Rural Women and Social Change in New China Cinema: From Li Shuangshuang to Ermo

The title of this essay may sound slightly clichéd, since it would be extremely hard to find a film in New China cinema, namely, the filmmaking tradition in the People's Republic since the late 1940s, that does not reflect, represent, advocate, cope with, or directly participate in social change. Indeed, the course and content of New China cinema are unmistakably characterized by its sometimes exhilarating, sometimes tormented relationship with a tumultuous political history and cultural transformation. This dominant tradition of social engagement dates back to a defining formative stage of Chinese cinema during the 1930s, when the silver screen's mobilizational potential was seized upon as a timely solution for a nation in crisis and its entertainment value was resisted as at best frivolous. New China cinema, as a crucial cultural institution of the new socialist nation-state, amplified such an educational function and, in all sincerity, offered carefully composed imagery to visualize current policies and collective aspirations. If we wish to extract one defining feature of New China cinema, I would argue, it is precisely this deep-rooted seriousness in its self-conception and presentation. Even in the Fifth Generation's more self-conscious pursuit of a new cinematic language, which for many critics signals the arrival of an artsy (if belated) New Wave or New China cinema, lightheartedness is still assiduously avoided. More often than not, the defamiliarized narratives and extraordinary visual images characteristic of the Fifth Generation filmmaking are defiantly displayed against the grave backdrop of historical events and obsessions. The inescapable continuity of New China cinema, of which the Fifth Generation is a necessary stage, is a point that I wish to emphasize at the outset of this study.

My main focus here, however, is the representation of rural women and their participation in social change in New China cinema. The four films that I will discuss belong to an important genre in Chinese cinema, namely, rural films, or films about life in the contemporary countryside. (In the parlance of the Chinese film industry, they are categorized as nongcun pian.)¹ Although the generic identity of such a film is principally determined by the subject matter, distinct features about and even conventions in its sound track, visual vocabulary, and plot premises often quickly prepare the audience for a rustic experience. The four particular films, selected from the heyday of socialist realism in New China cinema to post–Fifth Generation filmmaking, present a good occasion for us to describe those generic features or conventions. At the same time, the cross-references and revisions that we observe in these filmic texts demand a comparative viewing. This comparative viewing will help us appreciate an enduring representational strategy, in modern Chinese literature as well as cinema, of gauging the impact of social change through the focal figure of a rural woman. It will also inspire us to assemble a multilayered historical narrative, through which we may be better able to recognize the symbolic and cultural meanings of generic variations over the course of time. Such a diachronic tracking relies on but also explains more than a static or morphological description of generic features. For what we will find, by looking into the evolution of these rural films, are indeed different visions of becoming modern that bestirred a predominantly agrarian nation in the second half of the twentieth century. One fruitful entry point for such an investigation, as I will show in the following sections, is the apparent dissimilarity between Li Shuangshuang (dir. Lu Ren, 1962) and Ermo (dir. Zhou Xiaowen, 1994), two films that compel us to regard generic transformations as imaginative responses to social changes.

Rural Films and the Quest for a National Cinema

As early as 1953, at the launch of the first five-year plan of socialist construction, production and circulation of "rural feature films" in...