daojing is combined with frontal and back lighting that smoothes out her facial features and makes her hair glow. The cinematic technique of ‘dotting the dragon’s eyes’ makes Lin Daojing’s glistening eyes shine – even more so because of the dim lighting in the interior (Plate 5). Make-up and lighting enhance Lin Daojing’s firmness of will with feminine softness. This is an aestheticised moment when the glamour of the socialist icon shines through. ‘Socialist’ and ‘glamour’, far from being mutually exclusive, cannot exist without one another.

As a constitutive part of a devotional image, the socialist realist gaze was a rhetorical form of persuasion and inducement. Lin Daojing’s gaze opened an imaginary to captivate beholders who believed – an imaginary that was the ethos of the Party, including its values and ideals. The actress, Xie Fang, described merging with her fictional role as a newly admitted member of the Communist Party. Xie Fang’s imagination and chain of inner vision centred on what she saw as the transcendence of death:

It is a long sequence without speech. It is as if I see a bright and colourful rainbow and a group of people marching with red flags and flowers towards a golden shining gate. Then I see the familiar faces of Lu Jiachuan, Jiang Hua, Lin Hong, Wang Xiaoyan, and Yu Shuxiu, as if they are smiling and nodding at me in congratulations. Without that chain of imagination and visual images, my interior world would have been blank.⁹⁰

A socialist actor on screen served as an intermediary between socialist truth and spectators, who perceived a socialist vision through the eyes of the actor. For an image to be iconic, the viewer must be inclined to believe something: as Morgan puts it: ‘Without that faith, they are not icons at all.’⁹¹ In Song of Youth, Xie Fang/Lin Daojing became a socialist icon, transforming her own vision of death-defying transcendence into observable veneration of the Party before the viewer’s eyes.

The feminisation of icons was not new to Chinese revolutionary film. The most cherished icon in the Byzantine tradition – Madonna and Child – is built on the primacy of the face-to-face encounter between mother and child.⁹² Actresses served as figures of modernity and sexual morality in Republican Shanghai cinema, and they continued to serve as iconic figures in socialist China. Although they were not represented as sexual objects with revealing clothes and seductive poses, socialist actresses were neither desexualised, nor was their femininity erased. The Red Detachment of Women, for instance, invests in juvenated femininity and libidinal energy in a way that creates matriarchy through the death of a male martyr. At the end of the film, Qionghua becomes an exemplar and a revolutionary prototype with lesser figures encircling her.

As mentioned earlier, Zhu Xijuan was chosen for the role of Qionghua because of her wide eyes. Qionghua’s fiery and fearless eyes are given cinematic expression in a scene where she witnesses the execution of Changqing (her implied lover). In an extreme close-up, Qionghua’s sweaty, unsmooth and distorted face is accentuated by a light reflected on her forehead. Although there is more than one bright spot in Qionghua’s pupils, her gaze and knitted eyebrows focus the viewer on her eyes and what she sees: Changqing, bound for execution. In the next shot, special lighting, which fills almost the entire shot, is used to re-create the reflection of flames at the execution site as Qionghua observes Changqing’s death from afar, behind a tree (Plate 6). The lighting here visually re-creates Qionghua’s fiery agitation, and the cinematic representation of Qionghua subverts the conventional dichotomy between masculine toughness and feminine softness. Without high fashion or glamourous make-up, Qionghua, with her sweaty and oily face, nonetheless draws the audience in with her fiery eyes.

In her study of film and gender in Sino–Soviet exchange, Tina Mai Chen has pointed out that ‘love, desire, and sexuality were not erased or censored to the point of erasure’, and that ‘the masses learned about love and sexuality in part through the cultural products on display’.⁹³ Chen points to the kiss witnessed by Stalin at the end of the Soviet film The Fall of Berlin (Mikheil Chiaureli, 1949) to demonstrate what she calls the ‘triangulation of legitimate love’ and the ‘triangulation of male–female–party’.⁹⁴ In The Red Detachment of Women, the triangulation of legitimate love is given new expression at both the narrative and visual levels. The death of the male martyr transforms the triangulation of male–female–party, as the Party embodies the beliefs of the hero and becomes the sole locus of love and memory. The death of Changqing coincides with Qionghua’s admission to Party membership, allowing her to carry on Changqing’s legacy as a revolutionary prototype in a new matriarchy. Qionghua’s emotional and political devotion to Changqing is channelled and sublimated to the Party, as shown by the montage sequence in which an extreme facial close-up of Qionghua’s socialist realist gaze is superimposed on her Party application. There is more than one bright spot in Qionghua’s pupils – the film-makers didn’t achieve the cinematic technique of ‘dotting the eyes’ – yet the superimposition, like a halo, brightens Qionghua’s face in a moment of epiphany as the Internationale is sung (Figure 3.14). The ‘cinematic formalism’ of this climactic moment, orchestrated by montage, is a key instance of the ways Chinese revolutionary film increasingly standardised actors’ socialist realist gazes and performative gestures, creating uniform iconography for overt rhetorical effects (Plate 7).⁹⁵

The socialist iconography in The Red Detachment of Women is female. As Qionghua returns to her detachment with her newly acquired political consciousness, she takes on the role of a leader, with her comrades–sisters encircling her for support and mentorship. One, Honglian, has just given birth to a child. The final shots of the film and its theme song evoke sisterhood, matriarchy and the importance of progeny in the continuation of revolution:

March on! March on!

A soldier’s responsibility is great.

Women’s vengeance is deep.

In the past Hua Mulan joined the army in her father’s stead.

Now, the red detachment fights for the people

March on! March on!

A soldier’s responsibility is great

Women’s vengeance is deep.

Communism is the truth; the Party is our guide.

Slaves can finally be liberated!

The Red Detachment of Women invests in femininity rather than erasing it. This political, moral and aesthetic investment in female icons, with sisters and progeny, anticipated the emergence of the non-biological revolutionary family in later films such as Red Lantern (Cheng Yin, 1970) during the Cultural Revolution.

Rather than representing its female ‘stars’ as objects of capitalised sex appeal, Chinese revolutionary cinema invested in juvenated femininity and reframed glamour in socialist terms through specific choices in actors’ training, casting and cinematography. A new socialist ethics of acting, emphasising experience, embodiment and exemplification, transformed actors into socialist icons with devotional gazes for mass emulation. The 1962 socialist star craze, coincided with an emerging consumer culture and star culture on a global scale, revealed underlying tensions and similarities between two competing ‘star’ cultures, each of which produced glamour with its own ideological, economic and social agendas. Despite multiple political campaigns – and because of them – a decade of aesthetic experiments in screenwriting, cinematography and acting after the nationalisation of the Chinese film industry negotiated with pre-existing and competing cinematic traditions to create a unique and revolutionary film aesthetic.