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Working the System: Motion Picture, Filmmakers, and Subjectivities in Mao-Era China, 1949-1966

Online ISBN:
9789888805211
Print ISBN:
9789888805600
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press
Book

Working the System: Motion Picture, Filmmakers, and Subjectivities in Mao-Era China, 1949-1966

Qiliang He
Qiliang He
Hong Kong Shue Yan University
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Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
3 January 2023
Online ISBN:
9789888805211
Print ISBN:
9789888805600
Publisher:
Hong Kong University Press

Abstract

This book focuses on a pantheon of preeminent Shanghai-based filmmakers to investigate the making of the new citizenry in Mao-era China (1949-1976). Their checkered careers and stressful personal experiences in post-1949 China provided compelling case studies on how individuals’ subjectivities took shape under a new sociopolitical system. While the existing scholarship on the state-artists relationship tends to underscore the artists’ accommodation of and/or resistance to the Party-state’s domination, the present book argues that the resistance/accommodation binary was oftentimes retrospective constructions and, therefore, differed markedly from those filmmakers’ lived experiences during the early years of the PRC. Rather than offering another historical account of the filmmakers’ self-conscious embracing of the Party’s ideologies or bitter struggles with them, hence, this study examines how the volatile political situations and unstable Party policies in Mao’s China contributed to creating, maintaining, and adjusting those film directors’ newfound subjectivities in Mao’s China.

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