Chinese Revolutionary Cinema by Jessica Ka Yee Chan;

Author:Jessica Ka Yee Chan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: social film theory and criticism, Chinese revolutionary cinema, state cinema, People’s Republic of China, socialist culture, modernity, internationalism, state propaganda, twentieth-century socialism
ISBN: 9781786724342
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

In revolutionary films such as Song of Youth (Cui Wei and Chen Huaikai, 1959) and The Red Detachment of Women (Xie Jin, 1961), however, the narrative trope of martyrdom – the death of a male hero – establishes the surviving female lead character as the custodian of the socialist realist gaze. In The Red Detachment of Women, a montage sequence signals the heroine’s epiphany and leap to political consciousness. At a critical moment in the film, Qionghua, having witnessed the death of her mentor and implied lover, Changqing, encounters the official papers approving her admission to the Party. The sequence cuts to an extreme close-up shot of Qionghua’s gaze, superimposed with Party documents (Figure 3.14). The montage sequence, combined with subjectified sound (the Internationale), visually and aurally evokes her psychological reactions through a highly condensed succession of visual motifs: Party documents and Qionghua’s socialist realist gaze.

The montage sequence can also be read as the moment when Qionghua’s libidinal energy is rechannelled and sublimated into political goals – the Party becomes Qionghua’s locus of memory after her mentor (and implied lover) sacrifices himself for a revolutionary cause. Hence, the attractions that the montage sequence creates are in part derived from the unconsummated romance between Qionghua and Changqing.61 Qionghua’s gaze becomes properly socialist because it is neither relayed through other major or supporting characters nor punctuated by empty shots. Instead, her gaze points to an off-screen space without a defined diegetic object, signalling her leap to political consciousness. The document certifying her admission to the Party defines her gaze as one that belongs exclusively to Party members.

Since spectators implicated in the visual logic of the relay of gazes are central to the evolution of the socialist realist gaze, I suggest that the use of montage in Chinese revolutionary cinema was premised on the theoretical notion that film viewing is a collective and a participatory experience on a sensual and ideological level. Cinematic attraction, after all, is premised on direct visual and aural stimuli and the reactions of the audience, as Eisenstein underscores in his explications of the montage of attractions:

The attraction (аттракцион) has nothing in common with the stunt (трюк) […] In so far as the trick (трик) is absolute and complete within itself (в себе) [original emphasis], it means the direct opposite of the attraction, which is based exclusively on something relative, the reactions of the audience (реакции зрителя).62

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