Conclusion

Throughout the Seventeen Years from 1949 to 1966, film was a tool of propaganda and provocation. Its melding of ideology and aesthetics created dissatisfactions as well as radical aspirations for revolution. In periods of political relaxation, discontent and the desire for greater autonomy of the arts were unleashed. In periods of tightened political control, artists and critics were prosecuted, films were banned, and radical campaigns were initiated to rectify and remould artists and the masses. The dialectic of propaganda and its discontents (as well as the overcoming of those discontents) characterised the Seventeen Years before the Cultural Revolution.

In Revolution and its Narratives, Cai Xiang describes the early 1960s as a crisis of socialism. Cai argues that symptoms of the Cultural Revolution already existed in the first half of the 1960s, when the establishment of an urban-centred socialist culture, an emerging middle class and consumer culture, and value identification with the West generated political anxiety that set off radical experiments to rectify ideology.¹ For instance, the short-lived 1962 socialist star craze can be seen as a manifestation of this crisis of socialism, as the phenomenon depended on an emerging consumer culture and value identification with capitalism. In reaction to the political anxiety around revisionism and the Party’s lack of hegemony over what Xiaobing Tang calls the ‘anxiety over everyday life’, Mao initiated the mass campaign ‘Follow the Examples of Comrade Lei Feng’ in 1963, creating Lei Feng as a perfectly self-disciplined socialist icon for everyday mass emulation.² At the same time, a nationwide campaign of studying Mao’s works emerged. To curb political anxiety over everyday life, revolutionary heroism spilled over to quotidian and everyday protagonists, and daily life became the site of class struggle. ‘Good people, good events’ (haoren haoshi) became the subject matter of film, exemplifying everyday heroism, everyday class struggle and socialist ethics. The moralisation of everyday life was to take on new intensity during the Cultural Revolution, which set off even more radical aesthetic experiments.

Driven by political anxiety around revisionism, radical slogans were proposed, rejecting the old and privileging the new by establishing contemporary people and events (xinren xinshi) as the subject matter of film. In 1963, Ke Qingshi, mayor of Shanghai, proposed the radical slogan ‘feature the thirteen years’ (daxie shisannian), which called on artists to depict contemporary people and events of the 13 years since 1949 as the only proper reflection of socialist construction, negating pre-1949 people and events as subject matter. In the same year, Mao critiqued the dominance of ‘dead people’ from a bygone historical period as subject matter in various artistic forms such as dance, drama, film, fine art, music and poetry.³ The thematic and aesthetic preference for contemporary subject matter with a contemporary style was also articulated by Jiang Qing in ‘On the Revolution in Peking Opera’ (1964), which proposed radically revolutionising Peking opera in order to represent contemporary workers, peasants and soldiers. In a speech from the plenary discussion with performers after the modern Peking opera trial performance convention in Beijing in July 1964, Jiang Qing suggested that traditional operas should be ‘adapted and reworked’: ‘We advocate modern revolutionary dramas. We seek to reflect the real life of these fifteen years of nation building, and to model the image of the contemporary revolutionary hero on our opera stage.’⁴ Jiang Qing’s ideas later formed the basis of model opera films (yangbanxi) produced during the Cultural Revolution, when the production of fiction film came to almost a complete halt. The radical call to reject or revolutionise the old served to rectify ideology and negate the past by establishing yet another new, pioneering and revolutionary ideology.

The political anxiety over revisionism and the idea of getting rid of the old manifested in a new rectification campaign in 1964, which targeted Xia Yan and Chen Huangmei, key players in the 1961–2 Blooming and Contending. This rectification campaign involved a 16-month nationwide mass critique of films that were deemed ‘poisonous weeds’, such as Nie Er (Zheng Junli, 1959), The Lin Family Shop (Shui Hua, 1959), Big Li, Small Li, and Old Li (Xie Jin, 1962), Early Spring in February (Xie Tieli, 1963) and Stage Sisters (Xie Jin, 1965). Produced as a result of political relaxation after the Great Leap Forward, these films were criticised for their entertainment value, promotion of ‘universal’ values such as human nature, romance and sisterhood, and their representation of the interior world and psychological struggles of intellectuals, artists and shop owners. After 1949, film criticism took the form of political campaign and political judgement, sometimes initiated by Mao himself (for instance, the Campaign against The Life of Wu Xun). In 1964, Mao mobilised cities throughout the country to organise public screenings of ‘poisonous’ films as negative examples. Most of the films produced during the Seventeen Years became targets of mass criticism. From 1964 to 1965, 724 critiques of Early Spring in February and 325 critiques of The Lin Family Shop were published in various national newspapers and periodicals.⁵ In 16 months, 1,772 critiques were published: an average of 110 a month and 3.7 a day.⁶ Written critiques were mostly produced by intellectuals, including prominent writers and film critics such as Ba Jin and Zhang Junxiang. Mass critiques and discussion sessions were variously held at the local level. Zhuoyi Wang has suggested that some ‘poisonous’ films paradoxically gained popularity because of the mass critique that Mao had initiated. Wang’s research uncovers unpublished materials, such as minutes of local level meetings, to reveal how ‘the masses attended the viewing sessions for diverse purposes and watched the films in various ways, often to the dismay of the authorities.’⁷ Early Spring in February, for instance, was especially welcomed by young viewers, who were impressed with its cinematography, love story and star power. The nationwide mass mobilisation against ‘poisonous’ films was another occasion for popular film viewing, but its goal was ideological remoulding, a prelude to the even more radical Cultural Revolution.

