Notes

Introduction

 1.See Kevin M. F. Platt and David Brandenberger, eds., Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).

 2.Ibid., 9.

 3.See Laikwan Pang, The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution (New York: Verso, 2017).

 4.Mao Zedong, ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’, in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk Denton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 474.

 5.For more information about these genres, see Ying Bao, ‘The Problematics of Comedy: New China Cinema and the Case of Lü Ban’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20.2 (2008): 185–228; Ying Bao, ‘National Cinema, Local Language, Trans-regional Adaptation: Dialect Comedy in the Early People’s Republic of China’, Asian Cinema 21.1 (2010): 124–38; Daisy Yan Du, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s–1970s (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2018); Paola Iovene and Judith T. Zeitlin, eds., The Opera Quarterly 26.2–3 (2010): 179–492.

 6.The 1960s witnessed a gradual thematic shift away from the grand narrative of revolution to the representation of everyday life in socialist society. Many fiction films produced in the 1960s turn to the mundane and the everyday in order to provide civic education, contrasting sharply with earlier fiction films in which larger-than-life Party members are the heroes and heroines. The conclusion briefly discusses fiction films that evoke a different sense of revolutionary heroism during the crisis of socialism in the 1960s.

 7.Although Soviet short films and newsreels were shown in Harbin in the 1920s, it was not until 1931 that Soviet feature films were screened for public viewing in China. Battleship Potemkin (Броненосец ‘Потëмкин’) (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) was the first Soviet feature film screened, in Shanghai in 1925. The semi-private screening was organised by the Soviet embassy as an invitation for the cultural circle in Nanguoshe in Shanghai.

 8.Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6.

 9.Yomi Braester and Tina Mai Chen, ‘Film in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979: The Missing Years’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5.1 (2011): 10.

 10.Ibid., 9.

 11.Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’, in Reinventing Film Studies, eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 341.

 12.See Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

 13.Huang Zibu (Xia Yan), ‘Shenglu ping yi’ (On The Road to Life I), in Sanshi niandai Zhongguo dianying pinglun wenxuan, ed. Chen Bo (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1993), 656.

 14.Ibid.

 15.Ibid.

 16.The ‘soft film’ and ‘hard film’ debate between 1933 and 1934 revolved around the tension between film as education, reinforcing leftist ideology, and film as entertainment (which itself is an ideology). Huang Jiamo, in an essay titled ‘Hard Film and Soft Film’ published in Xiandai Dianying (1933), advocated the slogan ‘film is ice cream for the eyes and sofa for the soul’ against leftist ideology and revolutionary slogans. In retaliation, Xia Yan wrote a scathing criticism titled ‘The Cataracted “Business Eyes” – Who Has Destroyed the Newborn Cinema in China?’ in Chenbao (1934) against the entertainment orientation of soft-film theorists. For a more detailed discussion of the debate, see Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen, 267–74.

 17.Huang Zibu (Xia Yan), ‘Shenglu ping yi’, 655.

 18.Ibid., 654.

 19.Ibid., 655.

 20.Chen Liting, ‘Kan Shenglu’ (Watching The Road to Life), in Sanshi niandai Zhongguo dianying pinglun wenxuan, 667.

 21.‘Zhongguo dianying congyeyuan de Shenglu guanhougan’ (Chinese film workers’ thoughts on The Road to Life), in Sanshi niandai Zhongguo dianying pinglun wenxuan, 670.

 22.Ibid.

 23.Ibid.

 24.Hong Shen and Xi Naifang (Zheng Boqi), ‘Shenglu xiangping’ (On The Road to Life), in Sanshi niandai Zhongguo dianying pinglun wenxuan, 661.

 25.‘Zhongguo dianying congyeyuan de Shenglu guanhougan’, 670.

 26.Ibid.

 27.Wang Qixun, ‘Shenglu ping er’ (On The Road to Life II), in Sanshi niandai Zhongguo dianying pinglun wenxuan, 658.

 28.The line between entertainment and education is not necessarily as clear-cut as the rhetoric in film discourse suggests. By the 1930s, left-wing Chinese film-makers had mastered classical Hollywood narration, playfully adapting the dual plots of heterosexual romance and work for pedagogical messaging and entertainment purposes in films such as Queen of Sports (Sun Yu, 1934).

 29.Xia Yan, ‘Tan Sulian dianying de jiaoyu jiazhi’ (On the pedagogical value of Soviet film), in Xia Yan quanji, vol. 6 (Zhejiang: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 2005), 203.

 30.See Zhuoyi Wang, Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema 1951–1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Also notable is Paul Clark’s Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949, a pioneering study of Chinese socialist cinema since 1949.

 31.The study of Soviet mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s has been revolutionised since 1991 by the declassification of important archives. See Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

 32.See Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

 33.See Zhang, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen. Zhang’s study is a major breakthrough in Chinese film studies in the sense that the work considers the development of early Chinese cinema not in isolation, but as a historical event interconnected with world politics and aesthetic trends. Zhang looks at the ways in which Hollywood cinema, as what Miriam Hansen calls ‘vernacular modernism’, was translated, domesticated and put into local use during the Republican era in semi-colonial Shanghai. Building upon the works of scholars such as Kristine Harris, Leo Ou-fan Lee and Yingjin Zhang (1999), who read early Chinese cinema as constitutive of the urban culture in Shanghai, Zhang reconceptualises early Chinese cinema as a form of vernacular modernism in the semi-colonial context of Shanghai, going a step further than previous efforts undertaken by Laikwan Pang (2002) and Vivian Shen (2005) in locating the ‘left-wing cinema movement’ in the historically confined period from 1932 to 1937.

 34.Braester and Chen, ‘Film in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979: The Missing Years’, 5.

 35.Ibid., 7.

 36.Ibid., 6.

 37.See Cai Xiang, Revolution and its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966, trans. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

 38.Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 124.

 39.Chris Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution After the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004), 27–75.

 40.Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 59–62.

 41.Tina Mai Chen, ‘Internationalism and Cultural Experience: Soviet Films and Popular Chinese Understandings of the Future in the 1950s’, Cultural Critique 58 (2004): 82–114.

 42.See Weihong Bao, ‘The Politics of Remediation: Mise-en-Scène and the Subjunctive Body in Chinese Opera Film’, The Opera Quarterly 26.2–3 (2010): 256–90; Xinyu Dong, ‘Meeting of the Eyes: Invented Gesture, Cinematic Choreography, and Mei Lanfang’s Kun Opera Film’, The Opera Quarterly 26.2–3 (2010): 200–19.

 43.See Jason McGrath, ‘Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema’, The Opera Quarterly 26.2–3 (2010): 343–76.

 44.See Qi Wang, ‘Those Who Lived in a Wallpapered Home: The Historical Space of the Socialist Chinese Counter-Espionage Film’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5.1 (2011): 55–71; Matthew D. Johnson, ‘The Science Education Film: Cinematizing Technocracy and Internationalizing Development’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5.1 (2011): 31–53.

 45.See Chen Huangmei, ed. Dangdai Zhongguo dianying (Contemporary Chinese cinema). 2 vols (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1989); Meng Liye, Xin zhongguo dianying yishu shigao, 1949–1959 (A history of new China’s film Art) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2002); Qi Xiaoping, Xianghua ducao: hongse niandai de dianying mingyun (Fragrant flowers and poisonous weeds: the fate of films during the red years) (Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo chubanshe, 2006); Qi Zhi (Wu Di), Mao Zedong shidai de renmin dianying, 1949–1966 (People’s cinema in Mao Zedong’s era) (Taipei: Xiuwei zixun keji gufen youxian gongsi, 2010); Wu Di, ed. Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1949–1979 (Research materials on Chinese cinema). 3 vols (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2006).

 46.See Hong Hong, Sulian yingxiang yu Zhongguo shiqinian dianying (Chinese cinema during the ‘Seventeen Years’ and its Soviet influence) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2008).

 47.Braester and Chen, ‘Film in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979: The Missing Years’, 7.

 48.See Jie Li and Enhua Zhang, eds, Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

 49.‘(Re)Inventing China: A New Cinema for a New Society, 1949–1966’, Moving Image Source, accessed December 15, 2017, http://www.movingimagesource.us/events/reinventing-china-a-new-cinema-for-20090926.

 50.‘Walker Art Center and University of Minnesota Present the People’s Republic of Cinema’, Walker Art Center, accessed December 15, 2017, https://walkerart.org/press-releases/2009/walker-art-center-and-university-of-minnesota.

 51.See Wang, Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 11. Wang uses the term ‘revolutionary cinema/films’ to replace ‘communist cinema/films’ because the latter term ‘has been too frequently associated with a static understanding that this cinema, in its entirety, served one single agenda: communist propaganda’. He meticulously delineates the dramatic shifts in revolutionary campaigns, which he calls ‘revolutionary cycles’, in order to reveal the diverse individual calculations and conflicting agendas of film artists, audiences, critics, bureaucrats and Party authorities as they negotiated and competed for power and meaning. Wang argues that revolutionary films were ‘discursive sites open to multifarious struggles and conflicts during the revolutionary cycles, which did not follow a single, coherent propagandistic line in the first place.’

 52.David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927–1941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 5. For an earlier study of the development of Bolshevik propaganda, see Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization 1917–1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

 53.Clark and Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and Power, xii.

 54.Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1.

 55.Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 11.

 56.Ibid., 12.

 57.For a detailed study of the Campaign against The Life of Wu Xun, see Wang, Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 25–43.

 58.Clark and Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and Power, xiv.

 59.Pang, The Art of Cloning, 14.

 60.Ibid., 15.

 61.Mao Dun, ‘Zai fandongpai yabi xia douzheng he fazhan de wenyi’ (The struggling literature and art under the oppression of reactionaries), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1949–1979, vol. 1, ed. Wu Di (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2006), 21.

 62.Alice Lovejoy’s pioneering study on cinema and experiment in the Czechoslovak military sheds light on the ‘critical role that state institutions played in the development of the “Czechoslovak film miracle,” even at politically repressive moments’. She argues that ‘auteurs can be useful to institutions – and institutions useful to auteurs.’ See Alice Lovejoy, Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015).

