Towards a postsocialist cinema: The representation of the Cultural Revolution in films from the People's Republic of China, 1976-1981.

摘要

This dissertation seeks to determine whether the cycle of films produced after the Fall of the Gang of Four in the People's Republic of China in 1976 and representing events during the Cultural Revolution decade of 1966 to 1976 constitutes a major break with the classical mainland Chinese cinema that had been dominant in that country after 1949. It is widely acknowledged in scholarship about China that Chinese society and culture now is qualitatively different from the heyday of socialism, both in terms of a decline in central control and loss of faith in the socialist vision. This dissertation understands this new culture as postsocialist, and therefore asks if these films constitute the earliest sustained manifestation of postsocialist cinema.; An institutional and textual analysis of the main features of the classical mainland Chinese cinema is carried out as part of the dissertation. It determines this cinema to be pedagogical and details its features. The examination of the corpus films proceeds through consideration of themes, characters, narrative structure and spectatorial engagement. It finds that themes are increasingly separate from the concerns of the Party-state apparatus, and that lead characters are increasingly distanced from this apparatus. Finally, it notes that in the final years of the cycle of films composing the corpus, these tendencies are consolidated into pattern where the films are about both romance and family bonds. The Party-state apparatus is positioned as the interrupter of these bonds, and the pedagogical spectatorial engagement of the classical cinema is replaced with an emphasis on empathetic sharing of suffering and construction of peer group bonds that are counter culture in being defined against the hierarchical structures of the pedagogical cinema. Therefore, the dissertation concludes that these films are indeed the earliest sustained manifestation of a postsocialist cinema in the People's Republic of China.