Red China Through the Lens of Western Leftist Filmmakers
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BETWEEN POLITICS AND AESTHETICS: RED CHINA THROUGH THE LENS OF WESTERN LEFTIST FILMMAKERS by Le Tang APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Dr. Ming Dong Gu, Chair ___________________________________________ Dr. Shilyh Warren ___________________________________________ Dr. Nils Roemer ___________________________________________ Dr. Charles R. Bambach Copyright 2018 Le Tang All Rights Reserved BETWEEN POLITICS AND AESTHETICS: RED CHINA THROUGH THE LENS OF WESTERN LEFTIST FILMMAKERS by LE TANG, BA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS May 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My gratitude first goes to the chair of my doctoral dissertation committee, Dr. Ming Dong Gu, whose support has been crucial to my academic career at The University of Texas at Dallas. His seminars on critical theory and cultural studies have not only broadened my scope of knowledge but also sharpened my vision and skills for conducting cross-cultural research through the conceptual lens. My initial interest in the topic of this dissertation started with taking a course with him on cultural studies, for which I wrote an essay about Antonioni’s Chung Kuo. For the past three years, his guidance has been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement, without which the completion of this project would not have been possible. I also want to thank my committee members for their intellectual assistance to my dissertation. Dr. Shilyh Warren ushered me into the realm of documentary studies and opened my eyes to the political signification of cinema in the sphere of aesthetics. Dr. Nils Roemer has strengthened my sense of history, which enables me to contextualize cultural phenomena before shedding interpretive light on them. Dr. Charles R. Bambach’s expertise in continental philosophy has situated me in the Greco-Germanic tradition and paved my way for a phenomenological approach to visual arts. Finally, I am grateful to several individuals who have lent their precious support in my completion of this dissertation: Dr. Rainer Schulte, Thomasina Hickmann, Sandra Schulte, and James Wang. March 2018 iv BETWEEN POLITICS AND AESTHETICS: RED CHINA THROUGH THE LENS OF WESTERN LEFTIST FILMMAKERS Le Tang, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2018 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Ming Dong Gu, PhD This dissertation is a cross-cultural study of Western leftist filmmakers’ portrayals of communist China. It focuses on four movies: Chris Marker’s Sunday in Peking (1956), Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo (1972), and Joris Ivens’s How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976). I have chosen these works because they reveal an intriguing matrix in which the Western self represents the Chinese other in two ways. On the one hand, China has been a geographical other for the West down through the ages. As a result, the European filmmakers tended to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the successor of ancient China and project their Marcopoloesque sentiment onto its cultural image. On the other hand, the emergence of Chinese communism set China apart from the West in political ideology, socio-economic operation, and cultural practice, which were diametrically different from those of capitalism. Because of this dual otherness, Red China appeared as a romanticized utopia in the eyes of Marker, Godard, Antonioni, and Ivens. In their search for an alternative to bourgeois society, the PRC served as a desirable other in accordance with the political and cultural (un)conscious of European leftists. v In the dynamic interaction between self and other, Western leftist filmmakers produced a series of visual representations of Chinese communism informed by an intricate relationship between left-wing politics and left-wing aesthetics. On the theoretical level, progressive politics and progressive art share a cultural gene of radical transformation. Driven by a dialectical interplay between self and other, politics and aesthetics, Western leftist filmmakers found in Red China what they had yearned for in replacement of capitalist society. However, the former’s ideal of “art for the sake of revolution” fundamentally conflicted with the latter’s principle of “art in the service of revolution.” It was this inner divergence that planted seeds for the ideological tension between Western leftist aesthetics and Chinese leftist politics. In my dissertation, this tension is embodied in the striking contrast between the critical reception of Antonioni’s Chung Kuo and the favorable reception of Ivens’s How Yukong Moved the Mountains in China. