Abstract
Moulding the Socialist Subject by Xiaoning Lu is a concise yet insightful book. It addresses the instrumental role of cinema in textual form and as a state apparatus in ‘remoulding’ (改造, pp. 5 and 165) socialist subjectivity, as well as the intersection and interaction of cinema with other key discourses such as sport, ethnicity, theatre, melodrama, spectatorship/reception, and the urban/rural dichotomy.
Lu’s accounts are historically grounded, with coherent references to leaders’ speeches, government documentation, and film archives from 1949 to 1966. Numerous citations from Mass Cinema (大众电影, now known as Popular Cinema), Film Art (电影艺术) and so on make the arguments compelling and convincing. Likewise, each chapter unpacks such key concepts as new sports (新体育) and ethnicity (民族) during the Mao era for a contextualized discussion.
Structure-wise, the book paints a heterogeneous cinescape of counter-espionage genre, sport films, minority pictures, stardom, and mobile projection teams. It avoids grand narratives such as gender, nationalism, and revolution. Instead, the book re-examines ‘important yet understudied’ (p. 73) film texts and ‘a distinct cultural imaginary’ (p. 63) associated with them. This structural choice shores up its thematic trope of cinema subjectivity manifested in various genres, and also enables a theoretical engagement with surveillance, laughter/attraction, adaptation, and affective stardom, all registered in the Maoist era and also vital in discussing modernity and cinema.
The Introduction grapples with two underpinning concepts: subject/subjectivity and spectacle. Hinging on Mao’s speech of remoulding and the Foucauldian discourse of biopower, Lu acknowledges ‘the effectiveness of cinema in reforming subjectivity’ (p. 2) and reinforces the saturation of socialist ‘images and narratives through mass-media’ (p. 9) as spectacle. Her goals are to redeem the subject as fluid, porous, and multivalent and to reconfigure cinema as ‘a site of cultural struggle over meaning production’ (p. 12).
Chapters 1 and 2 approach cinema as a mobilizing and empowering tool for the masses to take action to safeguard national security and strengthen the human body. Examples from the counter-espionage genre (The Might of the People, 人民的巨掌, dir. Liting Chen, 1950) and sport films (Trouble on the Basketball Court, 球场风波, dir. Yu Mao, 1957) illustrate how participatory surveillance forms early socialist consciousness and how the new physical culture promotes worker ethics and models audience behaviour.
Chapter 3 discusses another under-represented genre, ‘minority film’, in terms of its categorization, singing/dancing exoticness, and ethnic otherness (p. 71). Two films, Flames of War in a Border Village (边寨烽火, dir. Nong Lin, 1957) and Daji and Her Fathers (达吉和她的父亲, dir. Jiayi Wang, 1961), are used as examples of cross-ethnic performance and adaptation from script to screen. Lu aptly argues that minority film serves as a cultural enterprise to ‘cultivate socialist fraternity and to shape socialist subjectivity’ (p. 95).
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on two renowned socialist movie stars to illustrate the party’s social engineering of the model worker and negative pedagogy on- and off-screen, with Zhang Ruifang portraying the female paragon and Chen Qiang the male villain. One positive and the other villainous, one instructed by the Stanislavski system and the other originating from the ‘spoken drama’ (话剧) tradition, one aiming to elevate the morale of the masses and the other fuelling class struggle; a comparative reading provides more insights into socialist stardom.
Chapter 6 addresses countryside socialist subjectivity through the lens of itinerant film projection teams. Painting a daily routine of this political yet recreational cinema instrument, its challenges and benefits, Lu credits the agency of film projectionists who claimed their gender specificity and were highly capable of operating machinery.
Due to the scope and length of the book, some of the analysis (e.g. only one counter-espionage film was appraised) albeit illuminating ends too soon. A literature review with recent publications on Chinese socialist cinema would have been helpful (e.g. Jessica Ka Yee Chan, Chinese Revolutionary Cinema: Propaganda, Aesthetics and Internationalism 1949–1966, London: I. B. Tauris, 2019 and Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). I would have liked to see more attention paid to junctures from geopolitical and generic perspectives. How was the socialist subject simultaneously remoulded by international cinemas from the Soviet Union or North Korea, for example, the inspiration that Zhang Ruifang drew from Soviet female stars (see Tina Mai Chen, Socialism, aestheticized bodies, and international circuits of gender: Soviet female film stars in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1969, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 18(2), 2007: 53–80)?
Lu examines subjectivity on bodily, affective, and epistemological levels and its (trans)formation in various genres, and it would have been helpful if she had provided the rationale for such a selection and if she had explained how subjectivity was remoulded in other popular war films (e.g. Dong Cunrui 董存瑞, dir. Wei Guo, 1955) and socialist construction films.
Moulding the Socialist Subject is a welcome addition for students who love diverse movies, the general public eager to understand the ‘structure of feeling’ prevalent in a socialist regime, and scholars of China studies.