Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6(49) - China Part 3: The Great Impasse (1966-76) : Socialist Formalism and After

“How can Communist art and literature actually reach and inspire the potentially revolutionary masses?” Andrei Zhdanov and Maxim Gorky in the early 30s in Russia had inscribed what was already labelled “revolutionary realism” into the socialist realist formula. To simplify the complex transition in Chinese political culture in response to this question, McGrath refers to Communist literary theorist Zhou Yang, later Vice Minister of Culture, who followed Zhdanov and Gorky in calling nineteenth century literary realism, old style “critical realism,” be replaced by a “new realism that in fact finds a deeper, newer “reality” […] “that cannot be hostile to romanticism [but] it must be of a new type.” Zhou Yang warned against pursuing a bourgeois naturalism that merely observes the present reality. Instead artists should be “remoulding themselves” and “moving towards reality’s future.” Mao in his “Talks at the Yan’an Forum” in 1942 referred to the to be mandated “new realism” as “proletarian realism” which was changed to “socialist realism” in the re-publication of the talks in 1953 (167), subsequently interpreted by Jiang Qing. 

In May 1966 as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Mao Zedong, rejecting the pre-1949 legacy and discounting the value of literature and art produced during the seventeen year period, launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) to thwart “new bourgeois elements including capitalist roaders within the Party itself,” that he believed threatened the socialist society of the PRC. McGrath suggests that “theories about why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution tend to ignore the fact that his openly stated reason was very well substantiated by subsequent history after it failed […] Rarely confronted in contemporary China is the extent to which Mao might have been horrified by the enormously concentrated wealth and consumption, alongside gaping class disparities of the twentieth-first-century Chinese party state that still reveres him as its founding father, given that he launched the Cultural Revolution precisely to counter what he perceived as new class disparities emerging under Communist rule” (200). 

In rejecting the pre-1949 legacy and discounting the value of literature and art produced during the seventeen years after the date, the new cultural authorities self-consciously set out to create an alternative mass culture and, as a major part of this, a new film aesthetic. They couched their presentation of this new film style in class conflict and “two-line struggle” terms, but the emphasis was on a national Chinese aesthetic, in contrast to what they perceived as the “bourgeois” cosmopolitan inspiration of the now discredited older filmmakers. Jiang Qing and her allies turned to the modernized “model operas” as the epitome of new mass culture and the new film style. - Clark 133. 

"The cinema created during the Cultural Revolution itself, which drew upon and yet in key ways contrasted with the Seventeen Years period, [q.v.], that preceded it, reveals how a fundamental impasse of revolutionary thought and practice found indirect expression in film form. That is, […] the study of the Cultural Revolution’s cinema (which McGrath undertakes in Chapter 5 Socialist Formalism and the End[s] of Revolutionary Cinema) provides a means for grappling with the implications of the event as a whole and its ultimate failure to forestall the restoration of class and capitalism in China (201). 

 

Jiang Qing

After the years of turmoil in the late 60s with Mao’s health declining a new power struggle emerged between the moderate reform faction led by Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping and the more ideologically extreme “Gang of Four” faction consisting of Jiang and three allies that briefly seized full control after Mao’s death in 1976. They were ultimately defeated from within the party, clearing the way for Deng Xiaoping’s reform faction to gain control of the government by late 1978. “In other words, the end of the GPCR eventually brought to power the very leadership that it had initially intended to oust, and those who had been suspected of being “capitalist roaders” would indeed steer China into what would become, by the twenty-first century, a leading position in the capitalist global economy” (ibid 200). 

Red Detachment of Women (1961)

McGrath considers that “the main touchstones of this period [were] not the artistically intriguing but politically rejected films screened publicly as examples of “poisonous weeds,” films such as Two Stage Actresses (Xie Jin) and Early Spring in February” (Xie Tieli), q.v., but rather the mainstream hits such as The White Haired Girl/Bai mao nu (1950) and The Song of Youth/Quingchun chi ge (1959). Red Detachment of Women/Hongse nianzijun (1961) is of particular interest in this connection as one of two titles each filmed over the course of the Mao era in three versions, in this case as a fiction film directed by Xie Jin in 1960 then remade during the Cultural Revolution as a revolutionary ballet film and once more as a revolutionary opera film in 1972 “allowing us to track changes in cinematic aesthetics retelling the same stories as an example of Chinese cinema’s countless reiterations of founding, legitimating myths of the PRC” using myth in the same sense as it is used in the western for example.  

