Exchanging Faces: Dubbing Foreign Films in China, 1949-1994
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EXCHANGING FACES: DUBBING FOREIGN FILMS IN CHINA, 1949-1994 BY WEIJIA DU DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in East Asian Languages and Cultures in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Robert Tierney, Chair Professor Dan Shao Professor Waïl S. Hassan Professor Kai-wing Chow Abstract My dissertation examines dubbed foreign films, which were the Chinese people’s “window to the outside world” during the Cold War era. Between 1949 and 1994, when Hollywood’s path to China was blocked by Cold War politics, the Chinese Communist Party dubbed and screened over one thousand films from the Soviet bloc, Western Europe, and beyond. These foreign films made up close to one half of all films screened in China and were more popular and profitable than domestic Chinese films. Despite their immense popularity and lasting impact, no comprehensive study on these films has emerged. I argue that dubbed foreign films disrupt the familiar narratives of Chinese cultural history, by showing that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) never achieved full control over its cinema, and its ideological indoctrination was always confined by its technology. I use government documents, film companies’ internal publications, and audience memoirs to construct a history of the PRC’s foreign film import and exhibition. I demonstrate that the CCP used foreign films to fulfill three functions: as ideological textbooks, as diplomatic tokens, and as program fillers and revenue earners to supplement China’s meager domestic film output. Much as the CCP wished to regulate the content of foreign films, pragmatic concerns such as diplomatic relationships and the demands of the film exhibition industry compelled them to screen foreign films that were not up to their ideological standards. As a result, foreign films were relatively free from the notoriously severe censorship imposed on domestic films. At times, dubbed films could even betray their propagandist purpose and constitute a legitimate space of mild dissent against mainstream aesthetics and ideology. ii I also examine the impact that decades of foreign film dubbing as opposed to subtitling had on the Chinese audience. The Chinese dubbing practice, with its emphasis on synchrony or “matching voices,” carried with itself an ideology that unwittingly subverted the CCP’s nationalism and authoritarianism. Dubbing obscured the boundary between the Chinese and the foreign. The foreign body and milieu, socialist or capitalist, acquired a degree of immediacy and Chinese identity through the accompanying Chinese voice. The Chinese voice, bent by the imperative to adhere to the foreign lips and body, acquired a “foreign accent” as it departed in unobtrusive yet substantial ways from the linguistic and vocal norms of the time. In short, instead of simply grafting a Chinese voice onto a foreign figure, dubbing turned the foreign figure Chinese and the Chinese voice foreign. Furthermore, the dubbing voice was subversive not only because it had a foreign accent, but also because its mission – to become one with the body on the screen – made it unsuitable as a mouthpiece of the CCP and distinguished it from mainstream voices that were dedicated to single-minded propaganda. In sum, my dissertation demonstrates how dubbed foreign films that were imported, dubbed, and exhibited by the CCP subverted the party’s own ideology due to stubborn, pragmatic circumstances. Revising Xiaomei Chen’s theory that emphasizes “counter-discourse” and the binary between official and unofficial Occidentalism, my research reveals that subversion occurred inadvertently and from within the system. My dissertation contains four body chapters. Part One of Chapter One traces how the PRC’s foreign film import and dubbing departed from Republican era practices yet remained haunted by the Republican heritage that the CCP ostensibly denounced. Part Two of Chapter One focuses on film exhibition between 1949 and 1966. Here I argue that foreign films both served and failed to serve the conflicting imperatives of program supply, diplomacy, and iii propaganda, resulting in the compromise of the CCP’s ideological principles. Part One of Chapter Two analyzes audience reception of nominally education films imported from Albania, Romania, North Korea, and Vietnam to demonstrate that even during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Chinese audience were not restricted by party messages but appropriated foreign films for their entertainment. Part Two of Chapter Two examines how the economic reform after 1978 ushered in both a golden age for dubbed foreign films and their irreversible decline, as new technologies such as VHS and laserdisc enabled ordinary people to smuggle, copy, and exhibit foreign films far beyond the officially imported canon. In Chapter Three I formulate a theory of dubbing in the Chinese context by bringing translation theories into film studies. I argue that despite the appearance of ventriloquism, dubbing is fundamentally analogous to literal translation in that dubbing requires bending the domestic voice to match the foreign lips and bodies. In the second half of the chapter, I examine ethical issues in the representation of the others in China’s translation and dubbing of foreign films. In Chapter Four, I present close readings of four representative dubbed foreign films. I focus on the ways in which the Chinese translators, critics, and audience were insensitive and susceptible to the values of social injustice portrayed in these films. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: PREHISTORY AND THE SEVENTEEN YEARS .........................................10 Part One: New China, “New” Foreign Films, or the Phantom of the Republican Era ..................10 Part Two: Beyond the Ideology Principle: 1949-66 ......................................................................24 CHAPTER TWO: TWO CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS .............................................................52 Part One: “Progressive” Contents and Reactionary Forms: 1966-76 ............................................52 Part Two: The Golden Age and the Beginning of the End: 1976-1994.........................................78 CHAPTER THREE: EXCHANGING FACES, MATCHING VOICES ......................................84 CHAPTER FOUR: CLOSE-UPS: FOUR DUBBED FOREIGN FILMS ...................................113 Part One: Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918 ............................................................................113 Part Two: Jane Eyre: A Timely Classic ......................................................................................121 Part Three: Angels, Whores, and Gypsies: Corazón Salvaje and Yesenia ..................................137 Part Four: Proof of the Man in Japan and China .........................................................................145 DISTANT RESONANCES: CONCLUSIONS AND QUESTIONS ..........................................164 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................172 APPENDIX A: PARTIAL FILMOGRAPHY OF INTERNAL REFERENCE FILMS DUBBED DURING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION ............................................................................188 APPENDIX B: PUBLICLY RELEASED FOREIGN FILMS MENTIONED IN CHAPTER TWO ............................................................................................................................................192 APPENDIX C: PROOF OF THE MAN: JAPANESE VERSION POSTERS, BOOK COVERS ETC ..............................................................................................................................................193 APPENDIX D: PROOF OF THE MAN: CHINESE DUBBED VERSION POSTERS AND BOOK COVERS .........................................................................................................................195 v Introduction A Stateless Subject This dissertation is about Chinese dubbed foreign films from 1949 to 1994. During those years when Hollywood’s path to China was mostly blocked by Cold War politics, over a thousand films from the Soviet bloc, Western Europe, and various other countries regularly occupied a third to a half of total exhibition time and achieved tremendous popularity. In China, the word yizhipian (lit. translated films) connotes a bygone era, when these films were the treasured entertainment and world-view for many Chinese, offered and filtered through the official apparatus, yet mingled with individuals’ youthful memories and desires. In Chinese studies, dubbed foreign film has been a specter that roams the margins: scholars know of their existence through hearsay or personal experience, yet no comprehensive study has emerged aside from scattered mentions and a few articles. The marginality of Chinese dubbed foreign films in film studies and Chinese studies is understandable for many reasons. As far as American mass culture is concerned foreign films are next to a nonentity and receive little scholarly attention.1 Elsewhere in the world (including contemporary China), the study of foreign films has become almost synonymous with the study of globalization and the impact of Hollywood. It has become difficult to imagine a time and place where non-Hollywood foreign films flourished. Furthermore,