 63.Clark, Moscow: The Fourth Rome, 16.

 64.Likewise, in his study of the Soviet reception of Western visitors in the interwar period, Michael David-Fox highlights the paradox that ‘imported ideas were used to construct notions of Russian uniqueness’. See Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12.

 65.Nicolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 169–86. In his study, Volland traces the continuity between open cosmopolitanism in the Republican era and rarely acknowledged cosmopolitan aspirations in the socialist era.

 66.Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings. Vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2002), 101–33.

 67.Mao, ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’, 468.

 68.Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, ‘Towards a Third Cinema’, accessed December 15, 2017, http://documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/camasgun.html.

 69.Ibid.

 70.Ibid.

 71.Ibid.

 72.Ibid.

 73.Ibid.

 74.In terms of cinematic conventions, the use of montage and low/high-angle shots to accentuate power relations between oppressing classes and the oppressed is a common feature shared by third cinema and Chinese revolutionary film. However, the use of close-up shots and camera movements motivated by individual psychology differentiates Chinese revolutionary film from third cinema and aligns it more closely with Hollywood entertainment cinema. Chinese revolutionary film retains the entertainment value of fiction film (a foremost concern of Hollywood cinema) to strengthen the educational impact of film as a dual form of entertainment and education. For a set of cinematic conventions of third cinema, see Teshome H. Gabriel, ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films’, in Questions of Third Cinema, eds. Jim Pines and Paul Willeman (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 46–7.

 75.Markus Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 66.

 76.See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1–42.

 77.See Victor Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

 78.Nornes, Cinema Babel, 66.

 79.Ibid., 69.

 80.Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 11.

1 Propaganda and Film Aesthetics

 1.Robert S. Elegant, ‘Red China’s Big Push’, Newsweek, September 30, 1957, 124.

 2.Ibid.

 3.Ibid.

 4.Ibid.

 5.Weihong Bao, ‘“A Vibrating Art in the Air”: Cinema, Ether, and Propaganda Film Theory in Wartime Chongqing’, New German Critique 41.2 (2014): 187.

 6.Matthew D. Johnson, ‘Propaganda Film’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10.1 (2016): 17.

 7.For more details about film censorship, see Qizhi (Wu Di), Mao Zedong shidai de renmin dianying 1949–1966 (People’s cinema in Mao Zedong’s era) (Taipei: Xiuwei zixun keji gufen youxian gongsi, 2010), 53–65.

 8.Johnson, ‘Propaganda Film’, 18.

 9.See Iwasaki Akira, ‘Senden, sendoushudan toshiteno eiga’ (Film as a tool of propaganda and provocation), in Eiga to shihon shugi (Tokyo: Oraisha, 1931), 97–124.

 10.Lu Xun, ‘Xiandai dianying yu youchan jieji’ (Modern film and the bourgeoisie), in Lu Xun quanji, vol. 4 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2005), 418–9.

 11.Ibid., 419.

 12.Ibid., 418.

 13.Eric Cazdyn, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 56–7.

 14.Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 65.

 15.Ibid.

 16.Liu Siping and Xing Zuwen, eds., Lu Xun yu dianying: zilao huibian (Lu Xun and film: collected essays) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1981), 176.

 17.Ibid., 183.

 18.Ibid., 188.

 19.Iwasaki, ‘Senden, sendoushudan toshiteno eiga’, 97–8.

 20.Lu, ‘Xiandai dianying yu youchan jieji’, 399.

 21.Iwasaki, ‘Senden, sendoushudan toshiteno eiga’, 103–4, 110, 117.

 22.Ibid., 102.

 23.Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings. Vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2002), 121.

 24.Quoted in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, Journal of Contemporary History 31.2 (1996): 237.

 25.Emily Braun, ‘Expressionism as Fascist Aesthetic’, Journal of Contemporary History 31.2 (1996): 275. Expressionist styles were also used by apolitical and even openly anti-fascist artists like Scipione or Renato Guttuso.

 26.George L. Mosse, ‘Fascist Aesthetics and Society: Some Considerations’, Journal of Contemporary History 31.2 (1996): 252.

 27.Lutz P. Koepnick, ‘Fascist Aesthetics Revisited’, Modernism/modernity 6.1 (1999): 55.

 28.Ibid.

 29.Timothy A. Brennan, ‘Postcolonial Studies Between the European Wars: An Intellectual History’, in Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, eds. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 191–3.

 30.Bao, ‘“A Vibrating Art in the Air”’, 183.

 31.Johnson, ‘Propaganda Film’, 18.

 32.Laikwan Pang, ‘Between Will and Negotiation: Film Policy in the First Three Years of the People’s Republic of China’, in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, ed. Carlos Rojas and Eileen Chow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 483.

 33.For a detailed study of the Campaign against The Life of Wu Xun, see Zhuoyi Wang, Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema 1951–1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 25–43.

 34.Pang, ‘Between Will and Negotiation’, 481.

 35.Yomi Braester, ‘A Genealogy of Cinephilia in the Maoist Period’, in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, eds. Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 110.

 36.Victor Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 6.

 37.Hu Qiaomu, ‘Wenyi gongzuozhe weishenme yao gaizao sixiang’ (Why should artists undergo ideological remoulding), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1949–1979, vol. 1, ed. Wu Di (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2006), 213.

 38.Ibid.

 39.Ibid., 212.

 40.Mao Zedong, ‘Zai wenxue yishujie kaizhan zhengfeng xuexi’ (Initiate a rectification campaign in literature and art), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:216.

 41.See Wang, Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 25–43.

 42.Xian Qun, ‘Guanyu “ke bu keyi xie xiao zichan jieji” wenti’ (On the question ‘can we write about petty bourgeoisie’), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:43–4.

 43.Lü Ban, ‘Wo renshi le wo de cuowu sixiang’ (I recognised my flawed ideology), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:222.

 44.Cai Chusheng, ‘Gaizao sixiang, wei guanche mao zhuxi wenyi luxian er fendou’ (Remould our thoughts to realise chairman Mao’s vision of literature and art), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:249.

 45.Ibid., 250.

 46.Ibid., 249.

 47.Shi Dongshan, ‘Renzhen xuexi, nuli gaizao ziji’ (Diligently remould myself through serious learning), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:259.

 48.Ibid., 261.

 49.Ibid., 262.

 50.Ibid., 263.

 51.Zheng Junli, ‘Wo bixu tongqie de gaizao ziji’ (I must resolutely remould myself), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:280.

 52.Ibid., 283.

 53.Mao Dun, ‘Zai fandongpai yabi xia douzheng he fazhan de wenyi’ (The struggling literature and art under the oppression of reactionaries), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:21.

 54.Ibid.

 55.Shi Dongshan, ‘Muqian dianying yishu de zuofa’ (Our current film method), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:37.

 56.Chen Bo’er, ‘Gushipian congwu daoyou de biandao gongzuo’ (The screenwriting and directing of fiction film from scratch), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:63.

 57.Ibid.

 58.Zhou Yang, ‘Zai quanguo diyijie dianying juzuo huiyi shang guanyu xuexi shehui zhuyi xianshi zhuyi wenti de baogao’ (A report on the learning of socialist realism at the First National Conference on Screenwriting), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:331.

 59.Ibid., 331–2.

 60.Ibid., 332–3. Zhou Yang’s suggestions were inspired by Soviet socialist realism, officially adopted in the PRC in 1953. Katerina Clark suggests that 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.’ According to Clark, Soviet fiction often situates protagonists in ‘the tension between spontaneity and consciousness’ as the protagonists learn to discipline themselves under the guidance of mentors on the path to transformation. See Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 257–9.

 61.Ibid., 334.

 62.Ibid., 338.

 63.Chen Huangmei, ‘Guanyu dianying juben chuangzuo wenti’ (On the question of screenwriting), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:381.

 64.Ibid.

 65.Ibid., 383.

 66.Ibid., 384.

 67.Ibid.

 68.Ibid., 386.

 69.Chen Huangmei, ‘Lun zhengmian renwu de suzao’ (On the creation of positive characters), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:438.

 70.Ibid., 431.

 71.Ibid., 440–1.

 72.Ibid., 439.

 73.Zhou Yang’s and Chen Huangmei’s perspectives on romance and love were inspired by Soviet socialist realism. Régine Robin suggests that Soviet socialist realist fictions typically have a ‘basic narrative paradigm’ and a ‘secondary narrative paradigm’: the former introduces ‘a goal in the public sphere and in collective life’, whereas the latter introduces ‘the characters’ private lives’, which ‘often leave something to be desired’. See Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 259.

 74.Cai Chusheng, ‘Dui 1954 nian dianying chuangzuo gongzuo de buchong fayan’ (A supplementary speech on film-making in 1954), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:405.

 75.Ibid., 411.

 76.Ibid., 410.

 77.Ibid.

 78.Ibid., 401.

 79.Chen Huangmei, ‘Yu “Zai jing bianju zuotanhui” shang de fayan’ (A speech from the discussion session on screenwriting in Beijing), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:365.

 80.Shi Dongshan, ‘Guanyu women de chuangzuo de jidian yijian’ (A few opinions on our creative work), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:393.

 81.Ibid., 395–6.

 82.Ibid., 397.

 83.Ibid.

 84.Hu Feng, ‘Zuowei cankao de jianyi’ (Suggestions for reference), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:453.

 85.Wenhui Daily Editorial, ‘Weishenme hao de guochanpian zheyang shao’ (Why are there few excellent domestic films), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:33. Wenhui Daily lists two exceptions: Liang Shan-bo and Zhu Ying-tai (Sang Hu and Huang Sha, 1954) and Reconnaissance across the Yangtze (Tang Xiaodan, 1954). The two films had attendance rates in Shanghai of 94 and 85 per cent, respectively. See Wenhui Daily Editorial, ‘Guochan yingpian shangzuolü qingkuang buhao, bu shou guanzhong huanying de shi ying yinqi dianying zhipianchang de zhongshi’ (Weak attendance rate and unpopularity of domestic film requires attention from film studios), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:33–4.