Red Detachment of Women (1970 ballet film)

Prescriptive realism was chosen by McGrath as the concept he finds most fitting to study conventions like character stereotypes and narrative scenarios in Mao-era socialist cinema (162). “These concepts allow us to reconcile the history of Chinese revolutionary cinema in a way that avoids ‘othering’ socialist realist cinema as mere propaganda reinforcing the demonization of Maoism discourse on China […], “not simply as didactic but as facilitating meaning among a particular cultural community in the way all classical cinema has done” (164). 

The sense of realism cultivated by Chinese revolutionary historical films is in continual tension with the films’ conventions, whether they be generic conventions of the war film, the conventions of Chinese socialist realism, or the conventions of ballet or Beijing opera in the case of the yangbanxi films. Conventions serve to orient the viewer and tell the story but also potentially called attention to themselves in a way that undercuts the realism of the historical representation. The tradition of Chinese revolutionary film not only gradually became less realist and more romanticist but in fact increasingly displayed and eventually culminated in a very distinctively Chinese version of what David Bordwell has called “socialist formalism” (206). 

 Bordwell used the term to refer to Soviet socialist filmmakers who drew on their more avant garde predecessors in the 1920s to create moments of formalism even during the Stalinist period as well as by later Soviet filmmakers who conducted similar explorations “in parallel with the renewed interest in formalist montage during the French New Wave” (ibid). “In the case of China, McGrath uses socialist formalism first to refer first to the stylistically formalist moments in Chinese revolutionary films of the Seventeen Years, and second amid the yangbanxi films which are among the most stylistically formalist instances of mass cinema in the history of the medium, films comparable, say, to Hollywood musicals of the first decade or so of the sound era, such as The Wizard of Oz” (207). 

 McGrath traces “a progression of cinematic aesthetics beyond a shift from social/descriptive to social/prescriptive realism to an even more formalised state that “coincided with a “performative shift” in day-to-day ideological practice, particularly by the 1970s when the intense passions of the early Cultural Revolution (1966-68) had subsided and “unpredictable tumult had been replaced by repetitive performances of ideological conformity” (201). Drawing on Jorg Schweinitz’s theory of film stereotypes, McGrath identifies a gradual process, termed by the former as derealisation in which, following a process of increased conventionalisation and autonomisation of character types within a genre eventually is experienced not so much as direct representations of reality but as “roles played out in an imaginary world” (207), an example in Chinese literature, drama and cinema of the revolutionary period being the villainous landlord bolstered further by villain stardom. 

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 In his discussion of “Chinese Realism in the Digital Age” (Ch.7), McGrath addresses the question of “how different modes of Chinese film have been transformed (or not) by the transition to digital cinema, from CGI-heavy blockbusters to independent films made on low budget Digital Video (DV)” (319-29). 

Chen Kaige

At the centenary of Chinese filmmaking in 2005, the top grossing film in Chinese cinemas was Chen Kaige’s martial arts historical melodrama The Promise/Fuji widely taken as his less-than successful attempt to top the artistry and popularity of Zhang Yimou’s Hero/Yingxiong (2002), which set a record for Chinese ticket sales and enjoyed great international success. The two former collaborators from two decades earlier on Yellow Earth, q.v., thus were now in direct competition in making expensive mainstream blockbusters, as McGrath points out, “a clear indicator of how the cultural scene of China had been transformed by the overwhelming trend of marketisation after the 1980s” (281) in what McGrath calls the post-socialist realism(s) of the reform era. 

