Division of Languages and Literature and Dean of the College Present
A Handmade and Homemade Industry in the Socialist Films The Young People in Our Village and Its Sequel
In 1953, the People’s Republic of China urged educated peasant youths in cities and towns to return to their rural homes. Accordingly, there emerged a series of films depicting the homecoming experience of the junior and senior high school students, who voluntarily went back to village hometowns and collaborated with local peasants for socialist construction. The “return to the village” trend went together with the state-initiated rural industrialization during the Great Leap Forward Campaign of 1958-1960. My presentation focuses on two homecoming films The Young People in Our Village (Women cunli de nianqing ren, 1959) and its sequel (1963) under the same title. I examine the cinematic representations of industrialization as an affective experience and how an affective Maoist industrial culture bridged the “cold face” of industry with local everyday life experience as well as utopian visions of community. Both films portray the ways in which the rural masses deployed artisanal skills in their participation in an industrial enterprise. I demonstrate the other side of socialist practice, highlighting the small-scale, the homemade, and the handmade as distinct from monumentality and sublimity that characterized socialist aesthetics. I conclude my talk with a reflection on the underside of the homemadeness and handmadeness in socialist industry and a comparative reading with a rural-subject film titled Old Well (Laojing, 1986) produced in Post-Mao China.
Yu Zhang received her Ph.D. in Chinese from Stanford University in June, 2014. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Chinese at Randolph-Macon College, USA. Her primary research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and cultural history. She is completing a book manuscript titled “To the Soil: the Rural and the Modern in Chinese Cultural Imaginations, 1915-1965.” It focuses on the cultural practices and representations of going to the countryside in modern China, investigating the relationship between the rural and the Chinese experience of modernity.
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Location: Olin LC, 210