| Euro-American critical literature on Chinese cinema has long developed a strong preference for two separate eras, the pre-1949 period and the post-1984 period. The thirty-five years in between, and the continuities among these three periods, have received little attention. Moreover, with a few exceptions, this limited research usually overlooks the diversities both within and beyond the film industry, and takes Communist films as monolithic and univocal, representing state ideology and serving Party propaganda only. In this dissertation, I work to fill in this gap. Following Rick Altman's theory, I argue that meanings of films in general and of early PRC films in particular must be understood on the discursive level as contingent products of ongoing multipartite negotiations on how to use the texts. With a focus on the first decade of the PRC from 1949 to 1959, I delineate how the continuous anti-elite revolution created rapid power shifts in both the cultural leadership and filmmaking ranks, analyze the diverse, and often opposing filmmaking legacies interplaying with each other in the 1950s, and examine how conflicts and compromises among multiple agents, including mainly diverse groups of film artists, Party authorities, and critics, complicated the ways to use early PRC films. Based on this large-scale historical research, I propose a shift in framework of analysis to a user-centered discursive study to approach the revolutionary cinema. In particular, I will analyze the diverse and shifting uses of four films in early PRC: Song Jingshi (1957), The Unfinished Comedy (1957), Blooming Flowers and Full Moon (1958) and Nie Er (1959). |
