Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979

Z. Wang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137378743
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

A comprehensive history of how the conflicts and balances of power in the Maoist revolutionary campaigns from 1951 to 1979 complicated and diversified the meanings of films, this book offers a discursive study of the development of early PRC cinema.

1

From The Life of Wu Xun to the Career of Song Jingshi: Adapting Private Studio Filmmaking Legacy for a Nationalized Cinema, 1951–1957

O n June 1, 1950, the first PRC state-sponsored movie magazine Mass Cinema (Dazhong dianying) began its publication in Shanghai. It would soon replace all the remaining popular Republican-era movie magazines. In a long essay published in the first three issues of the magazine, Huang Zongying, a progressive Shanghai private studio actor (yanyuan),¹ told a story of her witnessing the “liberation” of a Chinese girl from the Hollywood star culture. Entitled “Two Cultures,” the story begins shortly before the CCP’s takeover of Shanghai in 1949. Huang receives an unexpected visit from the girl, who is a fan of hers. Having watched Bathing Beauty (1944) five times and believing that she herself looks like Paulette Goddard, the girl dreams of becoming a movie star and has come to Huang to ask how. To educate this “captive of American cinema,” Huang tells her that there are two kinds of cinema. The cinema that suits the girl’s movie star fantasy is “yellow” or obscene.² It “fabricates outlandish stories out of thin air, has pretty women boldly sell their bodies, and is full of thrills and eroticism.” The other kind of cinema “is a cultural education, transmits truth and righteousness, reveals to people the direction of their lives, and encourages them to move forward.” Progressive films, such as Plunder of Peach and Plum (Tao li jie, 1934), Song of the Fishermen (Yu guang qu, 1934), and The Highway (Da lu, 1934), are all examples of the latter kind of cinema. Huang claims that it takes knowledge and righteousness, instead of “pretty face and mandarin accent,” to perform in this kind of cinema. The girl leaves puzzled and frustrated.

The story takes a turn when they run into each other after the CCP’s takeover: the girl has joined the PLA. Claiming that she had lost the original, Huang reproduced a long letter from the girl, now the army soldier. The letter details how the CCP and the PLA have helped her transform from a petty bourgeois young lady dreaming about a movie star career to a “glorious people’s literary and art worker, following the CCP and serving workers, peasants, and soldiers.” It also criticizes film stars for not seriously participating in benefit performances and seldom performing for soldiers. Huang stated that she took this letter as a friendly challenge and would transform herself more painstakingly to a performer “who truly serves the people.” She concluded by vowing to “advance in Chairman Mao’s direction of literature and art” together with the girl.³

This story can lie anywhere between a true account and a complete fabrication. Huang’s excitement at the girl’s “liberation” is both plausible and questionable, when we understand it in the context of the rapid transition from the Republican-era star culture to the PRC’s revolutionary film culture.

The excitement is plausible, because many progressive artists were indeed critical of the Hollywood star culture. The ideological revolution that would soon overturn the domination of this culture in China had historical roots in their voices. As Wang Chaoguang and Zhang Jishun point out, strong Chinese moral and political criticism of American cinema began as early as the 1920s, and significantly increased with the advent of the Chinese left-wing cinema movement in the 1930s.⁴ In post-WWII Republican China, escalated importation of American films stimulated a chorus against the “distasteful,” “banal,” “psychologically sick,” “weird,” and “obscene” Hollywood. Participants included not only progressive artists but also liberal and politically neutral intellectuals. Their tones were “as radical and strong as that of the early 1950s.”⁵ The standpoint of Huang’s essay was consistent with such criticism of the Hollywood and Hollywood-influenced “yellow cinema.”

But Huang’s privileged social status had also been dependent on the Republican-era star culture, which closely followed the Hollywood model. In the story, Huang can lecture the girl about the poison of the star culture precisely because she is one of the movie stars the girl adores. After the new ideology inverts this power relationship, it is the former movie star’s turn to be educated by the young “literary and art worker” on how to painstakingly transform herself. The fact that Huang practically quit her acting career soon after the founding of the PRC suggests that she was not necessarily as enthusiastic about the transformation as this essay sounded.⁶

Sincerely enthusiastic or not, Huang’s accommodation to the new culture was rational. I use the word “rational” in the sense invoked by Wang Shaoguang in his following argument on the Cultural Revolution participants:

Participants in the movement were true believers in Mao, but their participation in, or withdrawal from, collective action was principally based upon their rational calculations of personal pay-offs. The reckoning of costs and benefits thus conditioned, to a large extent, the degree and manner of those true believers’ involvement in the movement.⁷