 86.Wenhui Daily Editorial, ‘Weishenme hao de guochanpian zheyang shao’, 32.

 87.Ibid. From 1949 to 1956, 155 fiction films were made. The seven-year output is equivalent to a year’s output in the PRC before 1949 and six months’ output in Hong Kong and Japan. See Qi Zhi (Wu Di), Mao Zedong shidai de renmin dianying, 1949–1966, 266.

 88.Wenhui Daily Editorial, ‘Guochan yingpian shangzuolü qingkuang buhao’, 34.

 89.Chen Liting, ‘Daoyan yinggai shi yingpian shengchan de zhongxin huanjie’ (Directors should be at the centre of film production), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:48.

 90.Li Xing, ‘Guanzhong xuyao kan shenmeyang de yingpian’ (What kind of film does the audience watch), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:75.

 91.Zhong Dianfei, ‘Dianying de luogu’ (Gongs and drums of cinema), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:78.

 92.Ibid., 78–9. Zhong’s view was denounced as city-centric by Yuan Wenshu as it took into account box office and revenue data from Shanghai only. See Yuan Wenshu, ‘Cong yingpian de piaofang jiazhi shuoqi’ (On box-office value), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:101.

 93.Tang Zhenchang, ‘Gaijin shengao zhidu’ (Improve the system for reviewing film scripts), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:36–7.

 94.Mu Bai, ‘Paishe guocheng zhong de “qinggui jielü”’ (Commandments during shooting), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:50.

 95.Lao She, ‘Jiujiu dianying’ (Save our cinema), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:58.

 96.Ibid.

 97.Shi Hui, ‘Zhongshi zhongguo dianying de chuantong’ (Value the tradition of Chinese cinema), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:60.

 98.Chen Liting, ‘Daoyan yinggai shi yingpian shengchan de zhongxin huanjie’, 48.

 99.Ibid.

 100.Ibid.

 101.Ibid., 49.

 102.Sun Yu, ‘Zunzhong dianying de yishu chuantong’ (Respect the aesthetic tradition of cinema), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:54.

 103.Wu Zuguang, ‘Dang “chenzao bie lingdao yishu gongzuo”’ (Party, please don’t lead artistic work), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:117.

 104.Shanggong Yunzhu, ‘Rang wushu maicang de zhubao fangguang’ (Let numerous hidden jewels shine), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:43.

 105.Ibid., 44.

 106.Le Yan, ‘Yanyuan de kunao’ (Actors’ frustrations), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:66.

 107.Shanggong, ‘Rang wushu maicang de zhubao fangguang’, 44.

 108.Han Fei, ‘Meiyou xiju ke yan’ (No comedies to perform), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:56. In his three-year stint in Hong Kong, Han Fei appeared in more than 20 films. However, Han appeared in only one film and did mostly dubbing in the four years after he moved to Shanghai.

 109.Sun Jinglu, ‘Zui zhongyao de shi guanxin ren’ (Caring for others is the most important), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:42.

 110.Shanggong, ‘Rang wushu maicang de zhubao fangguang’, 43.

 111.Sun Jinglu, ‘Zui zhongyao de shi guanxin ren’, 41.

 112.Le Yan, ‘Yanyuan de kunao’, 67.

 113.Ibid.

 114.‘Guanyu tigao yishu zhiliang de baogao (jie lu)’ (A report on raising aesthetic quality), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:271.

 115.Xia Yan, ‘Wei dianying shiye de jixu dayuejin er fendou’ (Let’s continue to strive for the Great Leap in film production), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:275–6.

 116.‘Wenhua bu guanyu cujin dianying faxing fangying gongzuo dayuejin de tongzhi’ (A notice by the Ministry of Culture on the promotion of the Great Leap in film distribution and projection), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:183.

 117.Ibid., 184.

 118.‘Wenhua bu guanyu gedi dianying zhipianchang de jianshe fangzhen xiang zhongyang de qingshi baogao’ (A report by the Ministry of Culture on the construction plan for film studios in various regions), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:258.

 119.Chen Huangmei, ‘Xiang geming de xianshi zhuyi he geming de langman zhuyi qianjin de kaishi’ (Marching towards revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:241.

 120.Yuan Wenshu, ‘Xin de shenghuo yaoqiu xin de biaoxian xingshi’ (New life requires a new expressive form), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:244.

 121.Ibid.

 122.For a detailed analysis of the documentary-style art film Rhapsody of the Shisanling Reservoir (Yu Yanfu, 1958), see Wang, Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 101–9.

 123.Cai Chusheng, ‘Shi lun jiluxing yishupian’ (On documentary-style art film), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:291.

 124.Chen, ‘Xiang geming de xianshi zhuyi he geming de langman zhuyi qianjin de kaishi’, 242.

 125.As Zhuoyi Wang suggests, some documentary-style art films have science fiction elements inspired by Soviet science fiction.

 126.Qi Zhi (Wu Di), Mao Zedong shidai de renmin dianying, 346.

 127.Cai, ‘Shi lun jiluxing yishupian’, 293.

 128.The GLF itself can be considered as another rectification campaign, during which almost half of the fiction films produced in 1957 were criticised due to their association with the Hundred Flowers Campaign.

 129.Xia Yan, ‘Zai taolun yishupian fang weixing zuotanhui shang de baogao’ (A report on launching satellites in fiction film), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:216.

 130.Ibid., 214–16.

 131.Ibid., 215.

 132.Ibid., 216.

 133.‘Wenhua bu guanyu gedi dianying zhipianchang de jianshe fangzhen xiang zhongyang de qingshi baogao’, 259.

 134.Zhou Enlai, ‘Zhou Enlai guanyu wenyi gongzuo liangtiaotui zoulu wenti de jianghua’ (Zhou Enlai’s speech on ‘walking on two legs’ in literature and art), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:268–9.

 135.Ibid., 269.

 136.‘Guanyu tigao yishu zhiliang de baogao (jie lu)’, 272.

 137.Ibid.

 138.Ibid.

 139.Ibid.

 140.Ibid., 273.

 141.Ibid.

 142.Ibid. Chapter Four discusses how age mattered in actors’ casting for heroic roles.

 143.Xia Yan, ‘Yiding yao tigao dianying yishu de zhiliang’ (We must raise the quality of film art), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1949–1979, 2:306.

 144.Ibid., 309.

 145.Xia Yan, ‘Wei dianying shiye de jixu dayuejin er fendou’, 276.

 146.Merle Goldman uses the term ‘the Blooming and Contending of 1961–2’ to describe the relative relaxation after the Great Leap Forward. The driving force behind relaxation was Liu Shaoqi, rather than Mao, who had been instrumental in initiating previous relaxations, especially the Hundred Flowers Campaign. See Goldman, ‘Party Policies Toward the Intellectuals: The Unique Blooming and Contending of 1961–2’, in Party Leadership and Revolutionary Power in China, ed. John Wilson Lewis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 268–303. Zhuoyi Wang calls the political relaxation after the GLF the ‘Second Hundred Flowers Period’. See Wang, Revolutionary Cycles, 128.

 147.Chen Huangmei, ‘Zai Beiying chuangzuo huiyi shang de fayan’ (A speech at the creative conference at the Beijing Film Studio), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:318.

 148.Chen Huangmei, ‘Zai Beiying, Bayi liangchang bufen lingdao tongzhi he chuangzuo ganbu zuotanhui shang de jianghua’ (Remarks from a discussion session with leaders and cadres at the Beijing Film Studio and the August First Studio), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:322–4.

 149.Ibid., 322.

 150.Ibid., 329.

 151.Ibid., 330.

 152.Ibid., 334.

 153.Ibid.

 154.Ibid.

 155.Ibid., 335.

 156.The proposals in the drafted documents were never executed due to another rectification campaign in 1963.

 157.Zhou Enlai, ‘Zai wenyi gongzuo zuotanhui he gushipian chuangzuo huiyi shang de jianghua’ (A speech at the National Discussion Plenum on Artistic Work and the National Conference on Fiction Film), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:352.

 158.Ibid.

 159.Zhou Yang, ‘Zai quanguo gushipian chuangzuo huiyi shang de fayan’ (A speech at the National Conference on Fiction Film), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:362.

 160.Cai Chusheng, ‘Mantan sihao – zai yici zuotanhui shangde fayan’ (The four excellences – a speech in a discussion session), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:377.

 161.Ibid.

 162.Zhou Yang, ‘Zai quanguo gushipian chuangzuo huiyi shang de fayan’, 362.

 163.Wang, Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 132.

 164.See Cai Xiang, Revolution and its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966, trans. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 357–402.

2 Literature on Screen: Recasting Classical Hollywood Narration in Family Melodrama

 1.Although This Life of Mine and The New Year’s Sacrifice do not feature revolution and hardly evoke heroism, these two films are chosen for analysis because they played an important role in the evolution of screenwriting. As a revolutionary family melodrama, Revolutionary Family employed narrative and cinematic devices that overcame traces of negativity in May Fourth and pre-1949 literature like This Life of Mine and ‘The New Year’s Sacrifice’.

 2.Emily Yueh-yu Yeh, ‘Wenyi and the Branding of Early Chinese Film’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6.1 (2012): 70, 72. The term ‘Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School’ was used pejoratively in the late 1910s to refer to the ‘classical-style love stories of a small, but very widely read, group of authors who made liberal use of the traditional symbols of mandarin ducks and butterflies for pairs of lovers.’ See Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Twentieth Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 7.

 3.Ibid., 65.

 4.Xia Yan (Shen Naixi) (1900–95), whose career spanned almost the entire twentieth century, was one of the pioneering screenwriters of Chinese film. Xia Yan joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1927 and was one of the leaders of the League of Left-Wing Writers when it formed in 1930. He translated Maksim Gorky’s novel Mother, as well as Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The Film Director and Film Material in collaboration with Zheng Boqi (see Chapter Three). After 1932 Xia Yan became involved in film circles and adapted several screenplays such as Mao Dun’s Spring Silkworms (Chuncan). In 1955 Xia Yan was appointed Vice-Minister of Culture, but was removed from the post ten years later in 1965. He was subjected to harsh criticism and spent more than eight years in prison during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Xia Yan was rehabilitated in 1978 and his complete works were anthologised and published in 2005.

