by Cook, James A. ,Goldstein, Joshua,Johnson, Matthew D. ,Schmalzer, Sigrid
In the early years of the PRC, Chinese filmmakers were generally split between those with career roots in the Shanghai film world (Shanghai was essentially China’s Hollywood in the 1910s to 1940s; all of the films discussed in this paper were made in Shanghai) and those with strong ties to Yan’an, the Communist base area in the rural hinterland of Northwest China. Needless to say, those from Shanghai were mostly veteran filmmakers; the Yan’an filmmakers acquired their rudimentary film training in the Communist-controlled countryside and had almost no experience making studio films. Those from Shanghai tended to pride themselves on their technical expertise; those from Yan’an bragged about their revolutionary credentials and unquestionable loyalty to the party and Mao.25
In the early 1950s the Shanghai group enjoyed the upper hand. The central film bureau in Beijing was headed by Yuan Muzhi and Chen Boer, both of whom had worked in Shanghai. Not surprisingly, the bureau in Shanghai was entirely dominated by the Shanghai group, with the city’s Cultural Commission under the charge of Yu Ling and Xia Yan, both longtime figures in the Shanghai film world. Indeed, Xia Yan and his friends were in powerful positions in post-1949 China and had little reason to feel threatened by the Yan’an group.
However, by the late 1950s and early 1960s the power struggle increasingly shifted in favor of the Maoist leftists from Yan’an. Xia Yan and his friends came under vicious attack, with Xia under internal investigation for his alleged antiparty activities. The charges leveled against him focused on his using his power and influence to shelter and promote people with questionable political backgrounds and his endorsement of a number of films whose political orientations were deemed problematic.26
In an effort to defend themselves and prove their revolutionary credentials, Xia Yan and his group began to stress the leftist thrust of 1930s cinema and their involvement in it. In 1959, in one of the earliest articles that spearheaded the notion of leftist cinema, Yu Ling emphasized the revolutionary nature of the 1930s films, Xia’s leadership role in the film industry’s leftist turn, and the Party’s endorsement of Xia’s activities. The implication of Yu’s account was obvious: the revolutionary credentials of Xia and his friends were unquestionable; their contribution to the Communist cause was immense; and, in case anyone wanted to fault them for having collaborated with capitalist film producers in 1930s Shanghai, that collaboration had been approved by top party officials.27 At the same time, under Xia’s direct backing, the film historian Cheng Jihua was composing an authoritative two-volume History of Chinese Cinema (Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, first published in 1963). From the start, the guiding principle of this work was to foreground the Communist Party’s leadership in 1930s cinema. The assessment of the pre-1949 Chinese filmmaking legacy was to be based exclusively on each and every film’s political orientation. By placing “leftist cinema” at the center of his narrative, Cheng’s A History of Chinese Cinema became the basis for many other historian’s accounts of 1930s Chinese cinema, both inside and outside China.28
Cheng’s narrative of 1930s Chinese cinema is both teleological and doctrinal. His decision on which filmmakers and films to include in his discussion, how much space to be allocated to them, and what should be the appropriate amount of praise or criticism for them was dictated not by an understanding of the 1930s reality, but by individual filmmakers’ political standing in late-1950s China. Hence, the most laudatory words are reserved for Xia Yan and his friends, who still held high offices at the time the book was written and were trying to defend their status. In contrast, the films of famous 1930s directors like Bu Wancang and Sun Yu were given very little credit because both directors had already fallen from grace with the CCP leadership: Bu had followed the Nationalists to Taiwan in 1949, and Sun had been condemned as a rightist in 1957, putting all of his earlier films under a cloud of suspicion.
A surge or articles and memoirs about 1930s cinema appeared in film magazines and newspapers in the late-1950s as the Xia camp desperately tried to fight against their declining power and influence. In a last ditch attempt to save themselves from an imminent purge, Xia and his friends used whatever influence they still had to orchestrate a campaign to manufacture the leftist cinema myth and cast themselves as revolutionary heroes, dedicated to the party and loyal to the Communist cause. The truth about the 1930s Chinese reality was never the dominant concern in this leftist cinema myth; the main impetus behind its creation was the desire of Chinese filmmakers to win, or at least survive, the power struggles of the 1950s–1970s.
Unfortunately for Xia and his “clique,” their efforts did not save them. One by one, each of them was purged and subject to political persecution. Indeed, during the Cultural Revolution, Maoist leftists and Red Guards simply denounced all 1930s films in their entirety—no Republican-era film was leftist enough. Yet on a certain level the Red Guards actually accepted and recapitulated the myth of leftist cinema that Xia Yan’s group had created, for they too upheld leftist politics as the only criteria on which to base film criticism and the only meaningful lens through which to view film history.29 Even after the Cultural Revolution the leftist myth was retained in tact. The new regime under Deng Xiaoping corrected the “Maoist excesses” of the Cultural Revolution, and Xia Yan and members from his group who survived the Cultural Revolution took back the offices they had previously occupied. Of no small significance, the official debut of their return to power was occasioned by a national conference purporting to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Leftist League. Xia Yan and other major figures from their camp all made speeches.30 In the wake of this conference, there was once again an outpouring of articles, memoirs, and books about leftist cinema. With Xia Yan and his group back in power, no dissenting voice about the subject could be heard and the leftist cinema myth was firmly cemented in public discourse.
Indeed, with the political benefits associated with “leftist cinema,” many have tried to jump on the bandwagon. As a result, the official list of supposedly leftist films has been expanding continuously. In 1959, Yu Ling identified thirty-five films as leftist.31 Three years later, Cheng Jihua labeled some fifty films as leftist.32 By the early 1990s, the chief editor of The Chinese Leftist Cinema Movement (Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong) included seventy-four titles as leftist.33 Yet few scholars have questioned the inconsistency or validity of the term “leftist cinema” as a viable paradigm through which to understand films made in the past.34
The Case of The Twin Sisters
The film, The Twin Sisters (dir. Zheng Zhengqiu, 1934), nicely illustrates how the meaning of a given film is subject to interpretation and political manipulation. In the story, a pair of twins is separated at a young age (Figure 8.8). Years later (the film is set in 1924, during the warlord era) one of the sisters, Dabao, lives in poverty; the other, Erbao, is married to a powerful general. As fate would have it, in her attempt to find employment so that she can support her sick mother, disabled husband, and two children, Dabao, winds up working as a wet nurse for her sister Erbao’s child. Of course, neither sister is aware of their blood kinship. In fact, Erbao treats her sister as she would anyone beneath her class standing—with condescension, and undisguised cruelty. Desperate for money to pay her husband’s hospital bill, Dabao begs Erbao for an advance on her salary, but Erbao rejects the request, roughly slapping Dabao when she asks a second time. Driven by desperation and prompted by Erbao’s abuse, Dabao attempts to steal a gold necklace from Erbao’s child. It so happens that a houseguest walks in and catches Dabao in the act of stealing. As she tries to break away, Dabao pushes the guest against a wall, accidentally dislodging a vase from its stand, which falls on the head of the guest who is accidentally killed. Dabao is arrested. By another amazing coincidence, the man in charge of Dabao’s alleged theft/murder case is her own father, but he does not realize that Dabao is his daughter. But when Dabao’s mom comes to visit her in jail, she recognizes her husband. The heroic mother threatens to reveal her husband’s sordid past (he was once an arms smuggler dea
ling with foreign imperialists) if he doesn’t do something to help Dabao. At the climax of the film, with the entire family reunited, Dabao denounces the rich and powerful as a cold-hearted bunch and condemns the phony nature of the class gap between her and her sister; Erbao then apologizes for the way she has treated her sister and invites her mom and her twin sister to sit in her car. With that, Dabao is rescued from certain harsh sentencing and the family patches things up.
Figure 8.8 Still from the climax of the film Twin Sisters (Zai sheng hua) in which the two sisters played by Hu Die share the screen. The film touches on many of China’s social problems in the 1930s, including the disparities between rich and poor and the high-handed treatment of the poor by the rich. The above image is a good example of representations that raises these class tensions but is certainly far from a clear promotion of class revolution or an unequivocal “leftist” message.
Upon its release, the film immediately became a hit. Indeed, The Twin Sisters has been ranked as one of the six most popular films in the entire history of Chinese filmmaking.35 Many critics also lauded the film. Some praised its realistic portrayals of the hardships suffered by the ordinary people and its exposure of the ugly side of the rich and powerful; others appreciated the film’s craftsmanship and technical sophistication—the Chinese film industry was undergoing the transition from silent to sound, and The Twin Sisters demonstrated Chinese filmmakers’ mastery of the new technology. The female lead, Hu Die, who played both of the twin sisters in the film, also received plaudits. Letters from fans poured in demanding the studio make a sequel.36
The GMD government praised the film as well. It won best sound film in 1934.37 A year later, the Nationalist government included the actress Hu Die in a delegation to represent China’s film industry at Moscow’s International Film Festival and the film was submitted as an entry. Indeed, it is not hard to understand why “right-wing” members of the official establishment often liked The Twin Sisters. First, the film is explicitly set in 1924, the warlord era, thus relegating its depiction of human suffering to the historical past. It thus avoids directly implicating 1930s Chinese reality or the GMD. Indeed, the original version of the film includes a scene where Dabao’s husband helps to distribute GMD newspapers and pamphlets espousing Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles (the central credo of the GMD) thereby portraying the GMD as liberators of the oppressed masses.38 China’s misery is placed at the doorstep of warlords and foreign imperialists; many of the misfortunes integral to the plot (the original abandonment of the twin sisters and their separation, the death of Dabao’s father-in-law) are blamed on the violence of foreign arms smuggling. For such reasons, the “right-wing” establishment could comfortably shower the film with honors.
By the same token, many leftist intellectuals disapproved of the film precisely because in their view it failed to address the domestic roots of China’s problems. Despite the focus on class issues, the solution the film proposes to resolve class conflict is, in the words of one critic, “to be reconciliatory” (tiaohe zhuyi de taidu) rather than resist exploitation.39 In particular, when Dabao fumes against the exploitation of the poor by the rich, her mother (in many ways the film’s ultimate heroine) repeatedly admonishes her: “We poor people are born poor. Please learn to be patient and accept your fate.” Lu Xun, China’s leading leftist cultural critic, faulted The Twin Sisters on account of this “poor man’s philosophy” and lamented that if people are taught to accept their fate, the future of China will be hopeless.40
Despite the left’s dismissal of the film in the 1930s, in post-1949 China, The Twin Sisters gradually metamorphosed into a model leftist film. At first, in the 1950s, Communist film historians continued to view the film as politically problematic and ideologically dubious. One author denounced it as an example of the wrong kind of mass appeal.41 While a few 1950s critics did think the film noteworthy,42 it was generally excluded from the honor roll of progressive leftist films.43 It was not until after the Cultural Revolution, in the 1980s, that The Twin Sisters became consistently labeled “leftist.” First, in an article to commemorate Zheng Zhengqiu, Xia Yan, suggested that The Twin Sisters was a “transitional work” marking Zheng’s shift to progressive filmmaking; as such it necessarily contained both backward and revolutionary elements.44 Xia’s remarks signaled a more lenient assessment of Zheng and his films on the part of the official establishment. A study of Zheng’s entire film repertoire was soon published crediting Zheng for his contribution to Chinese film history.45 Today The Twin Sisters is most often described as a successful model of revolutionary filmmaking that exhibits both the correct ideological orientation (i.e., promulgating class consciousness) and an ability to appeal to mass audiences.46 We see here the myth of leftist film in action: The Twin Sisters, a film rejected by the Chinese left when it was made, is now described as a model of Republican-era leftist art.
Conclusion
In discussing myth making as an approach to history, Paul Cohen has observed that typically, mythologization achieves its effect “not through out-and-out falsification but through distortion, oversimplification, and omission of material that doesn’t serve its purpose or runs counter to it.”47 Cohen’s insight is a useful reminder when dismantling the myth about leftist cinema.
It is an undeniable fact that there was a flourishing leftist culture during the Republican period. It is also beyond dispute that a number of underground Communist writers, already active in the left-wing cultural movement, became involved in filmmaking in the early 1930s. No serious historian should be blind to the influence of the leftist movement on the filmmaking of the time. But to what extent that influence constituted a “leftist cinema movement” and in what sense the films that involved underground Communist writers were subversive and antagonistic to the GMD government are questions open for debate and far from settled.
As I have demonstrated in this chapter, while right-wing Nationalists in the 1930s may have made a ruckus about leftist films as a strategy to justify taking control of film censorship from more liberal elements in the government, overall the Nationalist government was quite receptive to the very films that are now labeled leftist. I have also stressed the fluidity of the historical context which renders the meanings of the films from this period extremely ambiguous. Any attempt to interpret these films from a single angle will fail to bring out their complexities and multiplicity in meanings. While Xia and his friends may deserve our sympathy and though it is understandable that they would want to repackage 1930s cinema to save themselves from a political purge in the Mao era, the myth they have created and perpetuated is a too simplistic and one-dimensional representation of Chinese filmmaking during the Republican era. This narrowly defined political interpretive framework hampers our fuller and more complex appreciation of 1930s Chinese films.
Notes
1. The incident is reported in Damei wanbao (Evening News), November 13, 1933. See Guowen zhoubao, 11:6 (February 1934) for the full text of this letter.
2. For more details about the NFCC operations, see Zhiwei Xiao, Film Censorship in China, 1927–1937, a Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of California, San Diego, 1994.
3. No. 2 Historical Archives, Nanjing, 2 (2)-271/16J1505, dated April 5, 1933.
4. Dianying jiancha weiyuanhui gongzuo baogao (The work report of the national film censorship committee), Nanjing, 1934, p. 64.
5. Quanguo dianying gongsi fuzeren tanhua hui jiniance (The symposium of all China film studio executives, conference proceedings), 1934, p. 30.
6. Zhongyang dianying jiancha weiyuanhui gongbao (The central film censorship committee news bulletin, hereafter ZYGB), 1:9 (1934), p. 37.
7. Ibid, 3:8 (1936), p. 48.
8. ZYGB, 1:2 (1932).
9. Luo Gang, “Zhongyang dianjian gongzuo gaikuang” (An overview of film censorship under the CFCC), in Zhongguo dianying nianjian 1934 (China film year book, 1934), Nanjing: 1935, pp. 1–3.
10. For details of the
article, see International Literature, no. 4 (1933), p. 153. This journal was published in Moscow and distributed throughout the world, including China. Presumably, the Nationalists had access to this publication.
11. No. 2 Historical Archives (2)—271/16J1505, dated April 5, 1933.
12. See The Work Report of the National Film Censorship Committee (Dianying jiancha weiyuanhui gongzuo baogao), Nanjing: 1934, pp. 42–43. Freedom Flower is not mentioned in any sources currently available, which raises the possibility that it may be Freedom Soul (Ziyou hun, dir. Wang Cilong, 1931).
13. Although the Chinese sources mention Milan as the site of this event, no research in Italian has confirmed the reference. My thanks go to Ms. Pollacchi Elena for bringing my attention to this issue.
14. Yingxi nianjian (Film year book), p. 45. The date of this publication is unknown, but its contents suggest that it was published between 1936 and 1937.
15. “Zhongyang xuanchuanbu juban guochan yingpian pingxuan” (The CPC set up best film award for domestic productions), in Zhongyang ribao (Central daily), June 1, 1936.
16. “Benjie guochan yingpian pingxuan jiexiao” (This year’s film award has been announced), DS, 6:25 (1937), p. 1076.
17. You Li, “Bu Wancang juran kai dujiao gongsi, Chen Lifu dai choubei ziben sanwanyuan” (Bu starts a company of his own, Chen raises 30,000 for him), in Yule Zhoubao (Variety), 1:5 (1935), p. 166.
18. ZYBG, 1:1 (1931), p. 28.
19. Donald Jordan, China’s Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 11.
