| Devoted to a domain of culture where the interaction between aesthetics and politics becomes particularly visible, that is, cinema, this study attempts to inspect how Chinese communists used various aesthetic means to create powerful political images under the guidance of Soviet socialist realism. So far little academic attention has been paid to Chinese films in the 1950s-1960s, especially those about minorities; the history of the transplantation of Soviet socialist realism and its theory of aestheticized ideology into Chinese cinema has long been overlooked.; Based upon primary and secondary materials in Russian, Chinese, and English, this study mainly employs a comparative approach to present its evidence and analysis. In conclusion, it argues that the Soviet understanding of the communication between aesthetics and politics was perpetuated in Chinese minority films in the 1950s-1960s, which did not celebrate ethnic diversity at a superficial level, but tried to locate "socialist style" in ethnic cultural practices and achieve the goal of transcending minority people into a heroic status in the myth of the "great socialist family." The minority films shrewdly made the audience linger in an imaginary sphere, only to elevate them to the lofty order of the symbolic socialist heroism. In doing so, these films were not simply the servants of ideology, but had their own aesthetic tasks to perform. The politics of Chinese minority films in the 1950s-1960s was an aestheticized politics. |
