As fans know well, Chinese cinema is wildly diverse, in forms that vary from outlandish Hong Kong kung-fu flicks to heart-wrenching tragedies overseen by mainland auteurs. Scholarly interest in Chinese cinema, however, has largely centered on fictional films produced by famous directors for urban audiences. Fortunately, two recent publications offer a strong and necessary correction by emphasizing the complexity of Chinese cinema, both in production and reception, over the long course of the twentieth century. Jie Li’s Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China brings to life the role of cinema in the vast Chinese countryside, where projection teams roamed for miles from village to village to bring Communist-approved entertainment to new audiences. Ying Qian’s Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China, meanwhile, expands the scope of inquiry to documentary media, broadly conceived in both form and content, and thus further destabilizes accepted conceptions of Chinese film. Together, these two books greatly expand the study of Chinese cinema and, in conjunction with many recent studies on Chinese opera, dance, and storytelling, foreshadow an increasingly comprehensive understanding of China’s cultural scene.
Read together, the two books reveal several shared concerns that will resonate with scholars of Chinese culture, starting with the difficulty of investigating their respective topics. Li’s research for Cinematic Guerrillas was greatly complicated by the fact that her focus is film projection in the countryside, where few textual records remain. Li tackled this problem through extensive “guerilla fieldwork.” Most notably, she delved into oral histories, working with Feng Xiaocai and graduate students at East China Normal University to interview over sixty projectionists and one hundred audience members. To her credit, Li reflects on the problems of studying PRC history: investigating the famed Three Sisters Movie Team, for instance, she notes how difficult it is to untangle fiction from fact when dealing with models promoted by the PRC state. Qian, meanwhile, faced a unique challenge in writing Revolutionary Becomings: many of the documentary films under investigation have been lost to time. The destruction of these films, produced during moments of military and political upheavals, is a great loss for scholars and film buffs alike. But I commend Qian for her ability to dig through the diaries and journals of filmmakers in order to carefully analyze films destroyed alongside the Shanghai film studios where they had been created.
As this commonality suggests, war looms large in both monographs. Qian starts Revolutionary Becomings with China’s first documentary, which tellingly captured the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 on film. Documentary production was deeply engaged with military men such as the warlord Feng Yuxiang, who commissioned a biopic to glorify himself as a leader enjoying a close and paternalistic relationship with his soldiers. During the Chinese Civil War of 1945–49, filmmakers under Communist direction braved the front lines to capture war on film, actions both exhilarating and deadly. Even after the war ended in victory over the Nationalists, Communist filmmakers reenacted many large-scale battles, with live ammunition. The resulting color documentaries were popular, but cost the lives of soldiers and filmmakers alike. Li confirms the popularity of war films in Cinematic Guerrillas, noting that they were particularly popular with rural audiences. Picky villagers preferred war films to foreign films, and even rural-themed cinema struggled to compete with battlefront dramas. War films were designed to instill an ethos of wartime sacrifice among viewers, including PLA soldiers, who enjoyed free screenings. Li finds solid evidence of the effectiveness of films such as The Heroic Little Guerillas: village youth, for instance, emulated such movies as they played war games using memories of “sparrow warfare,” where soldiers pecked at enemies with scattershot attacks. As Qian rightly observes, documentaries emerged not in a vacuum but in the context of colonial war and nationalist revolution. The same applies to other forms of media popularized in the twentieth-century, as well as to the cultural scene as a whole during the Mao years.
The prominence of war films serves as a useful reminder that cinema, like all aspects of artistic creation, was subordinated to political needs during the Mao years. Filmmakers emphasized war for propaganda reasons, and both authors are rightly sensitive to the relationship between art and propaganda. Li, while reminding readers how Mao and the Communists promoted cinema as a highly effective tool for propaganda, also highlights the active and at times ambiguous roles played by projectionists and audiences. As she notes, projectionists amplified, modified, and created propaganda, for example using light bamboo clappers, and praising local models with added lantern slides. Audiences, meanwhile, engaged in their own guerilla tactics by subverting top-down messages. Audiences embraced interesting villain characters over boring heroes, happily enjoyed “poisonous weed” movies that were being screened for mass criticism, and rejected anti-superstition messages. Qian, likewise, sees no simple relationship between documentary and propaganda. Documentary filmmakers shaped, influenced, and even staged the “real life” events they filmed. To be sure, these films were designed as propaganda. Documentaries taught factory workers and other audiences a new sense of time and offered instruction in DIY techniques such as constructing backyard steel furnaces. Like Li, however, Qian attends to the nuances of the Chinese term for propaganda (xuanchuan) and, emphasizing the sophistication of documentary viewers, pushes back against any assumption that these films were inherently effective in transforming audiences.
Both studies are concerned with the economic foundations of artistic production, a facet of art that has been largely overlooked in previous studies. Li’s research is at its best as she details the daily lives of projectionists, who were not self-sacrificing martyrs but were deeply concerned with their own economic well-being. Facing severe transportation, lodging, and food expenses, they had to ensure that their films drew audiences. Li pushes back against the common myth that rural cinema was free by detailing how villagers in fact paid collectively for the right to attend open-air screenings. Money was also much on the minds of wartime documentary filmmakers, who had trouble competing with their American rivals. Unlike American filmmakers, they had difficulty gaining access to restricted areas and hospitals to film war documentaries. American filmmakers could use their privileged status to rush cameras to the frontlines, and they could then screen footage of explosions and suffering for profit—actions not acceptable in the Chinese context.
As this comparison with American counterparts suggests, both authors explore the global aspects of Chinese cinema in their respective studies. In her discussion of projecting Soviet and other foreign cinema, Li emphasizes how local audiences received these films in diverse and creative ways. Transcultural guerillas, they found their own meanings in translated cinema, for example embracing North Korean films for their emotional power. Qian’s research into documentaries echoes much of this, especially the importance of Soviet influences, here starting with Joris Ivens, a filmmaker whose visit to China in the late 1930s had a profound impact on the Yan’an cultural scene. But where Li’s story emphasizes cooperation and borrowing between the PRC and its allies, Qian also notes the important role of competition with capitalist filmmakers, currently perhaps a larger problem than at any time in the past. Indeed, the two authors share a concern with the afterlives of Maoist cinema in contemporary China. Closing Cinematic Guerillas, Li traces the increasingly precarious fate of projectionists in the twenty-first century, as their shows attract ever fewer viewers, reminding this reviewer of the ongoing plight of rural drama troupes. And in Revolutionary Becomings, Qian fixes 1989 as a fateful year for documentaries. Tian’anmen was a watershed that severed the Party from the people, ushering in the era of independent documentaries, which now dominate the genre. Expansive in scope, richly detailed, and expertly researched, these two books will be greatly appreciated by scholars of modern Chinese culture.