This study has traced the evolution of a revolutionary aesthetic of heroism in Chinese socialist fiction film, from film adaptations of literature and family melodramas to war films featuring heroes and heroines.⁸ The cinematic evolution of a heightened sense of heroism was intertwined with evolving discourses on screenwriting, montage, screen acting and realism. The heroism emphasised before and during the Cultural Revolution was followed by a profound search for humanism in post-socialist China, as reflected in the ‘humanist spirit’ debate and discourse on post-socialist realism, which looked to André Bazin’s notion of cinema as a visual truth for theoretical guidance.⁹ Fifth-generation film-makers and various auteurs (such as Chen Kaige and Jia Zhangke) used long takes and on-location shooting and avoided montage, subverting previous revolutionary conventions and creating an aestheticised post-socialist realism that focused on the human rather than the hero. The screen kiss (a cheek kiss) resurfaced in post-socialist films such as Romance on Lushan Mountain (Huang Zumo, 1980), essentially a love story that shows young people how to date and how to love. Critical study of the Seventeen Years allows us to unwind the trajectories of socialist and post-socialist realism and map the search for a cultural hero in Chinese revolutionary film discourse.

In his study of Chinese socialist cinema after 1949, Paul Clark has also critically analysed an art form often seen as tainted by ideology: ‘The presumption seems to be that, in such a politicized culture, film has been simply a political tool in the hands of the national leadership […] this book hopes to suggest otherwise.’¹⁰ The present study has tackled the challenge of reading filmic texts that are often referred to pejoratively as propaganda: cultural productions that strictly conformed to the dominant state ideology and were heavily censored by the state. Chinese revolutionary film as state propaganda was more than this: an aesthetic experiment that sought to develop the appeal and allure of revolution through massive mobilisation and trial and error. Some of its aesthetic impulses were rooted in the interwar avant-garde, commercial cinema and international discourse on realism – the untapped potential of which was rechannelled into a socialist ideological agenda after 1949. Further serious study of Chinese socialist cinema must cross the 1949 divide and locate its roots in the interwar period, including the Soviet turn in Chinese film discourse in the Republican era.

The socialist aesthetic experiment produced a unique culture of film theory and criticism, which included ideological remoulding through self-criticisms, political campaigns, judgements and persecutions. Yet, amidst the direst ideological discipline and punishment, dissent and creative energy were unleashed, and sometimes absorbed, re-evaluated and redirected by the Party. In the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Zhong Dianfei’s notion of the political, aesthetic and box office values of film was articulated and suppressed; but it resurfaced in the short-lived 1962 socialist star craze, when taboo terms such as ‘stars’ (mingxing) and ‘masters’ (dashi), associated with entertainment and art cinema, were redirected to revolutionary film discourse. Paul Pickowicz notes that many of the most memorable films of the Mao era were made in the immediate years following the Great Leap Forward because of relaxation and recovery after the Great Leap and the maturation of revolutionary aesthetics.¹¹ Paul Clark has described the latter half of the Seventeen Years as moving towards ‘sinification’ of film, characterised by the acknowledgement of the May Fourth literary tradition and more ancient popular cultural traditions.¹² Recognising state propaganda as aesthetic experiment allows us to reconceive the delicate and mutually dependent relationship between artistic autonomy, individual talent and the state as an ideological binding machine.