Equally telling is the contrast between the earlier [art] films’ combination of documentary-style realism with the contemplative, stationary long-shot cinematography and the later films’ reliance on computer generated imagery (CGI) to construct their fantasy worlds, in keeping with the trend that had become the rule for the most popular films in Chinese cinemas … 

It is not just the objects in the image that might now be computer generated but also some of the basic techniques of cinematography such as camera movement (285)…The more constructed the digital image becomes, the more perceptual realism overlaps with what [is] celebrated as “virtual realism” where any image at all becomes possible (287). 

In Chapter One on the first decades of silent cinema McGrath shows that early Chinese filmmakers and critics “felt an imperative to adopt an aesthetic of realism despite anxiety that Chinese society and culture with its traditional preference for expressionism rather than realism in art, was not well suited to a medium that seemed to rest upon modern, Western notions of mimesis and objectivity requiring actors to actually ride a horse, drive a car or paddle a boat. Such activities in contrast, in Chinese opera were traditionally signified through pantomime, simple props, and stylised gestures and postures. 

The shift to the digital construction of such actions by graphic animators after filming, raised the possibility of a rethinking of Chinese film aesthetics in the mainstream, particularly in the domestic market where the link between strong digital special effects and box office success had been strongly established. “The drive to make China a leader in the perceptual realism of digital animation and compositing, aims to bolster the effort to increase China’s cultural “soft power” […] to match Hollywood’s technological capabilities […] As differences in animation aesthetics [show] the Chinese film industry seeks not simply to match Hollywood’s technological capabilities but to contest the artistic and cultural values it promotes - reviving in the process Chinese cultural debates over Westernization versus the preservation of Chinese identity (289). 

McGrath makes what he refers to as “a careful depiction of division between the CGI’s virtual perceptual realism and DV’s ontological realism, the latter drastically lowering of barriers to entry into the filmmaking profession brought about by the relative affordability of the means of cinematic production allowing entry of talented young directors in domestic and international independent and art film scenes, also including a higher proportion of women than at any previous time in Chinese history (308). At the same time McGrath acknowledges that this suggestion of a fissure between CGI’s virtual perceptual realism and DV’s ontological realism is “overly simplistic.” The typical big-budget commercial film, made in Hollywood or Beijing, is likely to feature live-action footage composited - “whether subtly and unnoticeably or grandly and spectacularly” - with digital computer-created effects. “At the same time worlds of imagination conjured by virtual environments are also real parts of ordinary people’s lives so that a film in a verisimilar critical realist mode [as distinct from stylised action or fantasy] might depict virtual environments as a part of an everyday reality in the urban landscape-soundscape it wishes to capture (ibid).” 

Jia Zhangke

McGrath then discusses how “in an exemplary manner” in his first film, Xiao Wu/Pickpocket (1997), with its careful depiction of various sorts of media, Jia Zhangke deploys “a form of hyper-immediacy” [the surreal depiction of one medium within another] would become a hallmark of Jia’s particular brand of post-socialist realism […] the mixing of fiction and documentary,” McGrath continues, “has been a consistent tendency of Chinese independent and art cinema, beginning with Zhang Yuan’s Mama (1990) and continuing with a number of the most inventive filmmakers of the DV generation.” McGrath adds that “cutaways to actual documentary footage within fiction films go back to the classics of 1930s Shanghai cinema” (ibid 316). 

Bi Gan

Bi Gan’s first film, Kaili Blues/Lucian pecan (2015), is described by McGrath as an “extraordinary film-poem” which Bi struggled to complete on an low budget that “creates an entirely distinctive oneiric atmosphere with mysterious shots that sometimes present riddles […] The story [traverses] several years of time within seconds inside of one continuous take. Here, as in the film as a whole,” McGrath suggests, “the sorts of sci-fi mysteries that other films spend hundreds of millions of dollars to explore - including the nature of time, memory, and karma - are inventively raised [by Bi] just through the unorthodox use of tools that combines [as in other Fifth Generation films] the elements of post-socialist neorealism with occasionally surrealist images, a haunting soundtrack by Lim Gong, and a dream-like poetics of motif rhyming largely replacing logical cause-and-effect narration” (320). 

