National Cinema, Local Language, Trans-regional Adaptation: Dialect Comedy in the Early People's Republic of China

Abstract

As the Mao era is generally considered a period of national isolation and totalitarianism, its cinema has seldom been examined from the perspectives of the local and the transnational. A closer look at film comedies produced in the early PRC period, however, shows dynamic interaction between the local and the (trans-)national in Chinese cultural production during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Many dialect comedies and comedies adapted from regional performing traditions were produced and distributed across the country and even overseas during this period. The cinematic interest in dialect and regional comedic traditions in this period prompts many critical questions and problematizes the seemingly homogeneous official culture in the early PRC. By focusing on the particular genre of dialect comedy, this essay attempts to retrieve the complex interaction between the local and the national and encourages further reconsideration of Maoist national cinema.