Out of the Cold-War west: A sociological view on the emergence of a Chinese art cinema in the mid-1980s.

摘要

This study explores the historical conditions for a group of Chinese films to be received as "artworks" in the West in the post Cold-War era. The Cold-War (1950s-1970s) ideological conflicts drew China into oppositional intimacy and mutually vulnerability with the West, in political ideology and cultural values. Political propaganda required denouncing "romance/personal relations" in film contents. Similarly, Western personal relations became a political ideology in the anti-communist campaigns. In dissolving the Cold-War binary codes---propaganda vs. romance, the West reinvented the "eye" that could see films coming out of communist China as art films. The changed perception of the West of Chinese films had two components. First, Hollywood romance as the embodiment of "bourgeois value" of the Cold War transformed into "realism," a film style that Chinese government endorsed for socialist causes. Only because the West began to see politics in aesthetic terms could the Fifth Generation films became "auteur works."; Pierre Bourdieu's "artist/cultural field" is the organizing concept. My empirical evidence comes from the New York Times between 1949 and 1988. A historical approach to these texts is combined with discourse and institutional analyses. "Chinese film(s)," conceived as a discourse-based, historically formed institution in the U.S., transformed from "ideology" to "film" and gradually enabled the Fifth Generation to emerge as an autonomous art cinema.