 5.Xia Yan, Xie dianying juben de jige wenti (A few questions about screenwriting) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1978), 1–2.

 6.Ibid., 7.

 7.Ibid., 8.

 8.Ibid., 4.

 9.David Bordwell, ‘Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures’, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 22.

 10.Ibid., 19.

 11.Ibid., 26–7.

 12.Ibid., 29.

 13.Xia Yan, Xie dianying juben de jige wenti, 2–3.

 14.Ibid., 35.

 15.Ibid., 9.

 16.Ibid., 12.

 17.Ibid.

 18.Ibid., 36.

 19.See Victor Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015) for his discussion of the term ‘bizen’ (approaching reality) in Chinese film discourse in the Republican era.

 20.Xia Yan, Xie dianying juben de jige wenti, 37.

 21.Ibid., 54.

 22.Ibid., 58.

 23.Ibid., 44.

 24.Sang Hu (Li Peilin) (1916–2004), one of the most prolific directors in Chinese film history, adapted and directed over 30 films in various genres throughout his career. Sang Hu pioneered the three ‘firsts’ in Chinese cinema: the first colour opera film Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (1954), the first colour narrative film The New Year’s Sacrifice (1956), and the first three-dimensional narrative film (liti gushipian) Adventures of the Magician (1962). A fan of Peking opera as well as Hollywood film, Sang Hu established himself in the film circle in 1941 with his first screenplay Spirit and Flesh (Ling yu rou) under the guidance of Zhu Shilin. Sang Hu also collaborated with Zhang Ailing and directed Long Live the Wife (1947), and continued to make films such as Midnight (1981) after the Cultural Revolution.

 25.Xia Yan, ‘Zatan gaibian’ (On adaptation), in Zhufu: cong xiaoshuo dao dianying (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1959), 119; Sang Hu, Sang Hu daoyan wencun (Writings of director Sang Hu) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2007), 238.

 26.Jin Cao, ‘Dianying juben hao, dianying ye hao: luetan yingpian zhufu jiqi juben’ (The film script is good, the film is good too: a few words on The New Year’s Sacrifice and its script), Renmin Ribao, 22 October, 1956.

 27.Yuan Xuefen (1922–2011), a renowned yueju actress, played an important role in yueju reform in the 1940s. When the yueju Xianglin Sao was first made into a film in 1948, film production was delayed significantly since neither the director nor the actors had any experience in film studio. It was said that even though over 20,000 feet of negatives – enough for more than two films – were consumed in four months, the film was still not finished. Additional filming was needed since there was no way to edit what had already been filmed. See ‘Xianglin Sao manmanliu’ (The slow-moving Xianglin Sao), Qingchun dianying 14 (1948): no pagination. For more details about Nan Wei’s film script, see Harry Kuoshu, Lightness of Being in China: Adaptation and Discursive Figuration in Cinema and Theater (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 51–70.

 28.Harry Kuoshu argues that the influence of the 1956 film adaptation was so strong that ‘the later Shaoxing opera versions of Xianglin Sao (1956, 1962) were really its reiterations rather than the revisions of Nan Wei’s original adaptation in the same opera form.’ See Kuoshu, Lightness of Being in China, 56.

 29.Xia Yan, ‘Zatan gaibian’, 119.

 30.Theodore Huters, ‘Ideologies of Realism in Modern China: The Hard Imperatives of Imported Theory’, in Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China, eds. Kang Liu and Xiaobing Tang (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 154.

 31.Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

 32.Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 91.

 33.David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 10.

 34.Lu Hsun, ‘The New Year’s Sacrifice’, in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 143.

 35.Ibid., 128 (with my modified translation).

 36.Realism, according to Erich Auerbach, creates multiple consciousnesses and gives voices to the low. Edward Said conceives realism as the third seminal point of Western literary history, succeeding the first and second seminal points when Christianity shatters the classical balance between high and low, after which reality is represented as human in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. See Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953).

 37.Marston Anderson, ‘The Morality of Form: Lu Xun and the Modern Chinese Short Story’, in Lu Xun and His Legacy, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 41.

 38.Lu Hsun, ‘The New Year’s Sacrifice’, 140.

 39.Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 45.

 40.Ibid., 44.

 41.Huters, ‘Ideologies of Realism in Modern China’, 152.

 42.Charles Laughlin notes that the 1920s witnessed a passage from ‘literary revolution’ to ‘revolutionary literature’, which involved ‘reconceptualizing literature as no longer the end of a process of revolutionary change but a means to, an instrument of, social revolution.’ See Laughlin, ‘The Debate on Revolutionary Literature’, in The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Kirk Denton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 159.

 43.Mao Zedong, ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’, in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk Denton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 479–80.

 44.Ibid., 470, 474.

 45.Socialist realism was adopted as an official doctrine at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934. According to Lorenz Bichler, the use of the term ‘socialist realism’ in China can be divided into three phases (1) From the 1930s to 1953, socialist realism was considered a strictly Soviet phenomenon. In his talks in Yan’an, Mao Zedong used the term ‘proletarian realism’ instead (2) Beginning in 1953, the term ‘socialist realism’ was used in Chinese discourse as a Chinese phenomenon. Zhou Enlai, at the Second Congress of Representatives of Literary and Art Workers, said that ‘“the realism of socialism” was from now on to be the highest principle for all works in literature and the arts.’ (3) After Mao’s proclamation of the ‘combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’ in 1958, the use of the term ‘socialist realism’ was avoided in Chinese discourse. See Lorenz Bichler, ‘Coming to Terms with a Term’, in In the Party Spirit: Socialist Realism and Literary Practice in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China, eds. Hilary Chung, et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 31–6. For more information on the historical relationship between ‘socialist realism’ and the ‘combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’, see Lan Yang, ‘“Socialist Realism” versus “Revolutionary Realism Plus Revolutionary Romanticism”’, in In the Party Spirit, 88–105.

 46.Xia Yan, ‘Zatan gaibian’, 119.

 47.Ibid., 115.

 48.Ibid., 117.

 49.Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 110.

 50.Smith, Contingencies of Value, 50.

 51.Sang Hu, ‘Zhufu daoyan chanshu’ (A few words from the director of The New Year’s Sacrifice), in Zhufu: cong xiaoshuo dao dianying, 129; Jin Cao, ‘Dianying juben hao, dianying ye hao’.

 52.Li Chenglie, ‘Tan yingpian zhufu de yishu chengjiu’ (On the artistic accomplishments of The New Year’s Sacrifice), in Zhufu: cong xiaoshuo dao dianying, 151.

 53.Sang Hu, ‘Zhufu daoyan chanshu’, 129.

 54.See Sang Hu, Sang Hu daoyan wencun, 239. Sang Hu recalled that at the time, he was quite proud of the tight editing of this specific sequence. However, when he watched the film once again in 1978, Sang Hu felt uncomfortable watching the sequence, which he described as ‘artificial’. The ‘artificiality’, conceived retrospectively by the director (and possibly by us), emerges not so much from the director’s immature editing skills, but from the different expectations of how much romantic enticement is permissible on screen in different ideological contexts. In an era when Hollywood movies were denounced, the Hollywood convention of portraying romantic love was on the contrary creatively appropriated.

 55.Xiao Liu, ‘Red Detachment of Women: Revolutionary Melodrama and Alternative Socialist Imaginations’, differences 26.3 (2015): 122.

 56.Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 12.

 57.Ibid., 38.

 58.Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 5.

 59.Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 50.

 60.Mao, ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art’, 470.

 61.Bai Yang, Wo de yingju shengya (My life in screen acting) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), 18.

 62.Sang Hu, Sang Hu daoyan wencun, 160.

 63.Bai Yang, Wo de yingju shengya, 19–20.

 64.Yuan Xuefen, Qiusuo rensheng yishu de zhendi (In search for the truth of art in life) (Shanghai: Shanghai yishu chubanshe, 2002), 107.

 65.Xia Yan, ‘Zatan gaibian’, 120.

 66.Lin Zhihao. ‘Guanyu Xianglin Sao kan menlan de xijie’ (Details about the threshold scene), in Zhufu: cong xiaoshuo dao dianying, 160.

 67.Xia Yan, ‘Zatan gaibian’, 121; Lu Hsun, ‘The New Year’s Sacrifice’, 135 (with my modified translation).

 68.Li Chenglie, ‘Tan yingpian zhufu de yishu chengjiu’, 150.

 69.Xia Yan, ‘Zatan gaibian’, 120–1.

 70.Bai Yang, Wo de yingju shengya, 12.

 71.Krista Van Fleit Hang, Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949–1966) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 18.

 72.Xiao Liu, ‘Red Detachment of Women’, 126.

 73.Ibid., 125.

 74.Stephen Teo suggests that ‘the style and content of The Lin Family Shop is redolent of the social melodramas of the 1930s – the so-called “progressive” films produced between 1932 and 1937 in Shanghai.’ The film tells the story of the protagonist Mr. Lin (the small fish), who struggles to maintain his business as he delays payment to his creditors (the big fish) again and again. A melodramatic turning point of the narrative comes when the corrupted official lays his eyes on Mr. Lin’s daughter as a potential concubine. Because Mr. Lin refuses to marry his daughter off as a concubine, his safety and business are threatened. The film ends with the culmination of class conflict: Mr. Lin and his daughter leave town, leaving a widow (the shrimp) in desperation. See Teo, ‘The Lin Family Shop: A Chinese Melodrama of Capitalist Existentialism’, senses of cinema 28 (2003), accessed December 15, 2017, http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/cteq/lin_family_shop.

 75.See Yang, ‘“Socialist Realism” versus “Revolutionary Realism Plus Revolutionary Romanticism”’, 91. Mao’s notion of ‘revolutionary realism’ is distinctive from Soviet socialist realism. Although ‘socialist realism’ was adopted as a Chinese phenomenon from 1953 to 1956, it was re-evaluated worldwide due to de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union in 1956.

