Revolutionary Cycles In Chinese Cinema 1951-1979

A comprehensive history of how the conflicts and balances of power in the Maoist revolutionary campaigns from 1951 to 1979 complicated and diversified the meanings of films, this book offers a discursive study of the development of early PRC cinema. Wang closely investigates how film artists, Communist Party authorities, cultural bureaucrats, critics, and audiences negotiated, competed, and struggled with each other for the power to decide how to use films and how their extensively different, agonistic, and antagonistic power strategies created an ever-changing discursive network of meaning in cinema.

Review: Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema provides a detailed, insightful, and vivid guide to the Maoist period. Looking at the conception, production, distribution, and reception of movies from 1949 to 1976, Wang fleshes out Chinese film culture in troubled times. Examining both material circumstances and ideological debates, he shows in fine detail how filmmakers operated, what facilitated their work, and which obstacles they faced.

This book is indispensable reading for those interested in the interaction between film and politics and in the power of culture in times of adversity. - Yomi Braester, University of Washington, USA A meticulous analysis of micro-level maneuvering by bureaucrats, artists, and critics, Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema demonstrates that Chinese socialist revolution was never a unilinear teleological progression but rather a rapid succession of cycles marked by disruptions and assumptions of order with consequences oftentimes beyond anybody's anticipation and control.

Wang is commended for probing beneath the deceptive surface of revolutionary rhetoric and revealing quandaries and ruptures that repeatedly compromised revolutionary and artistic goals. - Yingjin Zhang, Professor of Literature, University of California, San Diego, USA and author of Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (2010).