- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Introduction: Chinese Cinemas and the Art of Extrapolation
- D. W. Griffith and the Rise of Chinese Cinema in Early 1920s Shanghai
- Ombres Chinoises: Split Screens and Parallel Lives in Love and Duty
- Fei Mu, Mei Lanfang, and the Polemics of Screening China
- A National Cinema for a Puppet State: The Manchurian Motion Picture Association
- A Genealogy of Cinephilia in the Maoist Period
- Cold War Politics and Hong Kong Mandarin Cinema
- Conceiving Cross-Border Communities: Mobile Women in Recent Hong Kong Cinema
- Taiwan New Cinema: Small Nation with Soft Power
- Chinese Cinema With Hollywood Characteristics, or How <i>The Karate Kid</i> Became a Chinese Film
- World as Picture and Ruination: On Jia Zhangke’s Still Life as World Cinema
- The Opera Film in Chinese Cinema: Cultural Nationalism and Cinematic Form
- A Small History of <i>Wenyi</i>
- Art, Politics, and Internationalism: Korean War Films in Chinese Cinema
- Edification Through Affection: The Cultural Revolution Films, 1974–1976
- Reforming Vengeance: kung fu and the racial melancholia of chinese masculinity
- Desire and Distribution: Queer/Chinese/Cinema
- Thirdspace Between Flows and Places: Chinese Independent Documentary and Social Theories of Space and Locality
- From Anticorruption to Officialdom: The Transformation of Chinese Dynasty TV Drama
- New Media: Large Screens in China
- Online Small-Screen Cinema: The Cinema of Attractions and the Emancipated Spectator
- Acting Real: Cinema, Stage, and the Modernity of Performance in Chinese Silent Film
- Edward Yang and Taiwan’s Age of Auteurs
- A Marriage of Convenience: Musical Moments in Chinese Movies
- Policing Film in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1905–1923
- Between Will and Negotiation: Film Policy in the First Three Years of the People’s Republic of China
- Fetish Power Unbound: A Small History of “Woman” in Chinese Cinema
- Ethnographic Representation Across Genres The Culture Trope in Contemporary Mainland Media
- Conjuring the Masses: The Spectral/Spectacular Crowd in Chinese Film
- The Idea of Asia(nism) and Trans-Asian Productions
- Film and Contemporary Chinese Art: Mediums and Remediation
- Crossing the Same River Twice: Documentary Reenactment and the Founding of PRC Documentary Cinema
- Remade in China: Cinema with “Chinese Elements” in the Dapian Age
- Along the Riverrun: Cinematic Encounters in Tsai Ming-Liang’s The River
- Afterword (<span xml:lang="chi">尾聲</span>)
- Filmographies
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter studies a Sino-Soviet coproduced color documentary film entitled Victory of the Chinese People, directed by the Soviet war filmmaker Leonid Varlamov and completed in 1950. The film mobilized tens of thousands of soldiers and spent a large amount of ammunition to reenact four “great battles” in the Chinese civil war, despite the fact that all these battles had been recorded in real time by Chinese filmmakers just months before. By comparing this film’s reenactment of the battles with Chinese filmmakers’ actuality footage, and by examining the translation of Soviet discourses on documentary cinema at the time, this chapter argues that the making of this film and the adoption of Soviet theories and practices of documentary dramaturgy in the early 1950s constituted a critical learning moment for Chinese filmmakers and helped lay the foundation for a PRC documentary cinema.
Keywords: documentary, actuality, reenactment, war, Soviet influence
Ying Qian is a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian Center for China in the World, Australian National University. She has a PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, specializing in Chinese cultural history and film studies. She has published on Chinese independent documentary cinema, and is working on a book manuscript on newsreel and documentary Cinema of China's Mao-era.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- [UNTITLED]
- Contributors
- Introduction: Chinese Cinemas and the Art of Extrapolation
- D. W. Griffith and the Rise of Chinese Cinema in Early 1920s Shanghai
- Ombres Chinoises: Split Screens and Parallel Lives in Love and Duty
- Fei Mu, Mei Lanfang, and the Polemics of Screening China
- A National Cinema for a Puppet State: The Manchurian Motion Picture Association
- A Genealogy of Cinephilia in the Maoist Period
- Cold War Politics and Hong Kong Mandarin Cinema
- Conceiving Cross-Border Communities: Mobile Women in Recent Hong Kong Cinema
- Taiwan New Cinema: Small Nation with Soft Power
- Chinese Cinema With Hollywood Characteristics, or How <i>The Karate Kid</i> Became a Chinese Film
- World as Picture and Ruination: On Jia Zhangke’s Still Life as World Cinema
- The Opera Film in Chinese Cinema: Cultural Nationalism and Cinematic Form
- A Small History of <i>Wenyi</i>
- Art, Politics, and Internationalism: Korean War Films in Chinese Cinema
- Edification Through Affection: The Cultural Revolution Films, 1974–1976
- Reforming Vengeance: kung fu and the racial melancholia of chinese masculinity
- Desire and Distribution: Queer/Chinese/Cinema
- Thirdspace Between Flows and Places: Chinese Independent Documentary and Social Theories of Space and Locality
- From Anticorruption to Officialdom: The Transformation of Chinese Dynasty TV Drama
- New Media: Large Screens in China
- Online Small-Screen Cinema: The Cinema of Attractions and the Emancipated Spectator
- Acting Real: Cinema, Stage, and the Modernity of Performance in Chinese Silent Film
- Edward Yang and Taiwan’s Age of Auteurs
- A Marriage of Convenience: Musical Moments in Chinese Movies
- Policing Film in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1905–1923
- Between Will and Negotiation: Film Policy in the First Three Years of the People’s Republic of China
- Fetish Power Unbound: A Small History of “Woman” in Chinese Cinema
- Ethnographic Representation Across Genres The Culture Trope in Contemporary Mainland Media
- Conjuring the Masses: The Spectral/Spectacular Crowd in Chinese Film
- The Idea of Asia(nism) and Trans-Asian Productions
- Film and Contemporary Chinese Art: Mediums and Remediation
- Crossing the Same River Twice: Documentary Reenactment and the Founding of PRC Documentary Cinema
- Remade in China: Cinema with “Chinese Elements” in the Dapian Age
- Along the Riverrun: Cinematic Encounters in Tsai Ming-Liang’s The River
- Afterword (<span xml:lang="chi">尾聲</span>)
- Filmographies
- Index