 76.As will be discussed in Chapter Four, the gendered representation of women and the Party that constitutes revolutionary family finds echoes in Song of Youth and The Red Detachment of Women.

 77.Mark Shiel, Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 6.

3 Translating Soviet Montage

 1.Weihong Bao, ‘The Politics of Remediation: Mise-en-scène and the Subjunctive Body in Chinese Opera Film’, The Opera Quarterly 26.2–3 (2010): 256.

 2.See Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 59–62; Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 124.

 3.Jason McGrath, ‘Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China’, World Picture 3 (2009), accessed December 17, 2017, http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_3/McGrath.html.

 4.Although there has been effort to highlight the innovative use of montage in Chinese films such as The New Woman (Cai Chusheng, 1934), Street Angel (Yuan Muzhi, 1937) and Stage Sisters (Xie Jin, 1965), discussion of montage in Chinese cinema tends to be brief and deserves more in-depth study, especially with regard to how and why Soviet montage was translated and adapted by Chinese film-makers. See Chris Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution After the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004), 43–50; Robert Chi, ‘The Red Detachment of Women: Resenting, Regendering, Remembering’, in Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris Berry (New York: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 192; Ning Ma, ‘The Textual and Critical Difference of Being Radical: Reconstructing Chinese Leftist Films of the 1930s’, Wide Angle 11.2 (1989): 24–5; Laikwan Pang, Building a New Cinema in China: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 144–50; Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 249–84.

 5.The French verb monter means ‘to mount’ or ‘to assemble’. As a film term, montage means ‘editing’ in the general sense; i.e., how shots are put together to make up a film.

 6.Cheng Bugao, Yingtan yijiu (Memories of the film world) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1983), 161.

 7.Hong Shen, Dianying shuyu cidian (A dictionary of film terms) (Shanghai: Tianma shudian, 1935), 264.

 8.See Xia Yan, ‘Dianying daoyan lun’ (On film director), Xia Yan quanji: yizhu, vol. 12 (Zhejiang: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 2005), 753–97. Pudovkin’s The Film Director and Film Material (1926) was translated into German in 1928 and into English by Ivor Montagu in 1929. Pudovkin was the first of the Soviet directors to have his writings translated into English, over a decade before Jay Leyda translated Sergei Eisenstein’s The Film Sense. For more details about Pudovkin as a film-maker and a theorist, see Vsevolod Pudovkin, ‘The Film Script (The Theory of the Script) [1926]’, Selected Essays, trans. Richard Taylor and Evgeni Filippov, ed. Richard Taylor (London: Seagull Books, 2006), 32–64.

 9.Lydia Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 110.

 10.Various Soviet films and newsreels were introduced into China (especially Harbin) before the public screening of Storm Over Asia in 1931. For example, Battleship Potemkin (Броненосец Потемкин) (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) was the first Soviet feature film screened in Shanghai in 1925. The semi-private screening was organised by the Soviet embassy as an invitation for the cultural circle in Nanguoshe in Shanghai.

 11.Xia Yan, Xia Yan quanji: dianying pinglun (Selected works of Xia Yan: film criticism), vol. 6 (Zhejiang: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 2005), 192.

 12.See Shen Fengwei, ‘Tan “mengtaiqi”’ (On ‘montage’), Xinyingtan 4 (1943): 18–19; Shen Fengwei, ‘Zaitan “mengtaiqi”’ (On ‘montage’ again), Xinyingtan 6 (1943): 19.

 13.Shen, ‘Tan “mengtaiqi”’, 18.

 14.Montage was also associated with photography, but the term ‘photomontage’ was not introduced until after World War I by the German dadaists (though the method existed as early as the 1860s). The Soviet director Lev Kuleshov was the first person to use the term ‘montage’ in relation to film. In 1916, Kuleshov announced that ‘the fundamental source of cinematic impact upon the viewer [...] is montage, that is, the alternation of shots.’ See Lev Kuleshov, ‘Art of the Cinema’, Kuleshov on Film, ed. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 47–8. In the late 1910s, Kuleshov carried out a series of experiments (known as the ‘Kuleshov experiments’) and concluded: ‘The basic strength of cinema lies in montage, because with montage it becomes possible both to break down and to reconstruct and ultimately to remake the material.’ Kuleshov was a teacher and mentor to both Pudovkin and Eisenstein. See Yuri Tsivian, ‘The Rediscovery of a Kuleshov Experiment: A Dossier’, Film History 8.3 (1996): 358.

 15.Amy Sargeant, Vsevolod Pudovkin: Classic Films of the Soviet Avant-Garde (New York: I.B.Tauris Publishers, 2001), xiv–xxi.

 16.The biggest disagreement between Pudovkin and Eisenstein lies in ‘montage as series’ (сцепление) versus ‘montage as collision’ (столкновение). The former refers to the unrolling of an event through a series of fragments, whereas the latter refers to the collision of shots that gives rise to an abstract idea. Eisenstein writes: ‘A graduate of the Kuleshov school, he [Pudovkin] zealously defends the concept of montage as a series of fragments (сцепления кусков). In a chain. ‘Bricks’. Bricks that expound an idea serially. I opposed him with my view of montage as a collision (столкновение), my view that the collision of two factors gives rise to an idea.’ See Eisenstein, ‘Beyond the Shot’, Selected Works, vol. 1, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988), 144. Pudovkin speaks of the forceful direction of the spectators, whereas Eisenstein speaks of ‘a series of blows to the [audience’s] consciousness and emotions’. See Sargeant, Vsevolod Pudovkin, 174.

 17.Vsevolod Pudovkin, ‘The Film Script (The Theory of the Script) [1926]’, Selected Essays, trans. Richard Taylor and Evgeni Filippov, ed. Richard Taylor (London: Seagull Books, 2006), 32–64.

 18.Pudovkin, ‘The Film Script (The Theory of the Script)’, 63.

 19.Ibid.

 20.Shen, ‘Zaitan “mengtaiqi”’, 19.

 21.Given Pudovkin’s appraisal and refinement of Griffith’s film method, one could say that, stylistically, Pudovkin was no revolutionary at all. Amy Sargeant suggests that Pudovkin’s chief purpose may have been ‘no more than to codify and lend testimony to techniques which he judged had proved themselves already efficacious elsewhere’. In this sense, Chinese film-makers’ preference for the more pragmatic Pudovkin over the esoteric Eisenstein is not surprising. See Sargeant, Vsevolod Pudovkin, xxv.

 22.While Chinese translators in the 1930s were interested in Soviet montage as a formal experiment in the strict sense, various films from the 1930s onwards had brief examples of Soviet-style montage as well as more numerous examples of Hollywood-style montage sequences (which should not be confused with Soviet montage). A Hollywood-style montage sequence is a segment of film that condenses a passage of time into a succession of images connected by dissolves, fades, wipes or superimpositions.

 23.In suggesting that montage is often mobilised for political critique by left-wing film-makers, I do not mean that montage as a cinematic technique is inherently ideological. In fact, the same cinematic technique is used in films such as Little Angel (Wu Yonggang, 1935) and Song of China (Fei Mu, 1935) to promote the Nationalist official ideology and to serve a different political objective. Nonetheless, as argued earlier in this chapter, the revolutionary allure of Soviet montage held an attraction for left-wing film-makers such as Cai Chusheng, who experimented with the novel technique.

 24.The revolutionary song ‘Huangpu River’ was censored for its anti-imperialist lyrics on its original release in 1935. While it is impossible to retrieve original audience reactions to the sound effects of the film, I suggest that the director’s intention to include the song in the montage sequence (on both the narrative and formal level) was a creative attempt to strengthen the emotional and political effects of montage as Shanghai cinema transitioned to the sound era. Beginning in 1933, songs from films such as Twin Sisters (Zheng Zhengqiu, 1933) and Song of the Fisherman (Cai Chusheng, 1934) became hugely popular among Chinese audiences.

 25.Shen, ‘Zaitan “mengtaiqi”’, 19.

 26.Shen, ‘Tan “mengtaiqi”’, 19.

 27.Shen, ‘Zaitan “mengtaiqi”’, 19.

 28.Bao, ‘The Politics of Remediation’, 268.

 29.Zhou Yang, China’s New Literature and Art (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1954), 87.

 30.See Sergei Eisenstein, Dianying yishu sijiang (The film sense), trans. Qi Zhou (Beijing: Shidai chubanshe, 1953).

 31.Bao suggests that the notion of a ‘cinematic means of expression’ emerges as the idea gained currency in the 1950s and early 1960s: ‘Editing, particularly montage (mengtaiqi) and decoupage (jingtou fenqie and jingtou zujie), were considered key modes of cinematic expression.’ For a more detailed discussion of the opera film debates that revolved around the tensions between cinematic and operatic means of expression, see Bao, ‘The Politics of Remediation’, 265.

 32.See Sergei Eisenstein, Aisensitan lunwen xuanji (Selected writings of Sergei Eisenstein) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1962); Vsevolod Pudovkin, Puduofujin lunwen xuanji (Selected writings of Vsevolod Pudovkin) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1962).

 33.Xia Yan, Xie dianying juben de jige wenti (A few questions about screenwriting) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1978), 66.

 34.Shi Dongshan, Dianying yishu zai biaoxian xingshi shang de jige tedian (Several characteristics of the cinematic means of expression) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1958), 69.

 35.Zhang Junxiang, Guanyu dianying de teshu biaoxian shouduan (On the specific means of cinematic expression) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1959), 12.

 36.Ibid.

 37.Sergei Eisenstein, Dianying yishu sijiang, 261–2.

 38.Shi Dongshan, ‘Bi “mengtaiqi” de hunluan jieshi’ (Against confusing explanations of ‘montage’), in Ershi shiji zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan, vol. 1, ed. Luo Yijun (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2003), 348.

 39.Ibid., 348–9.

 40.Shi Dongshan, Dianying yishu zai biaoxian xingshi shang de jige tedian, 68–9.

 41.Shi Dongshan, ‘Bi “mengtaiqi” de hunluan jieshi’, 349.

 42.Xia Yan, Xie dianying juben de jige wenti, 62.

