Chinese Revolutionary Cinema: Propaganda, Aesthetics and Internationalism 1949-1966

Engaging with key films from the decade and a half between 1949 and ’66, this book explores the aesthetic experiment of socialist cinema in China. In the years succeeding the Communist Revolution, the state produced a diversity of genres that functioned as propaganda for the newly established People’s Republic. Breaking from past forms, revolutionary cinema adapted and revised Chinese literature for the screen, incorporated aspects of Hollywood narration and appropriated Soviet montage theory for its own means, as well as orchestrating a new, glamorous, socialist star culture. Chinese film periodicals were quick to project and disseminate the country’s redefined self-image to both domestic and international domains as they helped to create an alternative vision of modernity and internationalism.The author of this study analyses these important aspects of cinematic culture, prior to the creatively oppressive onset of the Cultural Revolution, to enrich our understanding of the internationalist agenda and attraction of Chinese revolutionary cinema and its heroic storylines. Revealing the historical contingency and mutability of the term `propaganda,’ Chan uncovers the visual, aural, kinaesthetic, sexual and political appeal that lies at the heart of the efficacy of propaganda as a persuasive form of pedagogy and entertainment. Based on extensive archival research, this book’s focus on the distinctive rhetoric of post-war Communist China will be of value to East Asian cinema scholars, Chinese studies academics and those interested in the history of 21st century socialist culture.