The Broken Human–Object Continuum: The Technological Future and Socialist Contradictions in Rhapsody of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (1958)

Abstract

Abstract The third section of Rhapsody of the Ming Tombs Reservoir (Shisanling shuiku changxiangqu 十三陵水库畅想曲, 1958), the first film in Mao-era China to include elements of science fiction, envisions a technologically advanced future in the year 1978. While seemingly aligned with the rapid industrialization goal of the Great Leap Forward, the film’s techno-fantasy attracted blistering criticism. Focusing on the overlooked historical debate that followed the release of the film, this article argues that criticism regarding the visualization of a technological future reveals how seemingly legitimate imaginations of a communist future reflect internal contradictions within the socialist present. Reading the film and the debate it sparked within the context of technological development in the late 1950s, this article identifies one locus of criticism: the human–object relationship. During the construction of the reservoir, the film shows a harmonious human–object relationship, but the futuristic part of the film depicts that relationship as profoundly alienated. I argue that this discontinuity does not betray ignorance of or an intentional departure from socialist ideology; rather, it reflects ideological contradictions between intellectual and manual labor, egalitarianism and class difference, industrialization processes and revolutionary agendas. In its rhapsodic depiction of advanced devices that consolidate the division of knowledge, the film unintentionally lays bare a fundamental conflict that was undermining the socialist system in the real world.