China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Indiana University
Chair: Marilyn B. Young, New York University
Discussant: Carma Hinton, Long Bow Films
How do texts that contain important visual dimensions—films, posters, illustrated primers, etc.—use pictures to communicate social and political messages? How can we make sense of the dominant and oppositional visual discourses that in the PRC, as elsewhere, alternately supplement, reinforce, challenge and simply provide alternatives to their rhetorical and textual counterparts? These are the kinds of questions taken up here, in presentations by scholars based in different disciplines (history, literature, media studies) who have previously worked on diverse issues (from the dynamics of protest to constructions of gender). It will be chaired by a specialist in the rhetoric of diplomacy as well as feminist studies; commenting will be a discussant whose work and research spans art history and film making.
The interdisciplinary nature of the panel deserves to be underlined, since PRC visual culture has often been treated as an esoteric subject, which may be of passing interest to many scholars (when it comes to providing illustrative materials for books, for example) but is only of serious concern to art historians. One goal of this panel is to show that the topic deserves to be taken seriously by a wide range of social scientists and humanists, and that it is useful when dealing with visual materials to draw upon interpretive strategies associated not only with art history and film studies but also with fields as seemingly disparate as political science and cultural history.
Harriet Evans, Westminster University
Poster representations of women from the Cultural Revolution era (1966–1976) conveyed political messages of general application as well as messages specifically targeted at women. Posters appropriated women as symbols of general ideological principles; they also inscribed a range of gendered meanings into the particular aesthetic forms—spaces, bodily shapes, etc.—used to describe women. Invariably accompanied by bold slogans, the most explicit message associated with images of women corresponded with the contemporary rhetoric of women "holding up half the sky." This paper looks at the gendered positioning of women in different kinds of landscapes, family and social group settings, and political and occupational contexts, raising questions about the intersecting interests linking the use of women for general symbolic and ideological purposes with particular, often gendered, aesthetic forms.
It argues that it is too simplistic to treat the posters merely as propaganda "models" that offered straightforward educative messages to the "masses. The posters actually provide contradictory clues about many things, including dominant visions of the interplay of gender and power. They reveal a range of essentialist assumptions about who women and men were that belie the overt ideological message associated with the images; a gendered reading of the posters challenges the common view that the reassertion of an essential femininity/femaleness has been a result solely of the changes instituted in China since 1978. The disjuncture between the declared thematic significance of women in revolutionary society and their subordination in the grammar of representation was a significant aspect of the dominant visual discourse of the Pre-Reform period: popular notions of gender hierarchy were reinforced, even while attempts were made to convince women that the Revolution had brought them an equal share of power.
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Indiana University
This paper focuses on two types of texts: primers from the 1960s that were used to introduce basic characters to beginning readers, and recent pictorial histories of Shanghai. Its focus is on the images that PRC authorities have tried to associate with a particular shifting vision of socialist modernity.
One of its goals is to add a new dimension to an ongoing interdisciplinary discussion of an important general theme: the tendency of Chinese revolutionary regimes (Communist and non-Communist alike) to declare that China needs to become less "backward" and more "modern." Two symbols often used to describe the kind of "modernity" that is desired are the "new citizen" and the "new city"—novel entities alleged to have come into being through the Revolution.
The changing meanings of Chinese terms associated with this discourse of modernity, and their relationship to concepts of socialist citizenship, have been studied in considerable detail lately. Scholars interested in visual texts have also had a good deal to say about the role of cities as symbols of modernity in China. Here, an attempt is made to bring together these two kinds of studies, by looking first at how literacy primers not only define words such as "citizen" and "modern" but also provide visual cues (illustrations) designed to make the readers associate certain mental images with those terms, and then examining pictorial histories of Shanghai, in which the city’s post-1949 changes are presented visually as representing the triumph of a positive form of modernity.
Paola Voci, Indiana University
In Chinese cinema, this paper argues, cultural and social dissent is often expressed through aesthetic choices relating to sounds and spaces. Most notably, visions of emptiness and periods of silence are used to make oppositional points, providing as they do a stark contrast to the talky and crowded staged dramas that have long dominated Chinese cinema. Although looking primarily at a recent movie, this paper tries to show that the "aesthetic of dissent" just described is not a recent creation of Fifth Generation filmmakers. Moving beyond the issues of narrative content, characterization and dialogue that often predominate in analyses of films, this paper raises questions about how images are framed and silence used to communicate political and cultural messages.
The challenging visual and aural characteristics of one of Chen Kaige’s films, King of the Children, will be the key focus. To place these characteristics in historical context, however, reference will also be made to two controversial pre-1949 productions, Lang tao sha (1937) and Xiaocheng zhi chun (1948), that make similar use of frame composition and non-dialogue centered sound tracks to communicate feelings of isolation and alienation.
The paper critiques the standard interpretations of the role of the PRC’s state ideology in "renewing" Chinese filmmaking, which have stressed the opposition between reactionary and progressive films in terms of their social messages while overlooking the fact that both embrace an aesthetic that emphasizes actors and dialogues. Because of this shared aesthetic, challenging the accepted supremacy of words over images has been and remains a truly revolutionary and culturally avant garde act.
Stephanie Donald, Murdoch University
Even a casual survey of PRC visual media shows that children are routinely used as political messengers. Why are snapshots of youthful innocence or energy so frequently employed to make political points? This is the main question addressed in this paper.
It begins with examination of posters from the 1960s–1980s in which children figure prominently—in roles ranging from Young Pioneers (especially during the Cultural Revolution) to Young Consumers (especially in the Post-Mao era). The use of children here is easily understood in terms of what they are doing. What needs additional analysis is the decision to use children at all. How should we understand the figure of the child in these posters? What is the function of childhood in a visual text that has a political motivation?
Discussion of two recent films—Black Snow and The Blue Kite—is used to expand the argument that, in a wide range of PRC visual texts, the figure of the child is used as a key point of emotional as well as political identification. To refer to the theme of this panel, power is pictured by its seeming antithesis, the vulnerability of the very young. The paper explores as well questions relating to the way that spectators relate to political posters and films, and how they identify with individuals represented in such works.