The Making of Xie Jin in the PRC

Abstract

This chapter reexamines Xie Jin (1923-2008) and his highly successful film career in Mao-era China. Despite his uneasy relationship with the cadres in the Shanghai-based film studio, Xie Jin managed to produce a series of high-profile, award-winning films that commanded enormous viewership nationwide. Albeit such marked success, the friction between strong-willed Xie and the nosy supervisors, inspectors, and censors proved demoralizing but unintendedly led to multiple authorship of practically all his films, that is, contributions of various parties (Xie himself, his supervisors, and film censors) to his films. Hence, it is fair to argue that the Party policies and the political authorities’ interventionism were at once enabling, empowering, and restraining factors behind the lionization of Xie as a rising star in the film firmament and the creation of his peculiar directorial style, that is, associating “the grand narrative of the nation” to “the vicissitudes of individual lives”—especially those of women—and using the mode of family melodrama to interpret the PRC’s sociopolitical order