Earlier in the book McGrath relates an anecdote about Jia Zhangke’s life being redirected by a chance encounter with Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, which changed how he thought about movies and inspired him to learn how to make them (p.2). Bi Gan described a similar encounter with a film on which he was required to write an assignment - Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker - after resisting, Bi ended the viewing “in complete awe.” McGrath comments that Kaili Blues can provide the viewer with “a similarly revelatory experience of what cinema can be” (321). 

He concludes with the final paragraph of Chinese Film: As fundamental transformation, for better or worse, of the planet and society looms, cinema, as a conduit to the real, can help fulfil what Amitav Ghosh calls “a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era.” We never know for sure, at least not for long. We think alongside the real, along with the real, we try to arrest it both in short and in artistic representation. As an art whose medium arguably is time itself, cinema has the ability to convey the movement of reality in a particularly powerful way. Still, it is precisely that movement that makes every thought, theory or representation - including cinematic representations as well as academic studies thereof - necessarily tentative. The real always moves on, and so do we. But the movies do too (328). 

An apt note to introduce as this series heads towards a close.  

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Jason McGrath Chinese Film 2022 

Paul Clark Chinese Cinema Culture and Politics since 1949 1987 

Chris Berry “China Before 1949”; Esther Yau, “China After the Revolution” Oxford History of World Cinema, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith ed. 1996 

Tony Rayns & Scott Meek, “Before the Revolution” Sight and Sound Autumn 1980 Gina Marchetti, “Two Stage Sisters : the blossoming of a revolutionary aesthetic” Jump Cut 34 

Nathalie Bittinger Review of Chinese Film (ibid) French Centre of Research translated by Elizabeth Gill in China Perspectives no.134 2023 available online.  

E.Ann Kaplan “Relevance of Western Melodrama to Recent Chinese Cinema” East-West Film Journal 5/1 

Chen Shan “Chinese Cinema: From the Beginning to the 5th Generation” introduction for the Festival of 3 Continents, Nantes 2025 available online if you click here 

Bérénice Reynaud “Chinese Cinema” The Oxford Guide to Film Studies ed. J. Hill & P. Gibson

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NOTE - Renumbering is still due to take place

Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links. 

 

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

 

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

 

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke  

Part Six (4) - New York Film-makers - Stanley Kubrick Creator of Forms

Part Six (5) ‘New Hollywood’ (1) - Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Pauline Kael and BONNIE AND CLYDE

Part Six (6) Francis Ford Coppola: Standing at the crossroads of art and industry

Part 6(7) Altman

6(8) Great Britain - Joseph Losey, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Peter Watkins, Barney Platts-Mills

6(9) France - Part One The New Wave and The Cahiers du Cinema Group

6(10) France - Part Two - The Left Bank/Rive Gauche Group and an Independent

6(11) France - Part Three - Young Godard

6(12) France - Part Four - Godard:Visionary and Rebel

6 (13) France Part 5 Godard with Gorin, Miéville : Searching for an activist voice