The visual age of interwar propaganda continued onto the postwar period: fascism as the ‘third way’ died out, but the ideological and aesthetic competition between capitalism and socialism heightened during the Cold War, when each bloc extended its vision of internationalism to the newly decolonised Third World. In 1957, ‘Red China’s Big Push’ highlighted the attraction and artistic refinement of Chinese film:

The films, good by any standard, attract [my emphasis] especially large audiences when dubbed in local languages. An American motion-picture expert, after examining Peking’s productions, observed that they showed ‘great production values and technical refinements.’ Unlike Hollywood, the Chinese tailor their product to the Asian market.¹³

Propaganda had to be appealing in the eye of the beholder in order for it to be an attractive and effective ideological form. In creating potential revolutionary subjects as an ideal audience, Chinese film-makers and cultural authorities invested in the visual, aural, kinaesthetic, sexual, ideological and ethical appeal of revolutionary film. The kinaesthetic rhythm generated by montage stimulated the eye and the ear. Where Sergei Eisenstein believed in the montage of attractions’ ability to generate a leap from sensory experience to rational thinking and revolutionary practice, Chinese film-makers distanced themselves from Eisenstein’s idea of intellectual cinema and invested in the cinematic stimulation of the senses. Their focus on sight and sound, punctuated by montage and the relay of gazes, sutured the ideal audience with rhetorical flourishes that conveyed a glorified and heroic revolutionary cause. Chinese film-makers’ appropriation of classical Hollywood narration and the dual plot of romance (or family) and work tapped into libidinal energy to promote socialist work ethic, morality and family values. Their investment in star power, glamour and juvenated femininity created socialist female icons for mass emulation. Their appropriation of Stanislavski’s system served to regulate actors’ ideological remoulding, self-cultivation and self-transformation. A nuanced understanding of propaganda as aesthetic experiment accounts for the potential appeal of Chinese revolutionary film and provides us with critical tools to understand the limits and emancipatory possibilities of socialist cinema, as well as the ways in which such cinema, through the work of translation, engaged in dialogue with world cinema.

The complexity of Chinese socialist cinema is just a small piece of our understanding of socialist culture. Joining efforts undertaken by scholars with a shared interest in socialist culture in the broadest sense of the word – socialist literature and socialist film in all genres – this study has emphasised the international connexions that Chinese revolutionary cinema made with other cinemas in terms of its aesthetic appropriations and international aspirations. Much more could be said about Chinese socialist cinema’s engagement with cinematic trends such as Italian neorealism and Japanese animation, or its exchange with cinemas from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. In contextualising and historicising Chinese socialist cinema, looking beyond Hollywood and the Soviet connexion would yield insights from the peripheries of the socialist bloc and the decolonised Third World. A methodology that looks more closely at distribution and audience reception (albeit filtered by the state in official channels) might lead us to further rethinking of the parameters of Chinese socialist cinema. Along these lines, I find Weijia Du’s work especially interesting: Du sheds light on the important role of dubbed foreign film, which occupied a third to a half of total exhibition time in Chinese theatres in the Seventeen Years.¹⁴ As ‘indispensable fillers’ supplementing domestic production, dubbed foreign films were sheltered from much of the censorship imposed on domestic production;¹⁵ they could even betray the propagation of socialist ideology and ‘constituted a legitimate space of mild dissent’.¹⁶ Du’s examination of government documents, film company records and audience reception recollected in memoirs complements my focus on domestic production. Chinese socialist film culture was constituted by both domestic production and imported foreign film, whose distribution and reception remain under-studied. In both regards, Chinese film history is intimately intertwined with other film histories.

Chinese revolutionary cinema opened up the emancipatory potential of cinema. It encompassed an ambitious socialist vision that went awry but nonetheless provided a source of solidarity for postwar experimental or revival cinemas from other parts of the world. The ambitious scope, depth of knowledge and creative manoeuvring demonstrated by Chinese film-makers’ negotiation with the propaganda state reveal the richness and complexity of socialist cultural production and its international aspirations. Following Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence and the Soviet thaw, socialist countries had pursued different directions and formed different alliances, leading to the socialist bloc’s gradual disintegration and culminating in perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 ‘reform and opening’ initiated a socialist market economy under the banner of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. In the domain of film, the revolutionary aesthetic of heroism before and during the Cultural Revolution came to be subverted, making way for a post-socialist aesthetic for a burgeoning commercial and global art cinema market. A critical look through the forgotten pages of film history, at the experimentations and legacies of Chinese revolutionary cinema, allows us to reimagine not only what cinema is, but what it could be.