Wang’s insight on the rational calculations of “true believers” can help us better understand the Maoist era against the prevailing and flawed assumption that revolutionary subjects were all blind followers of a charismatic leader. Participants of revolutionary politics and culture, ranging from true believers to opportunists, all rationally calculated their moves for diverse individual purposes. Huang was one such participant. The way she used the three progressive films in the essay epitomized her calculations. Plunder of Peach and Plum features Chen Bo’er and Yuan Muzhi and initiated their successful movie star careers in Shanghai. Both Chen and Yuan, however, left Shanghai for Yan’an in 1938, joined the CCP (in 1937 and 1940, respectively), and became leading Yan’an filmmakers and high-level CCP authorities. Cai Chusheng, director of Song of the Fishermen, was the highest-ranked state official among non-CCP Shanghai film artists when Huang wrote the essay. The Highway was directed by Sun Yu and featured Jin Yan, Zheng Junli, Zhang Yi, Han Lan’gen, and Li Lili. These progressive artists shared a similar artistic and political background with Huang and her husband, Zhao Dan, who was also a Shanghai private studio movie star. Some of them had close collaborative and/or personal relationships with the couple. By drawing a simple and clear line between the “yellow cinema” and the three carefully chosen films, Huang bracketed her circle of film artists and the power holders of the new film industry together.⁸ She based her devotion to the transformation of the new film art on her justification of her own artistic and political position as truthful and righteous.

Huang represented Shanghai progressive private studio artists in her attempt to invoke ideological references in the CCP’s parlance, such as the worker/peasant/soldier trio (gongnongbing) and the people, to discursively strengthen her political status. Zhao Dan, for example, vowed similarly “to be an art soldier faithfully serving the people.”⁹ In the nascent PRC, the progressive artists were certainly not the only group of people who made this strategic move. At the time, even private bankers quoted Mao Zedong’s “On Coalition Government” and advertised that their banks were “serving the people whole-heartedly.”¹⁰ The diverse groups’ similar efforts to appropriate new ideological references may lead to an impression of collective transformation. The coming disturbance, however, would soon expose the underlying competition and struggle, and reshuffle the power structure of the film industry for a new order.

This chapter focuses on the cases of The Life of Wu Xun and Song Jingshi to discuss the cycle of disturbance and order that initiated the Maoist revolution in Chinese cinema. The English-language scholarship has not studied the former film adequately, and has largely neglected the latter.¹¹ But they were in fact two of the most important sites of the circulation of power among CCP authorities, critics, and film artists during the first phase, or the Nationalization Period, of the PRC’s revolutionary cinema. In the first section of the chapter, I focus on the causes and effects of the campaign against The Life of Wu Xun, and review the circulation of power leading to the production of the exceptionally big-budget Song Jingshi. In the second section, I examine the high stakes of different factions of CCP authorities, critics, and the former private studio artists in the outcome of the production of Song Jingshi. The last section discusses how the competing stakes of these parties caused Song Jingshi to drastically depart from its intended course as a coherent part of the campaign against The Life of Wu Xun. The film eventually became a failure for everyone: the CCP authorities failed to use the film for any effective propagandistic purpose, critics against The Life of Wu Xun failed to use it to gain critical authority, and the Shanghai artists failed to use it to adjust and defend their private studio filmmaking legacy.

The Campaign against The Life of Wu Xun: Disruption of Adaptation

As mentioned in the introduction, conventional historical narratives of the Chinese revolutionary cinema tend to center around the dichotomy of Yan’an versus Shanghai, or CCP cadres and filmmakers from the wartime CCP-controlled areas versus artists from the private film studios.¹² As categories of different pre-PRC backgrounds of filmmakers, Yan’an and Shanghai are useful for understanding part of the power dynamics in the initial years of the PRC’s revolutionary cinema. But this categorization problematically assumes a static confrontation, in which Yan’an and Shanghai had “different perceptions of the function of art and artists in society.”¹³ Contrary to this assumption, Yan’an and Shanghai’s perceptions of the function of film art and artists were consistently in sync from the 1930s to the 1950s. From the 1930s to 1948, CCP authorities in Yan’an kept their perception in line with those Shanghai private studio artists from whom they could win support. Having very little film production capacity of their own, the CCP could only seek to exert their influence on the Chinese film industry through cooperation between underground CCP members and bourgeois film professionals in the KMT-governed areas, especially Shanghai, the hub of the national film industry. For this purpose, the CCP welcomed and actively contributed to the commercial success of progressive movie stars, although their stardom might obscure their ideological standing. Specifically, Mao’s seminal 1942 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (Talks) did not include film as part of revolutionary literature and art, which must primarily serve workers, peasants, and soldiers.¹⁴ CCP documents show that the film industry remained an exception from the Talks’ dogmas even after the CCP acquired their first film studio in northeast China in 1946. In a directive issued in November 1948, the Ministry of Propaganda of the CCP’s Central Committee set up some quite liberal political standards for film scriptwriting, and particularly warned that exceeding “the acceptable degree of strictness” may lead to suffocating the CCP’s fledgling film project.¹⁵ In the same year, Xia Yan, a longtime central figure of the CCP’s underground film work organizations, stated at a film forum that “it is quite unobjectionable for capitalists to make profit.”¹⁶

After the CCP took over Shanghai, as the need to unite bourgeois film professionals to undermine the KMT’s rulership disappeared, its tolerant film policy began to tighten. On August 14, 1949, the Ministry of Propaganda of the CCP’s Central Committee issued a resolution. It stated that “film art has the most extensive popularity and widespread propagandistic effect,” and called for “scriptwriters, directors and actors who have mastered the CCP’s policies and are familiar with the life of workers, peasants, and soldiers” to “strengthen the film project.”¹⁷ This resolution marked the beginning of a nationwide application of the formulation found in the Talks to the film industry. It was now the Shanghai artists’ turn to align their political and artistic ideas with the CCP’s norms.

