The cinema of make-believe: Rural viewers’ early reception of film propaganda in socialist China

Abstract

The substantial popularization of film only became a reality in China after the Chinese Communist Party sent down projection teams to the countryside in the 1950s to build a nationwide network of film propaganda. As rural viewers witnessed simultaneously the earliest arrival of cinema and the propagation of socialist ideas at the time, a study of their experiences offers an alternative understanding of early spectatorship which has long been structured by the conception of ‘the cinema of attractions’. I propose using ‘the cinema of make-believe’ to conceptualize the practices of film exhibition in rural China, indicating the isomorphism between the apparatus of cinema and that of propaganda. I argue that the capability of navigating film and reality was made prominent in rural viewers’ early reception of cinema, in which spectators were made to believe the presence of absent objects. Such ‘present-absence’ effect embedded in cinema facilitated the operation of socialist propaganda, despite obstructing the goal of universal agitation in certain circumstances.

Keywords:

• Early cinema
• film propaganda
• spectatorship
• socialist China

Acknowledgements

I want to express my deep gratitude to Prof. Laikwan Pang for her insightful comments on the earlier version of the article and to the anonymous reviewers for their inspiring comments which helped improve the manuscript greatly. I would like to thank Zhang Ying, Zhang Zhengguo, Liu Hui, Fan Shengli, Zhou Zhuo for helping me reach out to different interviewees in Shaanxi.

Notes on contributor

Yanping Guo is senior researcher in the Department of Journalism and Comunication at South China Normal University. Her current research interest includes media history, propaganda practices and theories, and cultural politics of socialist China. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Gender & History, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, among others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Propaganda film is used in a broader sense, which refers to all films produced by the state, particular during the Mao’s era. For more details, please see: Johnson, Matthew D. “Propaganda film.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 10.1 (2016): 17-20.

2 It was observed that people in Africa and India encountered similar situations. People in East Africa thought the filmic figures were alive and rushed up to touch them. In Indian villages, while some ‘sat transfixed staring in wonderment before them’, one man went behind the screen thinking there were real men there (Bottomore 1999, 140).

3 The CCP’s belief in cinema’s evidentiary function is linked to China’s long history in which film was a tool for education in as much as entertainment. In China, the idea of exploiting the indexicality of film for educational purposes dates back to the early period of Republican China. As early as the 1910s, there were articles introducing examples of foreign countries, using films to show people the customs of other countries in order to broaden their horizons. In the book Moving Shadow Play (huodong yingxi), one of the earliest textbooks to introduce cinema, Sun Yuxiu explains why film can be an educational tool: “Nowadays, every country sees film as a sharp tool.…In just a moment, it can turn celebrity stories, historical and commenorative events, and scenic attractions into films. And then films can be distributed in the countryside.…People in our nation are still under cultivated (minzhi weikai). They have never seen, not even in their dreams, the new inventions from the west. Make them watch film will be great!” Intellectuals like Sun recognized that film had the ability to approach reality and transcend time and space; it brought the distant close, the past present, and the invisible visible. They believed that the idea of opening people’s mind by opening their eyes was self-evident.

4 For more details about the policy of ‘vision education’, please see provincial working reports (‘Shanxi’ 1954; ‘Shaanxi’ 1957).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Science Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education of China [grant number 18YJC760019] and the Ph.D. Support Scheme (2016-2017) of Faculty of Arts of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.