 43.Ibid., 67. Xia Yan emphasised narrative logic and diegetic contiguity, that is, Pudovkin’s ‘montage as series’, as opposed to Eisenstein’s ‘montage as collision’.

 44.Ibid., 61.

 45.Ji Zhifeng, Mengtaiqi jiqiao qiantan (A brief introduction to montage techniques) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1962), 2.

 46.Shi Dongshan, ‘Bi “mengtaiqi” de hunluan jieshi’, 348.

 47.Cheng Bugao, Yingtan yijiu, 141.

 48.Shen, ‘Zaitan “mengtaiqi”’, 18.

 49.Zhang Junxiang, Guanyu dianying de teshu biaoxian shouduan, 4.

 50.Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 58.

 51.David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 249.

 52.McGrath, ‘Communists Have More Fun’, no pagination.

 53.David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 249.

 54.Zhang Junxiang, Guanyu dianying de teshu biaoxian shouduan, 21.

 55.Ibid., 19.

 56.Stephanie Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces, 62.

 57.Ibid., 60, 62.

 58.Ibid., 59.

 59.Ji Zhifeng, Mengtaiqi jiqiao qiantan, 39.

 60.See Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 124; McGrath, ‘Communists Have More Fun’, no pagination.

 61.Jason McGrath suggests: ‘the spectatorial desire to see the potential romance consummated is redirected to the didactic function of a cinema explicitly aimed at serving the Communist revolution.’ For more details on the sublimation process in terms of film narrative technique, see McGrath, ‘Communists Have More Fun’.

 62.Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Sergei Eisenstein: The Montage of Attractions’, in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939, trans. Richard Taylor, eds. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), 88.

 63.Tina Mai Chen, ‘International Film Circuits and Global Imaginaries in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–57’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3.2 (2009): 159.

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

 1.See Screen, May 1962.

 2.See Kinema Junpo 315 (July 1962); Kinema Junpo 325 (November 1962).

 3.See Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 140.

 4.Dong Yang, ‘Shei zhizao le “22 da mingxing”’ (Who made the 22 big stars), Wenshi cankao 65 (2012): 29.

 5.Zhou Yang, ‘Zai quanguo gushipian chuangzuo huiyi shang de fayan’ (A speech at the National Conference on Fiction Film), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 2:362.

 6.Liu Shu, Yongheng de xingchen: Xinzhongguo 22 da dianying mingxing huazhuan (shang) (Eternal stars: New China’s 22 big movie stars album, vol. 1) (Beijing: Shijie zhishi chubanshe, 2009), 29. The 22 Soviet stars included: Boris Fyodorovich Andreyev, Aleksey Vladimirovich Batalov, Sergei Fedorovich Bondarchuk, Aleksandr Borisov, Nikolay Konstantinovich Cherkasov, Boris Petrovich Chirkov, Vladlen Semyonovich Davydov, Vladimir Vasilievich Druzhnikov, Lyudmila Markovna Gurchenko, Sergei Safonovich Gurzo, Izolda Vasilyevna Izvitskaya, Pavel Petrovich Kadochnikov, Nikolai Afanasyevich Kryuchkov, Marina Alekseyevna Ladynina, Vasily Semyonovich Lanovoy, Tamara Fyodorovna Makarova, Vera Petrovna Maretskaya, Lyubov Petrovna Orlova, Lidiya Nikolayevna Smirnova, Oleg Aleksandrovich Strizhenov, Vyacheslav Vasilyevich Tikhonov and Georgi Aleksandrovich Yumatov.

 7.Ibid., 31.

 8.Ibid.

 9.Ibid., 34. Side-by-side advertising of Chinese and Soviet films was a common practice in the 1950s. For example, the Chinese revolutionary film Zhao Yiman (Sha Meng, 1950) was circulated in China alongside the Stalinist classic Zoya (Lev Arnshtam, 1944) in the early 1950s and on its re-release in the 1960s. For a discussion of socialist and international star culture and how Soviet film stars were received, discussed and debated in China in the 1950s and 1960s, see Tina Mai Chen, ‘Socialism, Aestheticized Bodies, and International Circuits of Gender: Soviet Female Film Stars in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1969’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 18.2 (2007): 53–80.

 10.Ibid.

 11.The 22 Big Stars included: Cui Wei, Xie Tian, Chen Qiang, Zhang Ping, Yu Lan and Xie Fang from the Beijing Film Studio; Zhao Dan, Bai Yang, Zhang Ruifang, Shanggong Yunzhu, Qin Yi, Wang Danfeng and Sun Daolin from the Shanghai Film Studio; Li Yalin, Zhang Yuan, Pang Xueqin and Jin Di from the Changchun Film Studio; Tian Hua, Wang Xingang and Wang Xiaotang from the August First Film Studio; and Zhu Xijuan from the Shanghai Theatre Academy.

 12.Liu Shu, Yongheng de xingchen: Xinzhongguo 22 da dianying mingxing huazhuan (shang), 43–4.

 13.Ibid., 44.

 14.DeCordova, Picture Personalities, 92.

 15.Ibid., 112–3.

 16.Ibid., 140.

 17.Ibid., 143.

 18.Michael G. Chang, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s–1930s’, in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 129.

 19.Ibid., 136.

 20.Gaylyn Studlar, Precocious Charm: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 2, 6.

 21.Hu Die was internationally well known for her dual performance in Twin Sisters (Zheng Zhengqiu, 1933). She attended the Moscow International Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival in 1935.

 22.Jason McGrath, ‘Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema’, The Opera Quarterly 26.2–3 (2010): 356–7.

 23.Ibid., 359.

 24.See Joshua Goldstein, ‘From Teahouse to Playhouse: Theaters as Social Texts in Early-Twentieth-Century China’, The Journal of Asian Studies 62.3 (2003): 753–79.

 25.Feng Xizui, ‘Tan neixin biaoyan’ (On interior performance), in Zhongguo wusheng dianying, ed. Dai Xiaolan (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), 914.

 26.See Cheng Bugao, ‘Gelifeisi chenggongshi 1–5’ (Short biography of D. W. Griffith), Dianying zazhi 1.1–1.5 (1924).

 27.Michael G. Chang, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful’, 154.

 28.See Kristine Harris, ‘The New Woman Incident: Cinema, Scandal, and Spectacle in 1935 Shanghai’, in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Lu (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 277–302.

 29.For details about Zheng Junli’s career, see Paul G. Pickowicz, ‘Zheng Junli, Complicity and the Cultural History of Socialist China, 1949–1976’, The China Quarterly 188 (2006): 1048–69; Zheng Junli, Zheng Junli quanji (The collected works of Zheng Junli), 8 vols, ed. Li Zhen (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 2016).

 30.See Richard Boleslavsky, Acting: The First Six Lessons (New York: Theatre Arts Inc., 1933); Richard Boleslavsky, Yanji liujiang (Six lessons on acting), trans. Zheng Junli (Hong Kong: Yingyi chubanshe, 1963).

 31.See Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1965); Constantin Stanislavski, Yanyuan ziwo xiuyang (An actor’s self-cultivation), trans. Zheng Junli and Zhang Min (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1950). Zheng Junli’s translation of Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares is based on Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood’s English translation, which was published in 1936, before publication of the Russian original. For more information on copyrights and the discrepancies between Hapgood’s translation and Stanislavski’s original, see Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004).

 32.See Zheng Junli, Juese de dansheng (The birth of a role) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1981).

 33.In 1963 the China Film Press published the first four volumes of The Collected Works of Stanislavski (translated from the Russian original), which include An Actor Prepares (Parts I and II) and Creating a Role. See Constantin Stanislavski, Sitannisilafusiji quan ji (The collected works of Stanislavski), 4 vols, ed. Shi Mindu and Zheng Xuelai (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1958–63).

 34.Yomi Braester, ‘A Genealogy of Cinephilia in the Maoist Period’, in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, eds. Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 101.

 35.Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), 129.

 36.Tina Mai Chen suggests that, ‘given the proclivity of Chinese reformers and revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century to symbolize oppressed social groups through the female body, the oppression of women under “feudalism”, Confucianism and imperialism marked women as ideal beneficiaries of the new order.’ See Tina Mai Chen, ‘Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women’s Agency in 1950s China’, Gender & History 15.2 (2003): 289.

 37.‘Tingting yanyuan de xindihua’ (Listen to actors), Zhongguo dianying 6 (1957): 13.

 38.Ibid.

 39.Cheng Yin, ‘Tantan xuanze yanyuan de wenti’ (On casting an actor), Zhongguo dianying 5 (1957): 40.

 40.See Liu Shu, Yongheng de xingchen: Xinzhongguo 22 da dianying mingxing huazhuan (shang), 175–8.

 41.‘Qingchun zhi ge de biaoyan yishu zuotanhui’ (A discussion session on the performing arts of Song of Youth), in Qingchun zhi ge: cong xiaoshuo dao dianying (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1962), 382.

 42.Ibid.

 43.Xie Fang, Yinmu neiwai (On and off screen) (Beijing: Shijie zhishi chubanshe, 1986), 31.

 44.Xie Jin, ‘Hongse niangzijun daoyan chuangzuo zaji’ (Notes on the director’s creation of The Red Detachment of Women), in Hongse niangzijun: cong juben dao yingpian (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1962), 283.

 45.Liang Xin, ‘Hongse niangzijun (dianying wenxue juben)’ (The Red Detachment of Women [cinematic literary script]), in Hongse niangzijun: cong juben dao yingpian, 71.

 46.Xie Jin, ‘Hongse niangzijun (fen jingtou juben)’ (The Red Detachment of Women [shooting script]), in Hongse niangzijun: cong juben dao yingpian, 193.

 47.Xie Jin, ‘Hongse niangzijun daoyan chuangzuo zaji’, 282.

 48.Krista Van Fleit Hang, ‘Zhong Xinghuo: communist film worker’, in Chinese Film Stars, eds. Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang (New York: Routledge, 2010), 113.

 49.Liu Shu, Yongheng de xingchen: Xinzhongguo 22 da dianying mingxing huazhuan (xia), 665.

