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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Maoisms, National Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives An Introduction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
18
Introduction
2018-03-01
2021-09-06
2018-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Federico Zecca
2018/03/01
University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’
2036-461X
30
en
Maoisms, National Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives An Introduction
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16237/14480
18
Maoisms, National Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives
An Introduction
Marco Dalla Gassa, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Corrado Neri, Université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3
Federico Zecca, University of Bari ‘Aldo Moro’


Le Joli Mao

   The charismatic and controversial figure of Mao Zedong has not only left a
deep mark on the history of twentieth-century China — looming still over the
country’s new capitalist developments, as a sort of ghost — but it has also spread
remarkably beyond national borders and into completely different political and
social contexts. In particular, after the start of the Cultural Revolution (1966)
several groups inspired by Chinese Marxism-Leninism appeared worldwide.
From the United States to India, from New Zealand to Peru, from Hong Kong to
Japan, as well as within European countries, specific political ideals, revolutionary
propositions, fantasies and images of purity have been projected onto the figure
of Mao, to some extent giving way to a form of idolatry — so called maolâtrie.
His benevolent face has become the symbol of what François Fejtő shortly after
called ‘a dream incarnate’,1 in particular for the generation who took part in the
demonstrations in public squares during May 1968 and who, brandishing the
book with Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (this is the real title of the
Little Red Book), hoped to emulate the deeds of the Red Guards and overturn
the status quo. In fact, in those very years, as well as during the following
decades, Maoism represented, at a transnational level, an extraordinary label that
aggregated different desires and intellectual-affective investments in relation to
their cultural and geo-political contexts. Essentially, as a cultural phenomenon,
Maoism turned into an ideal scenario in which everyone was able to invest
whatever they wanted; each country developed and, so to speak, re-invented ‘its
own’ Maoism with specific characteristics that were often completely different
from the Chinese original.
   Though there is a vast bibliography on Chinese as well as international Maoism
that has continued only to grow during these last few months of celebrations of
the fiftieth anniversary of 1968 in France, much less exhaustive is the bibliography
dedicated to the impact that the pro-China infatuation has had in the field of
cinematography. There are several reasons for this. The main motive concerns the
difficulty to distinguish the clear traits of Maoist doctrine in films, documentaries


1
    François Feitő, Chine/URSS: De l’alliance au conflit (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 449.

                                                        Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVIII, no. 30, Spring 2018
                    Marco Dalla Gassa, Corrado Neri and Federico Zecca


and other media products. In China we can observe a significant reduction of
film production and an increased ideological regimentation, especially after the
uprisings that broke out in 1966. In Europe, on the other hand, the first films
to deal with the impact of these events, such as Marco Bellocchio’s China Is
Near (La Cina è vicina, 1967) and Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), prefer
to point out the actual difficulties that both directors and their film characters
face when trying to render in artwork or political activity the slogans of what
Alain Badiou calls ‘the last revolution still attached to the motif of classes and
of class struggle’.2 After 1968, Maoist-oriented documentaries and fiction films
were produced principally by a number of collectives, such as the Dziga Vertov,
Foudre or Front Paysan groups in France or the militants of Servire il Popolo in
Italy. However, these films have only rarely been distributed beyond the circles
of radical militancy and they are not always easy to distinguish from the other
politically committed works that followed the 1968 experience, which were
inspired by other Marxist-oriented doctrines and actually stood in opposition
to Maoism. In other words, the impact of the pro-Maoist films is far from
comparable to that of the films inspired by the Soviet and (later) the Cuban
revolutions.
   And yet in those years film industry workers often declared, as did many
intellectuals, their sympathies towards the uprising of the Red Guards. In addition
to the aforementioned Godard and Bellocchio, personalities such as Joris Ivens,
Marceline Loridan, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Marin Karmitz, the actors Lou
Castel and Gian Maria Volonté also had their années Mao;3 even Sergio Leone in
his Duck, You Sucker! (Giù la testa, 1971) or Michelangelo Antonioni in Chung-
kuo Cina (1972) partly sympathize with the People’s Republic and its Great
Helmsman. Militant criticism of course also played its part as well: the editorial
staff of the Cahiers du cinéma (from 1969 to 1973), of the Cinéthique and the
literary magazine Tel Quel can be considered Maoist-oriented, and we should
not forget other periodicals such as Ombre rosse in Italy or Screen in the UK that
published editorials and critiques inspired by the Cultural Revolution. From the
1960s to the 1970s film critics such us Jean-Louis Comolli, Serge Daney, Régis
Bergeron, Goffredo Fofi, and many others, without mentioning personalities as
Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers,
form a whole army of intellectuals and scholars that embrace the ‘Chinese road’
to communism.
   It is in this gap between widespread fascination and the difficulty of its artistic-
aesthetic rendering (the Cahiers du cinéma of that period are, perhaps not by
chance, without illustrations) that we wish to insert the monographic issue that
Cinéma & Cie dedicates to Maoism, with a specific focus on the impact of the
Cultural Revolution on specific cinematic cultures fifty years after its apogee.


