The Dissemination And Acceptance Of Soviet Film In China (1950-1960)

After the People’s Republic of China established in1949, Communist Party urgently carried out a new socialist culture movement in mainland, to integrate ideology and grasp the cultural leadership. As "Big Brother" of the socialist camp, Soviet socialist culture naturally became the example of new China to study and follow. Among the many cultural forms, film plays a more significant role in cultivating people’s socialist identity and in the process of constructing the national imagination for it is popular, easy to copy and to spread. Therefore, learning from the Soviet film became the strategy and action at the national level. Within this general framework, however, the spread of Soviet film in China presented a complicated picture. It involved many changes within Chinese domestic policies, geopolitics, especially the establishment of national image of new China.The Sino-Soviet relationship was relatively close in the1950s during which a large number of Soviet films were screened. Among them, the classic films in Stalin’s era had a positive effect on new China, because their narrative of the revolutionary war and the imagination of socialism and communism had affinity with the new Chinese understanding of the nature of revolutionary war and the assumptions on the model of socialist culture. The positive influence spread to the popular culture as well. But the Soviet Unfrozen Film, especially the humanitarian thought of the new war film was contrary to new Chinese culture, which led to an identity crisis. At the same time, the new China launched an exploration on film nationality.