 50.Liu Shu, Yongheng de xingchen: Xinzhongguo 22 da dianying mingxing huazhuan (shang), 361.

 51.Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1965), 37, 193.

 52.Huang Zuolin, Wo yu xieyi xijuguan (The theatre aesthetic of xieyi and I) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1990), 419.

 53.Shen Shan, ‘Yanyuan yao xiang shenghuo taojiao’ (Actors should learn from life), Dazhong dianying 7 (1961): 21.

 54.Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1965), 112.

 55.Ibid., 193.

 56.Ibid., 37.

 57.Ibid., 86.

 58.Ibid., 179.

 59.Ibid., 60.

 60.Ibid., 252.

 61.Xiaoning Lu, ‘Zhang Ruifang: Modelling the Socialist Red Star’, in Chinese Film Stars, 105.

 62.Zhang Ruifang, ‘Banyan Li Shuangshuang de jidian tihui’ (Thoughts on playing Li Shuangshuang), Dianying yishu 2 (1963): 28.

 63.Zhu Xijuan, ‘Shenghuo shi chuangzuo de yuanquan’ (Life is the fountain of creation), in Hongse niangzijun: cong juben dao yingpian, 302.

 64.Ibid., 303.

 65.Cheng Yin, ‘Daoyan zaji’ (Notes of a director), Zhongguo dianying 11 (1957): 100.

 66.Laikwan Pang, The Art of Cloning: Creative Production During China’s Cultural Revolution (New York: Verso, 2017), 84.

 67.Ibid.

 68.Zhao Ziyue, ‘Zenyang zuoge haoyanyuan’ (How to be a good actor), Dianying chuangzuo 5 (1961): 38.

 69.Xiaoning Lu, ‘Zhang Ruifang: Modelling the Socialist Red Star’, 104.

 70.Liang Xin, ‘Cong shenghuo dao chuangzuo: Wu Qionghua xingxiang de suzao jingguo’ (From life to creation: the creative process of Wu Qionghua’s image), in Hongse niangzijun: cong juben dao yingpian, 215.

 71.Ibid., 212; Zhu Xijuan, ‘Shenghuo shi chuangzuo de yuanquan’, 301.

 72.Ibid., 301.

 73.Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 36.

 74.David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 73.

 75.Ibid., 74.

 76.Zhu Jing, ‘Xiaoxiang sheying chutan’ (Exploring portrait photography), Dianying yishu 4 (1963): 47.

 77.Ibid., 41.

 78.An ‘empty shot’ is a shot that depicts only scenery, functioning as a pause succeeding a cinematic climax. See Chapter Three for a more detailed analysis of ‘empty shots’ as a component of montage.

 79.Zhu Jing, ‘Xiaoxiang sheying chutan’, 47.

 80.During the Liang Dynasty, a renowned painter named Zhang Sengyao was commissioned by the emperor to paint four dragons on the walls of a temple. However, Zhang neglected to paint the eyes. He said: ‘If I were to paint the eyes, the dragons will have flown away’. The bystanders thought: ‘How ridiculous!’ Zhang then painted a pair of eyes on one of the dragons. Within seconds, thunder struck through the walls. A dragon soared into the sky. Those without painted eyes remained on the wall.

 81.Zhu Jing, ‘Xiaoxiang sheying chutan’, 46.

 82.Patrick Keating, Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 5.

 83.Ibid., 128.

 84.Ibid., 46.

 85.Ibid., 44.

 86.Ibid., 35.

 87.Ibid., 34–5.

 88.Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 257.

 89.Ibid., 259.

 90.Xie Fang, “Banyan Lin Daojing de tihui” (Thoughts on playing Lin Daojing), in Qingchun zhi ge: cong xiaoshuo dao dianying, 267.

 91.Morgan, The Embodied Eye, 104.

 92.Ibid., 95.

 93.Tina Mai Chen, ‘Socialism, Aestheticized Bodies, and International Circuits of Gender’, 58, 78.

 94.Tina Mai Chen, ‘Film and Gender in Sino–Soviet Cultural Exchange, 1949–1969’, in China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949 to the Present, eds. Hua-yu Li and Thomas Bernstein (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2010), 438. See also Chapter Three for my analysis of this sequence.

 95.McGrath, ‘Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema’, 344.

5 Visions of Internationalism in Chinese Film Journals

 1.Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, ‘Rethinking the History of Internationalism’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, eds. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 11.

 2.Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fouth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 16.

 3.Nicolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 169–86.

 4.See Volland, ‘Clandestine Cosmopolitanism: Foreign Literature in the People’s Republic of China, 1957–1977’, The Journal of Asian Studies 76.1 (2017): 185–210.

 5.Paola Iovene, Tales of Futures Past: Literature and Anticipation in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 51, 57.

 6.Austin Jersild, The Sino–Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 19.

 7.Patrizia Dogliani, ‘The Fate of Socialist Internationalism’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, 41.

 8.Ibid., 59.

 9.Ibid., 49.

 10.Sandrine Kott, ‘Cold War Internationalism’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, 343.

 11.Ibid., 355–6.

 12.Sluga and Clavin, ‘Rethinking the History of Internationalism’, 8.

 13.Akira Iriye, ‘Foreword’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, xiv.

 14.See Talbot Imlay, ‘Socialist Internationalism after 1914’, in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, 214–5.

 15.Tina Mai Chen, ‘Socialist Geographies, Internationalist Temporalities, and Traveling Film Technologies: Sino–Soviet Film Exchange in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Futures of Chinese Cinemas: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures, eds. Olivia Khoo and Sean Metzger (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2009), 73.

 16.Tina Mai Chen, ‘Internationalism and Cultural Experience: Soviet Films and Popular Chinese Understandings of the Future in the 1950s’, Cultural Critique 58 (2004): 108.

 17.Mei Duo, ‘Guanghui de bangyang’ (A glorious model), Dazhong dianying 20 (1954): 3.

 18.Chen, ‘Internationalism and Cultural Experience’, 85.

 19.Chen, ‘Socialist Geographies’, 80.

 20.Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 40.

 21.Bu Ping, ‘Zhongyang dianyingju juxing yizhipian gongzuo huiyi’ (Chinese Film Bureau holds a conference on dubbing and subtitling), Dazhong dianying 3 (1954): 24.

 22.Ibid.

 23.Ibid.

 24.A few films from Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Romania, Japan and Italy (such as The Bicycle Thief) were also dubbed and subtitled in that year. See Zhang Ji, ‘Jinnian woguo jiang yizhi sishiyu bu waiguo yingpian’ (Our country will dub and subtitle about 40 foreign films this year), Dazhong dianying 6 (1954): 21.

 25.Cai Chusheng, ‘Xiang shiyue geming huanhu! Xiang Sulian dianying xuexi!’ (Cheers for the October Revolution! Let’s learn from Soviet cinema!), Zhongguo dianying 11–2 (1957): 6.

 26.Chen, ‘Socialist Geographies’, 81–2.

 27.Xinru, ‘Jianku de, chuangzaoxing de laodong’ (Hard and creative labour), Dazhong dianying 3 (1954): 26.

 28.Ibid.

 29.Ibid.

 30.The film version used in my visual analysis is the version (Feng cong dongfang lai) targeted to a domestic Chinese audience.

 31.It is ironic that a year later, in 1960, the Soviet Union withdrew all its advisers from the PRC, which officially marked the Sino–Soviet split.

 32.The slogan ‘Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country’ was created by Lenin himself in his report on the work of the Council of People’s Commissars in December 1920.

 33.Viktoriya Radunskaya, ‘Dangwo jiuyao likai Shanghai de shihou’ (When I am about to leave Shanghai), Shangying huabao 8 (1959): 4.

 34.Ran Ma, ‘A Genealogy of Film Festivals in the People’s Republic of China: “Film Weeks” during the “Seventeen Years” (1949–1966)’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 14.1 (2016): 54.

 35.Mei, ‘Guanghui de bangyang’, 3.

 36.Yu Ling, ‘Gei jintian kan Sulian dianying de qingnian’ (For young people who watch Soviet film nowadays), Shangying huabao 4 (1957): 7.

 37.Zi Si, ‘Zhongsu dianying gongzuozhe youyi changchun’ (The evergreen friendship between Chinese and Soviet film workers), Shangying huabao 4 (1957): 18–9.

 38.‘Sulian dianying shi quanshijie dianying yishu de xianfeng’ (Soviet cinema is the pioneer of film art in the world), Zhongguo dianying 11–2 (1957): 3.

 39.Sha Lang, ‘Sulian dianying yu Zhongguo guanzhong’ (Soviet cinema and the Chinese audience), Zhongguo dianying 11–2 (1957): 83.

 40.Chen Bo, ‘Ganxie Sulian dianying’ (Thanks, Soviet cinema), Zhongguo dianying 11–2 (1957): 111.

 41.In his speech at the Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in November 1957, Mao said: ‘There is a Chinese saying, “Either the East Wind prevails over the West Wind or the West Wind prevails over the East Wind.” I believe it is characteristic of the situation today that the East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism have become overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism.’ See Mao Tse-tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1966), 80–1.

 42.‘Fakanci’ (Editorial note), Guoji dianying 1 (1958): 1.

 43.Ibid.

 44.Tina Mai Chen notes that the number of new Soviet films imported into China dropped dramatically after 1957, and those screened in the 1960s tended to be Stalinist classics rather than newly produced films. See Chen, ‘Internationalism and Cultural Experience’.

 45.Iovene, Tales of Futures Past, 51, 57.

 46.Ibid., 58.

 47.Yomi Braester, ‘A Genealogy of Cinephilia in the Maoist Period’, in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, eds. Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 100, 108.

 48.Ibid., 105.

 49.In 1959, the journals Chinese Cinema and International Cinema merged to become Film Art (Dianying yishu).

 50.Xiao Qiao, ‘Jieshao Yuenan dianying zazhi “dianying”’ (Introducing the Vietnamese film journal Film), Zhongguo dianying 2 (1958): 81.

 51.‘Yingguo “Huamian yu yinxiang” zazhi’ (The English journal Sight and Sound), Zhongguo dianying 2 (1957): 64.

