"Real people, real events" : actuality and mass politics in maoist documentary cinema
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Documentary filmmaking in Mao's China involved intricate and often unpredictable negotiations between the reporting of historical facts and the transmission of ideological messages, as well as between interpreting the world and changing it. As a study of Chinese documentarian practice during the 1950s and 60s, this dissertation will illuminate how its representations and transformations of lived reality reflected broader societal tensions. The political salience of Mao-era documentary cinema, I contend, can be thrown into relief by following how the terms of debate over its engagement with social reality were successively revised against a shifting ideological and technological terrain. The first half of this study interrogates the decisive critical concept of zhenshixing (truthfulness, authenticity), concentrating on the contest over creative and organizational agency that hung in the balance amidst 1950s disputes concerning how filmmakers should and should not go about addressing themselves to "real people, real events". The second half of my project then turns to the textual analysis of key motion pictures released at the onset of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution: the nuclear test film Great Triumph of Mao Zedong Thought (1966) and the documentary series celebrating the historic Red Guard rallies in Beijing (1966-67). I show how the imagery and aesthetic choices found in these cinematic works point to contending visions of social mobilization and political subjectivity, visions that called into question prior media production arrangements and espoused new logics of form, giving expression to essential conflicts between anarchic mass-political exuberance and the grey rationality of technocratic control. This dissertation reveals the surprising theoretical depth and formal innovativeness of a cinematic corpus that has been dismissed as dogmatic and devoid of aesthetic interest. Moreover, it brings into focus what was productively aberrant and exceptional about Cultural Revolution culture, underscoring fractures and scissions in Mao-era documentary cinema, as reframed in terms of a "politicizing of art" deeply indebted to Maoist notions of truth and aesthetic production, representation and reality, knowing and doing.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Pei, Eldon |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History. |
| Primary advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Ma, Jean, 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Levi, Pavle |
| Thesis advisor | Mullaney, Thomas S. (Thomas Shawn) |
| Thesis advisor | Wang, Ban |
| Advisor | Levi, Pavle |
| Advisor | Mullaney, Thomas S. (Thomas Shawn) |
| Advisor | Wang, Ban |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Eldon Pei. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Eldon Pei
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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