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ……………………………………………………………………… iv ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………………….. v LIST OF FIGURES …………………………………………………………………………….. ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS …………………………………………………………………. xiv INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………………. 1 CHAPTER 1 THE CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF LEFT-WING FILM AND LEFT- WING IDEOLOGY .......................................................................................................................14 1.1. Aesthetic Redemption: The Confluence of Romanticism, Modernism, and Marxism .....................................................................................................................................15 1.2. Envisioning Progress: The Benjaminian Potentiality of Film ....................................21 1.3. Beyond Representation: Cinematic Realism and Its Political Agency .......................25 1.4. Revolutionary Performativity: The Political Significance of Alienation Effect and Montage ......................................................................................................................32 CHAPTER 2 REVOLUTIONARY CHINOISERIE: TRANSNATIONAL MAOISM AND CONTEMPORARY FRENCH FILM ...........................................................................................45 2.1. The Romanticized Image of China: From Confucian to Revolutionary Utopia .........47 2.2. Marx/Mao/Marcuse: The Cultural Politics of the French Counterculture ..................61 2.3. From an Imperial to a Revolutionary Capital: Chris Marker’s Phenomenology of Beijing .........................................................................................................................82 2.4. Maoism in Performance: La Chinoise and Godard’s Cinematic Revolution .............94 CHAPTER 3 ANTONIONI’S CHUNG KUO AS AN EVENT: HOW A LOVER OF RED CHINA CAN BE (MIS)UNDERSTOOD ...................................................................................106 3.1. China as Heterotopia: Unraveling Antonioni’s Love for the Other ..........................108 3.2. Revealing the “Human Landscape”: Cinematic Realism in Chung Kuo ..................112 3.3. Yearning for the Other: The Visual Ethics of Chung Kuo ........................................125 3.4. Accused by the People: The Clash between Antonioni and His Chinese Critics .....135 CHAPTER 4 THE NATION OF YUKONG AND MULAN: JORIS IVENS’S LIFELONG FASCINATION WITH RED CHINA .........................................................................................152 vii 4.1. Ivens and Solidarity Film: An Aesthetic Means to a Political End ..........................153 4.2. Between Allegory and Documentary: The Intertextuality of How Yukong Moved the Mountains .................................................................................................................162 4.3. “Women Hold up Half of the Sky”: Chinese Femininity in How Yukong Moved the Mountains .................................................................................................................171 4.4. The Recession of Utopia: A Tale of the Wind and the Disillusionment of Ivens’s Chinese Dream ..........................................................................................................179 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................184 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................189 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................199 CURRICULUM VITAE viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1. “The Gleaners.” Jean-François Millet. Oil on Canvas. 1857………………………. 27 Figure 1.2. “The Stone Breakers.” Gustave Courbet. Oil on Canvas. 1850……………………. 27 Figure 1.3. “The Crowd Fleeing the Imperial Soldiers’ Attack.” Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein (1925; New York: Kino Lorber Films, 2007), DVD……...… 38 Figure 1.4. “Wounded Civilians Falling from the Stairway.” Battleship Potemkin……………. 38 Figure 1.5. “The Death of a Boy Montage.” Battleship Potemkin…………………………..…. 39 Figure 1.6. “The Mother Approaching the Troop with Her Son’s Body.” Battleship Potemkin.. 40 Figure 1.7. “Mother’s and Son’s Bodies Overshadowed by the Soldiers.” Battleship Potemkin. 40 Figure 1.8. “Marriage – Divorce Montage.” Man with a Movie Camera, directed by Dziga Vertov (1929; New York: Kino Lorber Films, 2003), DVD……………………… 42 Figure 2.1. “The Toilette.” François Boucher. Oil on Canvas. 1742………………...…………. 46 Figure 2.2. “The Chinese Garden.” François Boucher. Oil on Canvas. 1742……………..…… 46 Figure 2.3. “Rebellion – Babel Montage.” La Société du spectacle, directed by Guy Debord (1973), YouTube.com……………………………………………..…………….