 52.Ibid.

 53.Ibid.

 54.Volland, ‘Clandestine Cosmopolitanism’, 194.

 55.Sun Daolin, Zhang Ruifang, and Qin Yi, ‘Qianjin ba! Nanmei he Feizhou de dixiong’ (March on! Our brothers in Latin America and Africa), Shangying huabao 2 (1959): 2.

 56.Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker, ‘Introduction: The Socialist 1960s in Global Perspective’, in The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World, eds. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 8.

 57.Ibid., 7.

 58.Ibid., 10.

 59.Toni Weis, ‘The Politics Machine: On the Concept of “Solidarity” in East German Support for SWAPO’, Journal of Southern African Studies 37.2 (2011): 352.

 60.Austin Jersild, ‘Sino–Soviet Rivalry in Guinea–Conakry, 1956–1965: The Second World in the Third World’, in Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World, eds. Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 309.

 61.Tina Mai Chen, ‘International Film Circuits and Global Imaginaries in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1957’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3.2 (2009): 150.

 62.Ran Ma, ‘A Genealogy of Film Festivals in the People’s Republic of China’, 53.

 63.Concurrently, the entire August 1957 issue of the literary journal Yiwen was devoted to the literature of Asia. See Iovene, Tales of Futures Past.

 64.The first Afro–Asian Film Festival, which took place in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1958, should be distinguished from the First Tashkent Festival of African and Asian Cinema in 1968, to which the PRC was not invited by the Soviet organisers. (The 1958 festival was expanded, for the fourth Festival in 1976, to include Latin America.) Rossen Djagalov and Masha Salazkina describe the Tashkent festival as an ambitious effort by Third World film-makers and Soviet cultural bureaucracies to construct a ‘Third-World cinematic field that could compete against Hollywood or west European cinema’s global domination in the realm of both aesthetics and distribution’. See Rossen Djagalov and Masha Salazkina, ‘Tashkent ’68: A Cinematic Contact Zone’, Slavic Review 75.2 (2016): 280.

 65.Chen, ‘International Film Circuits and Global Imaginaries’, 152.

 66.Wang Yang, ‘Yafei dianying yishu de jieri’ (The festival of Afro–Asian film art), Guoji dianying 4 (1958): 30.

 67.‘Jianjue zhichi Yindunixiya renmin fandui Meiguo dianying de douzheng’ (Resolutely in support of the Indonesian Struggle against American Film), Dianying yishu 3 (1964): 7.

 68.Ssutu Hui-min, ‘Revolution in the Afro–Asian Film World’, China’s Screen 4 (1964): 7.

 69.Shen Yanbing, ‘Zhongmian youyi wangu changqing’ (The ancient and evergreen Sino–Burmese friendship), Dianying yishu 11 (1960): 20.

 70.Ibid.

 71.Three feature films (Kim Dong, What Smoke, and The Souvenir) and three documentaries (The Triumphant Decade, The Indomitable Buddhists of South Vietnam, and The Indomitable People of South Vietnam) were shown during the Vietnamese Film Week. Production year not identified.

 72.Han Shangyi, ‘Support Vietnam, Oppose U.S. Imperialism’, China’s Screen 3 (1965): 2.

 73.Albania formally withdrew from the Warsaw Pact in 1968 in response to the Prague Spring. The PRC and Albania remained closely allied until Deng Xiaoping’s reform era in 1978.

 74.Elidor Mëhilli, ‘Socialism in Motion: How Georgians and Russians Acted Albania’s Ottoman Past and Albanian Films Brought War to Mao’s China’, paper given at the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, 2017. See also Elidor Mëhilli, From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).

 75.Chinese title not identified. Chien Hsiao-chang, ‘Song of Red Friendship’, China’s Screen 1 (1965): 2.

 76.Ibid.

 77.Simon Shen and Cho-kiu Li, ‘The Cultural Side Effects of the Sino–Soviet Split: The Influence of Albanian Movies in China in the 1960s’, Modern China Studies 22.1 (2015): 219, 230.

 78.My reading of China’s Screen throughout this chapter is based on the English edition.

 79.The following films from Latin America were introduced in the article: Behind the Big Wall (Detrás de un largo muro/Daqiang houmian) (Lucas Demare, Argentina, 1958), The Forward Center Dies at Dawn (El centroforward murió al amanecer) (René Múgica, Argentina, 1961), The Source (La vertiente/Pubu) (Jorge Ruiz, Bolivia, 1958), The Miracle of Salt (El milagro de sal/Yan de qiji) (Luis Moya Sarmiento, Columbia, 1958), Stories of the Revolution (Historias de la revolución) (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba, 1960), Realengo 18 (Eduardo Manet, Cuba, 1961), The Young Rebel (El joven rebelde) (Julio García Espinosa, Cuba, 1961), The Right to be Born (El derecho de nacer/Sheng de quanli) (Zacarías Gómez Urquiza, Mexico, 1952) and Araya (Margot Benacerraf, Venezuela, 1959).

 80.‘Progressive Latin American Films Popular in China’, China’s Screen 1 (1964): 18.

 81.The term ‘progressive’ was also used to describe works of authors from Western Europe and the United States in what Nicolai Volland calls ‘zone four’ on the periphery of the Chinese literary universe. See Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism, 181.

 82.Production year not identified. See Chih Chao, ‘The People of the Congo Will Certainly Win’, China’s Screen 2 (1965): 6.

 83.Production year not identified. See Tu Hsuan, ‘Forward, Africa! Fight On’, China’s Screen 4 (1965): 7.

 84.Kasongo Kapanga, The Writing of the Nation: Expressing Identity through Congolese Literary Texts and Films (London: Africa World Press, 2017), xiv.

 85.Li Teh-chuan, ‘A Militant, Many Splendored Friendship’, China’s Screen 4 (1964): 2. The United Nations named 1960 the ‘Year of Africa’. Seventeen new nations gained independence soon after. From 1963 to 1965, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi visited over 30 Third World nations. The PRC gained recognition from 15 African nations and offered approximately $296 million in aid to Africa from 1960 to 1965. See Jersild, ‘Sino–Soviet Rivalry in Guinea–Conakry’, 306.

 86.Li, ‘A Militant, Many Splendored Friendship’, 2.

 87.Ibid.

 88.Ibid., 3.

 89.Ibid., 4.

 90.Ibid., 3.

 91.Ibid., 4.

 92.Production year not identified. See ‘Visit to Uganda’, China’s Screen 4 (1965): 9.

 93.Production year not identified.

 94.Chen, ‘International Film Circuits and Global Imaginaries’, 156.

 95.Ibid.

 96.‘Zhongguo dianying bianji quan shijie’ (Chinese film reaches the world), Shangying huabao 9 (1959): 21.

 97.Chen Huangmei, ‘Some Facts About New China’s Film Industry’, China’s Screen 3 (1964): 3.

 98.Ibid.

 99.‘The East is Red’, China’s Screen 3 (1965): 12.

 100.‘The White-Haired Girl Abroad’, China’s Screen 1 (1964): 19.

 101.Ibid.

 102.Ibid.

 103.‘A Most Outstanding Film: Reactions of Viewers Abroad to Five Golden Flowers’, China’s Screen 3 (1964): 19.

 104.Ibid.

 105.Ibid.

 106.Five Golden Flowers received a warm welcome at the Chinese Film Festival in Tunisia, at the That Luang Fair in Laos, and in Sudan. The film was awarded the prize for the best actress (Yang Likun) and best director (Wang Jiayi) at the second Afro–Asian Film Festival in Cairo in 1960.

Conclusion

 1.See Cai Xiang, Revolution and its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966, trans. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 357–402.

 2.Xiaobing Tang, ‘Qianwan buyao wangji de lishi yiyi: guanyu richang shenghuo de jiaolü jiqi xiandaixing’ (The historical significance of Never Forget: anxiety over everyday life and its modernity), in Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxueshi lun, vol. 2, ed. Wang Xiaoming (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2003), 176–84.

 3.Mao Zedong, ‘Mao Zedong dui wenxue yishu de pishi’ (Mao Zedong’s critique of literature and art), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1949–1979, vol. 2, ed. Wu Di (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2006), 418.

 4.Jiang Qing, ‘On the Revolution in Peking Opera’, trans. Jessica Ka Yee Chan, The Opera Quarterly 26.2–3 (2010): 456.

 5.Qi Zhi (Wu Di), Mao Zedong shidai de renmin dianying, 1949–1966 (People’s cinema in Mao Zedong’s era) (Taipei: Xiuwei zixun keji gufen youxian gongsi, 2010), 487.

 6.Ibid.

 7.Zhuoyi Wang, Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema 1951–1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 151.

 8.As early as 1953, in his endorsement of socialist realism at the First National Conference on Screenwriting, Zhou Yang established the priority of film-making in creating ‘pioneering characters as a type’. The priority was consistently re-articulated in successive campaigns. See Zhou Yang, ‘Zai quanguo diyijie dianying juzuo huiyi shang guanyu xuexi shehui zhuyi xianshi zhuyi wenti de baogao’ (A report on the learning of socialist realism at the First National Conference on Screenwriting), in Zhongguo dianying yanjiu ziliao, 1:331.

 9.See Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

 10.Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1.

 11.Paul Pickowicz, China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 214.

 12.Paul Clark, Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics Since 1949, 56. The gesturing toward China’s operatic tradition in the latter half of the Seventeen Years anticipated the aesthetics of model opera films produced during the Cultural Revolution.

 13.Robert S. Elegant, ‘Red China’s Big Push’, Newsweek, September 30, 1957, 126.

 14.Weijia Du, ‘Beyond the Ideology Principle: The Two Faces of Dubbed Foreign Films in PRC, 1949–1966’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9.2 (2015): 141.

 15.Ibid., 142.

 16.Ibid. Du highlights a woman’s comment in a literary magazine: ‘When I was little, I saw in a Soviet film a female agent who wore a plat’e [dress] […] and I thought, I would put up with any hard labor if I could wear that kind of dress!’ See Du, ‘Beyond the Ideology Principle’, 153.