6(14) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Bresson 

6 (15) France Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Jacques Tati

6 (16) - Part 6 - Creator of Forms - Carl Th Dreyer

6 (17) - Italy and Luchino Visconti

6(18 - Italy and Roberto Rossellini - Part One

6(19) - Rossellini, INDIA and the new Historical realism

6(20) - Rossellini in Australia

6 (21) - Italy - Michelangelo Antonioni

6 (22) - Italy - Federico Fellini, Ermanno Olmi

6 (23) - Italy - Pasolini, Rosi

6 (24) - Interregnum - Director/Auteur/Autoren

6 (25) West Germany

6 (26) - Alexander Kluge Part One

6 (27) - Alexander Kluge Part Two

6 (28) - The Young German Cinema: Reitz, Schlondorff, von Trotta

6(29 ) West German Cinema - Fassbinder

6 (30) West German Cinema - Straub & Huillet

6(31) - New Spanish Cinema

6 (32) - Bunuel in the 60s

6 (33) Nordic Cinemas - Bergman and Widerberg

6 (34) - Scandinavia - Sjoman, Zetterling, Troell

6 (35) - East Germany - Konrad Wolf, Frank Beyer

6 (36) - East Central Europe - Poland

6(37) - East Central Europe - Hungary Part One

6 (38) East Central Europe - Miklos Jancso

6 (39) East Central Europe - Czechoslovakia

6 (40) East Central Europe - Yugoslavia

6 (41) - The Soviet Union

6 (42) - Asia - Japan - Part One

6 (43) - Japan - Part Two

6 (44) - Japan - Part Three - Shohei Imamura

6 (45) Asia - India Pt 1 - Satyajit Ray

6 (46) Asia - India Pt 2- Ghatak, Dutt, Sen, Parallel Cinema

6 (47) Asia - China - Part 1: Mapping Chinese Cinema 

6(47) Asia- China - Part 2: The Shanghai Revival (1947-1949)

6 (48) - Brazil Pt 1- Cinema Novo, dos Santos, Rocha

6 (49) Brazil Pt 2 - de Andrade, Diegues, Guerra

6(50) - Latin America - Argentina

6 (51) - Chile - Allende and Popular Unity

6 (52) - Latin America - Bolivia, Jorge Sanjine

CINEMA REBORN - CLASSIC FRENCH CINEMA - PORT OF SHADOWS (1938), THE WATCHMAKER OF SAINT PAUL (1974), 36 FILLETTE (1988)

The 2026 program includes three remarkable films from three classic periods of French Cinema.

PORT OF SHADOWS (Marcel Carné, 1938) is an early film from the master film-maker best known for the wartime masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). In his notes for the film published on the Cinema Reborn website critic Charles Carrall writes: “In his third feature-length film Port of Shadows (Le quai des brumes, 1938), an early masterpiece for Carné, the port city of Le Havre is shrouded in a serious fog. …As one of seven works in his celebrated partnership with screenwriter Jacques Prévert, Carné’s Port of Shadows, based on a Pierre Mac Orlan novel, stands out for its remarkable atmosphere of doom and gloom.

‘A remarkably beautiful motion picture.’ – Frank S. Nugent, The New York Times

The link to Charles’ notes takes you through to bookings and session times in Sydney and Melbourne. Screens twice in each city.

Introduced by Bruce Beresford at Ritz Cinemas and Dr. Felicity Chaplin at Lido Cinemas.

THE WATCHMAKER OF SAINT PAUL (Bertrand Tavernier, 1974)

‘An extraordinary film – the more so because it attempts to show us the very complicated workings of the human personality, and to do it with grace, some humour and a great deal of style.’ – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

In Bertrand Tavernier’s feature directorial debut, adapted from a Georges Simenon novel, the quiet, orderly life of a widowed watchmaker (Philippe Noiret) is blown apart by the revelation that his teenage son has gone on the run after killing a man. Forming a relationship with a sympathetic police inspector (Jean Rochefort), the watchmaker searches for answers and grapples with the realisation that he knows far less about his son than he believed.

Introduced by Barrie Pattison at Ritz Cinemas and Dr. Andrew McGregor at Lido Cinemas

Read Ben McCann’s program notes and find links to session times and bookings. Screens twice in each city.

36 FILLETTE (Catherine Breillat, 1988)

‘Impressive, painfully candid … Lili is played with devastating realism by Delphine Zentout.’ – David Stratton, The Movie Show

Featuring a key supporting role by French New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud, Catherine Breillat’s international breakthrough film – based on a novel she wrote about her own teenage experiences – was controversial in its day, and time has if anything only increased its transgressive charge. It remains a frank, unsentimental and singularly pungent depiction of feminine coming-of-age, anchored by Zentout’s fearless performance.

Introduced by Beaudicea Smith-Davies at Ritz Cinemas and Philippa Hawker at Lido Cinemas.

Read Jane Mills program notes and find links to session times and bookings. Screens once only in each city.

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