When Taylorism Met Revolutionary Romanticism
Documentary Cinema in China's Great Leap Forward
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2227475 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ying Qian (0000-0002-4759-9968, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 578-604 |
| Publication date | 2020-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0093-1896 • E-ISSN: 1539-7858 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/708075 |
| OpenAlex | W3011416617 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 16 |
This essay traces documentary cinema's entanglement in material productions in industry, agriculture, and infrastructure during China's Great Leap Forward (1957–1961) and uses documentary as a prism to investigate the intertwined histories of media practice and social transformation. I argue that as the fastest growing mode of filmmaking, documentary inculcated a complex temporal aesthetic in this period and propelled the Great Leap Forward as a productive force. Taylorist images provided sensorial training for a rapidly expanding labor force, instilling in new workers the rhythm and speed of optimal industrial movement. Meanwhile, a new mode of artistic documentary blurred the distinction between documentary and fiction, with a practice of documenting tomorrow that shunned uncertainty and brought the future into palpable proximity. Rapidly made to approximate the simultaneous time of television, but delivered manually by mobile projectionists to sites of mass labor all over the country, documentary films accompanied sleepless mass labor on a 24/7 schedule and played pivotal roles in disseminating age-old vernacular technologies, such as the backyard furnaces, to grave consequences. What was the Chinese revolution? How do we grasp its energies and entropies, and account for its failures? Understanding documentary as a critical media that articulated and supported the radical temporality and epistemology of the Great Leap Forward, this essay argues for the important role of media and mediation in delimiting the epistemological, political, and aesthetic possibilities that shaped the paths of the revolution's actualization
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · China · Epistemology · Filmmaking · Literature · Mediation · Movie theater · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Temporality · Chinese history and philosophy · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Law · Philosophy
Documentary art film and affective truth
The Little Sun and cinema as energy in Chinese science education filmmaking, 1950–1964
Water on cross-border screens, Hong Kong water tales from the 1960s
Introduction
The Cult of Craftsmanship in China
Flat Surface” as Material Metaphor
Mars Is a Mirror”
Industrialization as Imagination and Reality
The Human Tide
The Cinematic Milieu
The Chinese economy under stress, 1958—1965
Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art
Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951–1979
Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China
The Cambridge History of China
The Great Leap Forward
Red and Expert
The Causes of China's Great Leap Famine, 1959-1961
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
The Cultural Revolution at the Margins
| Unique citing works | 10 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |