| Abstract | This study offers a detailed exploration of China's Left-wing Cinema Movement which took place in Shanghai from 1932 to 1937. As the first intervention by intellectuals in the Chinese film industry, this cinema movement marks a converging point of artistic cinema and commercial cinema, a meeting place for elite culture and mass culture. This paper argues and illustrates that this film movement was less an outcome of any single historical force than a product of competing social, cultural, and political discourses, including the anti-Japanese Nationalist sentiment, the cosmopolitan urban culture taking shape in Shanghai, the influence of other film practices in the rest of the world, and traditional Chinese narrative practices. Under the influence of many national and international events and ideologies of the 1930s, through the medium of cinema these left-wing filmmakers struggled to come to terms with issues such as nationhood, modernity, romantic love, community, individual identity, and most importantly, a left-wing ideology which supposedly could redeem China from its many national problems. This study argues that these filmmakers developed a unique cinema which focused on conveying didactic political messages, but this conscious privilege of content over style produced a filmmaking which marks the singularity of this cinema from other practices in the world. This dissertation first reconstructs the historical development of this cinema movement, a history which has been overburdened by the films' symbolic ideological positions and therefore distorted to a great extent by later scholars to accommodate various political orientations. A careful analysis of the cinematic languages and structures employed in these films follows in the second part of this study. The final section focuses on the nationalistic orientation of this movement which brought traditional Chinese male intellectual culture and Western left-wing ideology together. in addition to providing original discussions of general theory about this cinema movement, this study also offers detailed analyses of individual films. By investigating this movement from three perspectives, i.e., history, aesthetics, and ideology, not only does this dissertation provide a comprehensive study of this cinema but it also highlights the complex web of connections among these three areas. |
