Gained in translation: The reception of foreign cinema in Mao’s China

Abstract

This article studies the exhibition and reception of popular foreign titles in the cinematic memories of those who grew up in the Cultural Revolution: Soviet film Lenin in 1918 (1939), North Korean film The Flower Girl (1972), Albanian film Victory Over Death (1967), and Indian film Awara (1951). I argue that, as films crossed national, even continental borders to meet with mass audiences for whom they were never intended, the radically different exhibition and reception contexts helped generate new meanings “gained in translation.” Those heteroglossic “extrinsic meanings” revise David Bordwell’s referential, explicit, implicit and symptomatic meanings. This article will also delve into affective responses, hidden pleasures, and viewer identifications. Studying foreign cinema’s reception in Mao’s China broadens the field of “Chinese cinema studies” to include “cinema in China” with all of its cosmopolitan connections, revises our assessment of the Cultural Revolution, and invites us to reconsider today’s Chinese media ecology in light of its socialist past.