The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture

Altering Archives

Peng Hsiao-yen, Ella Raidel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351692830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Cinema archives memories, conserves the past, and rewrites histories. As much as the Sinophone embodies differences, contemporary Sinophone cinemas in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People's Republic of China invest various images of contested politics in order to assert different histories and self-consciousness. As such, Sinophone cinemas and image production function as archives, with the capability of reinterpreting the multiple dimensions of past and present.

The Politics of Memory in Sinophone Cinemas and Image Culture investigates Sinophone films and art projects that express this desire for archiving and reconfiguring the past. Comprising ten chapters, this book brings together contributors from an array of disciplines - artists, filmmakers, curators, film critics, and literary scholars - to grapple with the creative ambiguities of Sinophone cinemas and image culture. Blending eclectic methods of scholarly research, knowledge-making, and art-making into a new discursive space, the chapters address the diverse complexities of the cinematic culture and image production in Sinitic language regions.

This book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of film studies, China studies, East Asian studies, Taiwan studies, and Sinophone studies, as well as professionals who work in the film industry.

Part I
Remembering China

The individual self, the collective, and the state apparatus

1 Why remember everyday movie-going in Cultural Revolution Shanghai?

Chris Berry

This chapter is about the politics of memory. However, it is not about the depiction of memory, nor is it about contemporary Chinese-language cinema. Rather, it is about contemporary memories of movie-going in China in the past. To be specific, it reflects on a small research project that I did with a Chinese colleague, Zhang Shujuan 張淑娟. We gathered the data in 2010, wrote it up in 2011–12, and published it in the following year.¹ Another friend of mine had asked for a contribution to a conference on film and fashion. You only have to look at me to understand that I know nothing about fashion. But after agonizing about how to help, I suddenly remembered two things. First, many years ago I found myself chatting with some women in Beijing in a VCD shop about why we were all thinking of buying North Korean films. One of them told me she liked watching those films during the Cultural Revolution at least partly because what the women characters were wearing gave her ideas about what she might wear. Second, Shujuan had told me how friendly she was with her older neighbors in Shanghai, who would have been young during the Cultural Revolution.

Therefore, Shujuan and I decided to work with her neighbors to put together two small group interview sessions, show them a few film clips, and then talk about what they wore during the Cultural Revolution decade and how it related to films. The clips we showed were from Azalea Mountain (Dujuan Shan 杜鵑山, directed by Xie Tieli 謝鐵驪, 1974), as an example of military-style and Revolutionary War era clothing; The Young Generation (Nianqing de yidai 年輕的一代, directed by Ling Zhihao 凌之浩 and Zhang Huijun 張惠鈞, 1976), as an example of the 1970s features set in the early 1960s; and the Albanian film Old Wounds (Plagë të Vjetra, directed by Dhimeter Anagnosti, 1968, released in China as Chuang Shang 創傷), as an example of a foreign film with a contemporary setting that was screened in China during this era. We also interviewed the Shanghai collector of movies and other materials from the Mao era, Liu Debao 劉德保, and his wife, Ma Yulan 馬玉蘭.

We did everything very quickly and without time for extensive planning or deep reflection, because we had to strike while the iron was hot. At the time, we were thinking about the research as a project about film and how people use films as an archive of possibilities for themselves, and questions of agency, individuality, everyday life, and the Cultural Revolution era. To sum things up very simply, we discovered some things that we were not expecting and quite a few things that diverged from the stereotype of the Cultural Revolution as an era of uniformity and fanaticism. If we were expected to hear about direct copying, our participants disabused us of such assumptions and told us that they were not usually modeling their everyday fashion directly on particular films or stars. Of course, there were some exceptions, like the popular so-called “Ke Xiang Tou” (柯湘頭) bobbed hair, modeled on the style sported by the protagonist in Azalea Mountain. A more common pattern was that memories from watching films came to compose an unconscious mental archive that our participants drew on in various ways to inform their choices of what to wear.

In relation to the stereotype of the Cultural Revolution as a period of fanaticism, our interviewees indicated that their fashion choices were not necessarily only driven by the desire to appear revolutionary. For example, although revolutionary war films might have shaped the military look that was so popular with young people during the early part of the Cultural Revolution decade, both our female and male participants told us they also liked military-style clothing because it made them look smart. Their choices were also often strategic, as they understood that certain things could only be worn at home, for example. They saw tight qipao 旗袍 in left-wing movies from before 1949, which continued to screen right up until the Cultural Revolution. (These are the dresses also known as cheongsam and familiar to many non-Chinese viewers from films such as In the Mood for Love [Huayang nianhua 花樣年華], directed by Wong Kar-wai 王家衛 in 2000). Although such clothing was condemned as “bourgeois” during the Cultural Revolution decade, many women had a qipao in their wardrobe and even had photos taken wearing it at the photographer’s studio. However, they certainly knew they could not wear it in public. Finally, our participants’ mental archive of filmic fashion was more diverse than people might think, because it included a lot of foreign films from countries like Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania and North Korea, and the European films in particular supplied images of leather shoes with pointed toes and back-combed hairstyles that were filed away in the mental archive until relaxation of the strictures of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s made them available for emulation. Some further details of the findings of our initial research project will be given below, and further details can be found in the article already published.²

The one thing we were not doing when we undertook the project was thinking about it consciously as a memory project. But, of course, it was all about memory. In this follow-up essay, I want to think about what is at stake in undertaking this kind of memory project into everyday moviegoing, and specifically during the Cultural Revolution. First, I have already indicated that one way in which it was a memory project concerns the finding that our subjects used films as a mental archive of possibilities during the Cultural Revolution. How does establishing this kind of knowledge contribute to or challenge Cinema Studies as a field? Second, in relation to the huge inter-disciplinary field of Memory Studies, what kind of a project was this, and what is the significance for that field of doing projects like this one?

Things like fashion and everyday life are often seen as trivial compared to unusual public events, so what does it mean to record memories of such matters that are not usually saved for the historical archive? And third, in the case of the Cultural Revolution, what does it mean to have done this project at a time when others are also returning to remember the Cultural Revolution for more directly politically engaged reasons of various kinds? By way of conclusion, I will also ask what my own engagement with this small archive-altering project is, and reflect on the potential of remembering everyday movie-going beyond the Cultural Revolution era itself.

Ethnohistory and Chinese Film Studies

The mini-project that Zhang Shujuan and I have conducted is, of course, not the first effort in Cinema Studies to engage with audiences and audience memory. This is the kind of work that Annette Kuhn calls “ethnohistory” in her pioneering 2002 book on British audiences and their memories, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory.³ And, in the sub-field of Chinese Cinema Studies, Yomi Braester’s ground-breaking 2010 book Painting the City Red, while not particularly concerned with audiences and reception, does employ interviews and memory extensively in his efforts to understand how urban cinema was involved in the post-1949 transformation of China’s cities.⁴ Similarly, Paul Clark’s efforts to transform our understanding of film production during the Cultural Revolution has also been heavily grounded in ethnohistory in the form of interviews with filmmakers and other “cultural workers” from the period.⁵ Nevertheless, although not unknown, work on audience memories is not that frequent in Cinema Studies as a whole and Chinese Cinema Studies in particular.

The emergence of ethno-historical work on audience memories of movie-going must be understood as part of a larger shift in the field of Cinema Studies away from thinking about film only as a set of texts to be subjected to hermeneutic exegesis and toward thinking about cinema as a culture encompassing everything from what John Caldwell calls “production cultures”⁶ through to the experience of movie-going and its integration into everyday life. The ground-breaking work in this recasting of the discipline to extend beyond its lineage in text-focused disciplines like literature and art history and to connect with anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, and more is Janet Harbord’s Film Cultures.⁷ Semioticians such as Roland Barthes long ago demonstrated that any text is only generated through the reading process and that it has great polysemic potential.⁸ So, if we want to understand not only what we as scholars can make out of a given text but also what it might have meant for audiences, and especially for historical audiences, then we need to develop a much more active sub-field of Cinema Studies focused on reception studies. If we want to understand how movies and movie-going were part of ordinary people’s lives and why they valued them, then we also need to focus on more than only questions about how people understood the text itself.

In the case of Chinese Cinema Studies, there are additional specific reasons for engaging in such historical studies. The reason for this can be understood by way of comparison. Earlier examples of the kind of ethnohistory that Kuhn undertakes include Richard Dyer’s work on the memories of British gay men and their interest in Judy Garland.⁹ What made Dyer’s work important was not only that it was methodologically pioneering, but also that there was no other way to try and understand this well-known film fandom phenomenon other than through working with audience memories. Gay sex was illegal in the United Kingdom when Judy Garland was a star, and so there was no published record of fan literature and reviews to consult for anyone interested in understanding this connection between Garland and her gay fans. Similar difficulties are what make working with the memories of Cultural Revolution audiences especially important.

I do believe that we need to pay much more attention to movie-going and moviegoers’ responses to films in general. But in the current era, audience member responses to films are all over the Internet and plenty can be gathered without interviews or other specialized techniques. Even in the 1980s, fan responses were published in newspapers and magazines. If we go back a lot earlier, say to the 1930s, few people with clear memories survive. But the Cultural Revolution era is attractive for research not only because there are plenty of alert people to interview, but also because the official record is so lacking in reliable information about ordinary life and what ordinary people may have done and thought beyond the party state’s wishful projections about them.

The entire Maoist era but in particular the Cultural Revolution is one in which we know two things clearly. First, arts and the media, in line with Mao’s Yan’an Talks on Literature and the Arts (Zai Yan’an Wenyi Zuotanhui shang de Jianghua 在延安文藝座談會上的講話), were clearly designated to have a pedagogical role and to act as the mouthpiece for the party-state, and they were controlled accordingly.¹⁰ Second, the official media’s coverage of audience response and engagement was confined to proclaiming responses that were either in line with what was wanted or, very occasionally, indicating that the message was not getting across as well as hoped for. What other ways films might have been thought about or integrated into daily life is largely missing from the historical record and the archive as it stands now.

In contrast to the situation during the Cultural Revolution in China, Annette Kuhn talks about combining interviews with other traces of audience response in conventional documents from the time and looking at the films themselves to create “methodological triangulation” in her work on British reception of films in the 1930s.¹¹ However, in the case of Maoist China, although we can look at the films, tight state control over publications means that interviews and other memory work with audiences alive today hold out the only avenue for moving beyond the party-state’s wishful projections to grasp a fuller understanding of cinema as cinema culture. “Methodological triangulation” may not be so possible in these circumstances, but the absence of any other source makes the task all the more urgent. Therefore, we need...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Remembering China: the individual self, the collective, and the state apparatus
• Part II Politicizing archives: artists and digital history
• Part III Manufactured archives: the fictional memory
• Index