The progressive film artists began their rational adaptation to the new regime and the new film culture through media publications, conference addresses, and filmmaking. Most of them actively joined a chorus echoing the CCP’s promotion of the worker/peasant/soldier cinema. True believers in the worker/peasant/soldier cinema or not, they promptly completed a number of films practicing the new Party line. The three best-known are Between a Married Couple (Women fufu zhijian, 1951), Platoon Commander Guan (Guan lianzhang, 1951), and The Life of Wu Xun. Between a Married Couple and Platoon Commander Guan both foregrounded revolutionary worker/peasant/soldier figures and featured urban petty bourgeois intellectuals, who obviously served as a self-portrayal of the filmmakers, as faithful political followers of the revolutionaries.

The Life of Wu Xun, which predated the CCP’s takeover, was not as up to date with the new Party line as the other two films. The protagonist of this film, Wu Xun (1839–1896), was a late Qing beggar who lived a destitute life but raised money for several charity schools through his begging. Many Republican-era progressive intellectuals, including Sun Yu and Zhao Dan, greatly admired Wu for his selfless and unyielding devotion to equal education.¹⁸ In 1948, Sun began to shoot The Life of Wu Xun at the Kunlun Film Studio, casting Zhao as Wu. As shown in his original script, the film would have been an epic celebrating Wu’s merits and achievements. In the first half of the story, Wu labors hard for a rich Recommended Man (Juren, or those who passed provincial-level civil service exams in imperial China), Zhang. But Zhang tampers with his salary accounts, refuses to pay anything, and beats him cruelly. After being rescued by his friend Zhou Da, Wu has a fevered dream in which he comes up with the idea to establish charity schools and empower the poor through education. This dream is a turning point. Wu’s subsequent efforts to build charity schools may look humiliating: he begs for money even by playing punching sack for anyone who is willing to pay. But such actions reward him with hope, inner happiness, and an exciting realization of his education dream. Elites and the emperor also recognize Wu for his achievements with great respect, although Wu does not care about the honor they give.¹⁹

The project was suspended during the chaos of the civil war. In 1950, Kunlun pushed Sun to resume the project, hoping that the film could rescue the studio from its financial crisis. At this point, however, Sun clearly saw the difficulties in adapting the film to the Party line, and he accepted the task only reluctantly. Putting tremendous efforts into the revisions, he actively consulted with CCP authorities and carefully followed their advice. The authorities were not enthusiastic about the project either, but all appeared to agree that the film would be politically acceptable after the appropriate revisions were made.

In 1951, Sun completed The Life of Wu Xun. Dramatically different from its original script, the film showed an ambivalent attitude toward Wu. On the one hand, it still intended to praise Wu, at times trying to make Wu appear revolutionary. On several occasions, Wu expresses his desire to seek vengeance from Zhang and other elite oppressors. In the fevered dream, he even becomes a leader mobilizing the poor into revolutionary actions. On the other hand, however, the film could not alter the well-known historical facts that Wu was far from a rebel and was even highly honored by the Qing rulers. It had to criticize his lack of a spirit of revolt from a revolutionary perspective. The film repeatedly stressed that by begging, instead of revolting, Wu only deepens his torment and perpetuates the unjust society. Zhang’s henchmen, who thrash Wu in Zhang’s house, later thrash him again as his punching “patrons.” An elite defrauds Wu out of the first sum of money that he raises. Facing such oppression, Wu’s reaction cannot be further away from vengeance. He repeatedly falls on his knees not only to beg for money but also to implore the elites with enough power and status to initiate the school proje...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Understanding Revolutionary Culture and Cinema
• 1. FromThe Life of Wu Xun to the Career of Song Jingshi: Adapting Private Studio Filmmaking Legacy for a Nationalized Cinema, 1951–1957
• 2. From Revolutionary Canon to BourgeoisWhite Flag: Blooming Flowers and the Full Moon (1958) in the Maoist Campaigns
• 3. From “a Hundred Flowers” to “a PoisonousWeed”: Dangerous Opportunities for Satirical Comedies, 1955–1958
• 4. From Revolutionary Romanticism to Petty Bourgeois Fanaticism: The Great Leap Forward and Filmmakers’ Stylistic Return to the Past, 1958–1960
• 5. From Disaster to Laughter: Making Comedies in a Changing Political Landscape, 1959–1963
• 6. From Conflicting Authorities to Diverse Masses: Early Spring in February (1964) as “Sugarcoated Poison”
• Conclusion: From the Ebb of the Revolution to the End of Revolutionary Cinema, 1967–1979
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index