2
 Alain Badiou, ‘The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?’, positions, 13.3 (2005), 507.
3
  François Hourmant, Les Années Mao en France: Avant, pendant et après mai 68 (Paris: Odile
Jacob, 2018).

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           Maoisms, National Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives An Introduction


In the title, however, we talk about Maoisms in plural form, since it is quite
clear that, as Christophe Bourseiller puts it, this label has come to aggregate
numerous ‘[intellectual and emotional] investments and just as many phantoms’,
all depending on their relative historical contexts. In fact, ‘as a cultural
phenomenon, it [has] been the ideal place in which everyone [has been able to]
invest whatever he liked’.4 We have chosen to focus on film experiences that are
distant from one another in terms of historical period, geographical and cultural
areas, and characters involved. More precisely, we have sought to bring back to
light subjects and historical episodes that have been suppressed in public debates
and in traditional film history books. From the beginning, we abandoned the
idea of offering a complete description of the various ‘adventures’ influenced
by Maoism, or of arranging them in a precise chronological order. We have, on
the contrary, preferred to select studies that can pose questions across different
contexts, cultures, and nations, with particular attention to the repression
strategies, the ideological aporias, the cultural dynamics and the political struggles
that characterized the relationship between Maoism and national cinemas, from
the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution to the present day.


An Overview of the Special Issue

   All the articles included in this special issue adopt a trans-historical and
transcultural perspective, suggesting to some extent that the complexity of the
process of translation and ‘reinvention’ of Maoism in different cultural and
national contexts calls for a comparative approach, in order to highlight the
specificities and distinctive features of each experience.
   Our journey through transnational Maoisms begins in France, probably the
European country in which the fascination for the Cultural Revolution has had
the most relevant cultural impact, especially after May 1968. Man-tat Terence
Leung’s article considers two of the most ‘inflammatory’ works made by Jean-Luc
Godard together with his long-time collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin during their
militancy in the Maoist collective Dziga Vertov Group, Wind from the East (Vent
d’est, 1969) and All’s Well (Tout va bien, 1972). Through an in-depth textual
study, the author highlights the different ways in which the two films employ the
Maoist ideology, its slogans and keywords, its political perspective. The 1969 film
seems to interpret (enthusiastically and somewhat superficially) Maoism as mere
revolutionary doctrine, therefore trying to ‘brainwash’ the viewer into violently
revolt against the status quo through incessant Brechtian stimuli and coercive
‘counter-cinema’ aesthetic strategies. Conversely, with its more sophisticated
(albeit relatively more conventional) narrative and aesthetics, All’s Well sees
Maoism as a subtle epistemological tool for understanding the predicaments of

4
 Christophe Bourseiller, Les Maoïstes: La folle histoire des gardes rouges français (Paris: Points
2008), p. 438.

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                  Marco Dalla Gassa, Corrado Neri and Federico Zecca


