Authors

Ran Wei¹;  ¹ Durham University, UK

Discussion

The current scholarship generally agrees that the Sino-Soviet cultural exchange on cinematic montage during the Republican era China (1911-1949) and especially since 1932, when the diplomatic relation between the two states thawed, was mainly about the translation of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s film theory and that the process of reception of Soviet montage was largely associated with Chinese leftwing intellectuals. However, I should like to propose that the transnational circulation of knowledge was more complex than this common thought suggests. This paper will look at the engagement with Soviet montage film practice and theory in Chinese culture during the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period of great political and social turbulence. Based on the extensive archival research into Chinese cultural periodicals and films of the time, this paper is putting forward an argument that, despite strict censorship policies, the dissemination of film knowledge and film production that is reflective of Soviet montage commenced earlier in a fragmented form through occasional discussions or other forms of appropriation. Rather than being associated merely with the Chinese leftwing circles, such cultural engagement with the films and/or theories of Sergei Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov were in actuality appropriated in a variety of cinematic and cultural discourses: the conventional, Hollywood-influenced cinema thoughts of the time, the discussions of machine art which constituted a major trend in the modernist art circles, the debates about class awareness mediated by the writings of Japanese socialist authors, and, finally, in the nationalist-cum-revolutionary discourses. As a result, it could be safely argued that the map of Sino-Soviet cinematic exchange during the 1920s and early 1930s needs to be revised to take into consideration the heterogeneous nature of vernacular reception. By mapping out this multi-mediatic engagement with Soviet montage in the Republican era China, this research hopes to enrich the understanding of the Sino-Soviet knowledge circulation and the complex social-cultural conditions of the specific historical time.