Jessica Ka Yee Chan's Chinese Revolutionary Cinema corrects two common assumptions about Chinese cinema after the 1949 revolution; that it was crude and clichéd, and that it was cut off from the rest of the world. Instead, she demonstrates that it was both propaganda and an aesthetic experiment, and that it was highly attentive not only to the rest of the socialist world but also to the legacy of its earlier links to Hollywood.
After an introduction setting out the project, the first chapter provides historical background by detailing the fate of the cinema during the various political campaigns that shaped the era. She begins to unfold her argument in the second chapter, which focuses on family melodrama after 1949. Chan analyses this genre as a revolutionary recasting of Hollywood's classical mode of cinematic narration. Critics emphasized the importance of linear storytelling, with a clear cause and effect logic. This pattern followed the Hollywood model, although rarely directly acknowledging it. Furthermore, unlike Hollywood melodrama, romance and the formation of the family are only steps on the way to the ultimate fulfilment of serving the Party and the revolution.
The third chapter, “Translating Soviet montage,” examines editing in the films of the post-revolutionary era. Chan goes back to the pre-revolutionary era to trace the translation and discussion of Russian writing on film editing. Pudovkin's montage, which supports the narrative in a manner similar to Hollywood, is usually understood as competing with Eisenstein's preference for using editing to create provocative dissonance. But in the post-1949 Chinese discourse, Chan shows that they were often merged into the “Soviet style.” Chan also explores particular patterns. These include montages that illustrated revolutionary songs, sound montages that communicated the feelings and thoughts of revolutionary heroes and heroines, and relays of the revolutionary gaze into the future perfect of socialism.
The fourth chapter details a short but significant episode in which China's own movie stars were promoted. This occurred after the Sino-Soviet split had terminated the promotion of Russian stars and the failure of the Great Leap Forward had put the moderates back in power in China. Within a couple of years, stars were condemned as bourgeois in the build-up to the Cultural Revolution. As Chan details, just as Pudovkin's montage was similar to Hollywood's, adopting and adapting the Soviet star system was also akin to Hollywood, but not acknowledged as such. She also details the techniques used to glamorize and promote the new stars.
The final core chapter looks at how film journals imagined China as a part of a larger picture of international engagement that included dubbing imported film, staging special film weeks from fraternal socialist countries, and Chinese films going out to film festivals overseas. Before the Sino-Soviet split, China imagined itself learning from the Soviet Union. But afterwards, it led its own network of Third World friends and reported on their allegedly eager consumption of Chinese cinema.
A section of Chan's introduction proclaims 1949–1966 as “the missing years” in terms of scholarship. This idea is ironic, because films from 1949–1966 dominated when Chinese films first started circulating in the West after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. They have been eclipsed in both availability and scholarship on them since. Nevertheless, Paul Clark's pioneering Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 (Cambridge University Press, 1988) covers most of the history discussed here, as does Zhuoyi Wang's Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). A range of other writing by scholars including Tina Mai Chen, Yomi Braester and others, mostly acknowledged in the references for this book, has also countered dismissal of the aesthetics of revolutionary cinema, and the assumption of isolation after 1949.
However, it would be wrong to think that Chinese Revolutionary Cinema does not make a substantial contribution to our understanding of cinema in the “Seventeen Years.” The real strength and originality of Chan's book lies in the meticulous and detailed analysis of the critical discourse of the period. Through analysing everything from film magazines to policy documents, Chan demonstrates that the Chinese film world was very conscious of links to international film culture and the importance of aesthetics, and heavily engaged in debates about these topics. No one else has analysed the development of China's film culture and criticism in the revolutionary era in as much detail before.
Therefore, it is very welcome to find that the book includes extensive referencing, a full bibliography, a filmography with Chinese characters and a glossary of Chinese terms. Only the inclusion of a character list for Chinese names is missing, which might have caught the unfortunate error of movie star Shangguan Yunzhu's name appearing as “Shanggong Yunzhu” throughout. Nevertheless, as well as the text itself, the scholarly apparatus will make the book an essential resource for all scholars working on this era.