Western societies. In particular, Leung focuses his analysis on the renowned ten-
minute tracking shot set in a supermarket: according to the author, this long take
represents the (successful) attempt of the two directors to employ the Maoist
‘theory of contradictions’ in their investigation of ‘the structural ambivalence
between leftism and rightism pertaining to the modern capitalist system’. In
his view, the 1972 film penetrates and denaturalizes the ‘symbolic fabric of
contemporary neoliberal consensus’, thus revealing the (never fully expressed
and partly still effective) ‘emancipatory potential’ of post-1968 French Maoism.
   Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier shifts the focus to two other European
countries, analysing a pair of very different — differently embedded —
documentary/ethnographic movies about the Khmer Rouge produced
in Yugoslavia and Sweden. Her article first contextualizes the historical
contingencies that made these two films possible, before dwelling secondly on a
stylistic and formal analysis, that shows how different representational strategies
inscribe Cambodian Maoism in the Yugoslavian and Swedish national cultures.
At the end of the 1970s, arguably under the pressure of the Chinese communist
party, the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea invited journalists from friendly
countries and representatives from Western Maoist organizations. The aim
of these visits was obviously to present a positive image of the country, but
interestingly, the two documentaries tell very different stories and were received
with opposing attitudes. The former was an implicit criticism of the totalitarian
regime; the latter a complete endorsement of the Khmer Rouge. Hence, the
violent rejection of the Yugoslavian film from the Cambodian government was
not without its reasons: as Benzaquen-Gautier demonstrates, the Yugoslavian
filmmaker Nikola Vitorović could not deliver an explicit critique of the regime,
but via cinematic language (editing, juxtaposition, an ambiguous use of music)
he managed to add a layer to the superficial propaganda discourse as an ‘attempt,
however limited, to deconstruct the scenery elaborated by the CPK leaders’.
Benzaquen-Gautier shows how the national context — here, the Eastern bloc
was still swamped in the cold war — reacts to the Cambodian declination of
Maoism by creating a complex, challenging dialogue via allegoric cinematic
expression. On the other hand, Swedish intellectual, journalist and filmmaker
Jan Myrdal maintained his Maoist conviction and produced a documentary
explicitly endorsing Khmer Rouge politics. Through a comparative approach,
the article investigates the positioning of the filmmakers in a dialogue between
‘us’ and ‘them’ which demands a negotiation between ‘solidarity, identification,
and denunciation’.
   Sanghita Sen’s article brings us instead to India, where the Naxal movement
— a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist armed revolutionary movement — emerged in
May 1967. The author analyses selected films that deal with the Naxal/Maoist
movements and unravel their socio-cultural impact. This journey is not only
physical but temporal as well; the essay focuses in the first part on movies from
the 1960s: agit-prop, militant works that engage directly with the spectatorship
by soliciting a critical vision. These texts are therefore revolutionary both in

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         Maoisms, National Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives An Introduction


content and form, seeking an alternative to the escapist, commercial tradition.
Sen nonetheless acutely analyses the complexities of this ‘parallel cinema’;
namely, in comparing the works by Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen — two directors
both engaged in a ‘Calcutta trilogy’ — Sen shows how aesthetical and formal
choices helped to link Indian parallel cinema to similar movements in the ‘world
cinema’ context, but also that every director developed his own strategy to write
a counter history and challenge mainstream cinema via the deconstruction of
national (and nationalistic) narrative mode. The paper provides close analysis
of Ray’s and Sen’s use of documentary footage, location shooting, jump cuts and
montage that debunked ‘pavlovian’ Bollywood style. The article, also shifts its
focus to Bollywood cinema from the 1990s, questioning the heritage of the Naxal
movement on a more recent society and its arts. By paying close attention to
historic movies that depicted the Maoist frenzy, some directors managed to stay
in the system by delivering melodramatic movies and at the same time strived to
deconstruct nationalistic stereotypes. These negotiations raise questions about
Maoist movements in contemporary cinema: is it domestication or inception?
   This question could not be more urgent than in China itself, and Wendy
Xie’s paper brings us back to where it the movement started. In her article, the
author analyses the remake of a classic ‘model opera’ that legendary director Tsui
Hark filmed in his flamboyant, hyperkinetic mode in 2014. This appropriation
seems to condensate the contradictions of contemporary China itself: how can
a Communist nation — where the portrait of Mao still lingers on Tiananmen
square and (quite amusingly) on the much-coveted banknotes — integrate the
high spectacle coming from Hong Kong’s tradition of martial and fantastic
movies (despite the fact that they were banned in Maoist China)? And more
specifically, is Tsui’s enterprise purely lip-service to Beijing, or did he include in
his work a multi-layered discourse that can be interpreted as challenging Red
nostalgia? Xie develops a stringent argument in favour of this second hypothesis.
In the first part she shows how the novel that inspired the propaganda film is
indebted to the chivalric tradition of vernacular novels that shaped the collective
imaginary of the Chinese readers. Secondly, she focuses on the introduction
and coda of the movie, where a young protagonist discovers (in New York) the
long forgotten, classic revolutionary canon. By inscribing his action movie in the
retrospective gaze of a millennial, and by erasing any clear political reference,
Tsui Hark undercuts the reverential Communist ideology and offers to the
attentive spectator an array of hypothesis concerning the place of Red nostalgia
in contemporary China. Where does national construction and family history
meet — or collide? Maoist nostalgia and contemporary propaganda apparently
serve the same aim, but is that really so? Tsui’s recreation of the wartime drama
collapses all the formal devices of the original ‘model opera’, appropriating the
story with a self-conscious positioning as representational rather than original.
This simulacrum seems to be a symptom of an anxiety vis-à-vis contemporary
China’s value system, ideological drive and self-recognition. Zooming out, while
Wendy Xie’s article is aptly focused on the cradle of Maoism, her enquiry is

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                  Marco Dalla Gassa, Corrado Neri and Federico Zecca


ultimately pertinent to many transnational realities that used, copied, quoted,
translated, mocked, critiqued or discussed Maoist ethics and aesthetics.
   Similar issues are explored by Kristian Feigelson, whose article adopts a
comparative transnational and trans-historical perspective in order to make sense
of how the Cultural Revolution has been represented and understood in two
different cultural contexts: French auteur cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and
Chinese cinema of the Sixth Generation. In the first part of his essay, Feigelson
draws a comparison between La Chinoise and René Viénet’s Can Dialectics
Break Bricks? (La Dialectique peut-elle casser les briques?, 1973). According
to the author, Godard’s 1967 film still presents many of the representational
and ideological clichés of French Orientalism, in that it does not perceive the
Cultural Revolution as a controversial historical event, but rather as an ‘exotic’
mythology to embrace a-critically and a-problematically. Contrarily to this,
Viénet’s situationist film uses the technique of détournement — re-dubbing and
adding a new soundtrack to a pre-existing, average kung fu film — in order to
distort and criticize the Maoist doctrine and its too enthusiastic reception within
the French intelligentsia, at the same time polemically addressing the economic
exploitation and social alienation inherent in Western capitalism. In the second
part, the article shifts its attention to contemporary China, discussing the ways
in which a few directors of the Sixth Generation have moved beyond the official
conciliatory discourses on the Maoist period promoted by the Communist
government today, in order to adopt a more controversial vision of the Cultural
Revolution and its ‘shadows’. In particular, the author analyses the independent
movie The Ditch (Jiabiangou, Wang Bing, 2010), as a perfect example of this
change of attitude: with its balance between modernism and digital minimalism,
the movie narrates the sufferings of a group of (alleged) dissidents imprisoned in
a labour camp right after the Hundred Flowers Campaign, thus shedding light
on one of the darkest pages of Chinese history.
   The last essay of the special issue somewhat inscribes some of the questions
discussed in the previous articles in a wider framework, at the same time opening
a new possible strand of research. Analysing Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers
(2003) and Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi, 1994),
Yomi Braester proposes the category of ‘post-Maoist cinema’ to make sense of a
series of works that have reconsidered the Maoist era through a strong historical,
political and metalinguistic conscience from the 1990s onwards, expressing
both a feeling of nostalgia for an idealistic period and a harsh criticism of past
excesses. For the author, this post-Maoist cinema is fundamentally a transnational
phenomenon, that reveals several common, defining traits regardless of the
national context in which the films are produced. First of all, according to
Braester, post-Maoist films conceive Maoism essentially as a set of performative
acts, detached from any explicit militant or ideological reflection. In other words,
the use of specific Maoist imageries, symbolisms, or keywords is not functional
to the direct narration of what Maoism itself actually was; rather, they serve
to create a vivid portrait of the tensions that characterized any given country

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         Maoisms, National Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives An Introduction


(France and China, in this case) during the Maoist period — that is, cultural,
social, generational processes and so on. More precisely, the article is focused on
the examination of two key characteristics of post-Maoist cinema: the depiction
of sexuality and the representation of cinephilia, both intended as tools for an
implicit ‘critical reassessment’ of Maoism. Indeed, on the one hand, Maoism is
not considered as a body of doctrines for the social and economic revolution, but
rather as a cultural climate thanks to which the characters succeed in breaking
bourgeois taboos, a sort of ‘subterfuge’ for the expression of their individual
selves, and especially of their sexuality. On the other, the representation of movie-
going or the intertextual references to other (Maoist) films to some extent project
an air of unreality about Maoism, as though it were, after all, only a cinephiliac
invention.
   To conclude, the articles here presented highlight the theoretical productivity
of the contamination between film studies and cultural history in order to make
sense of a ‘repressed’ and concealed experience, such as the reinvention of
Maoism in national cinemas. This specific line of film production, now almost
forgotten, can on the contrary speak to (and of) our historical memory. As a
transnational phenomenon, Maoism penetrated various national contexts in
many different ways, each time being translated and transformed, depending
on the characters of each country and film industry. In this sense, researching
Maoist cinemas provides a stimulating (albeit certainly eccentric) point of view,
not only for the study of the single films, authors, or ‘movements’, but also for the
comprehension of the societies and cultures that have produced them. Although
we are perfectly aware that this special issue barely scratches the surface of such
a complex subject matter, it is precisely from within this perspective that we wish
to invite further research.




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