Abstract
This essay is about the politics of aesthetics in the cinematic making and remaking of the model opera (yangbanxi), a performative genre that was favorably engineered by Jiang Qing so as to facilitate politicized lives of Chinese masses by virtue of igniting and uniting the revolutionary fervor among peasants, workers and soldiers. Through a comparative analysis of the narrative schemas and aesthetic strategies deployed in Xie Tieli’s Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (1970) and Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), this article raises the questions of how a multiplicity of utopian visions has been reincarnated and reembodied through the contemporary remaking of the iconic model opera film. It argues that the practice of cinematic remaking in post-reform China is constituted by the underpinning logics of the politics of nostalgia and the rearticulation of geopolitical desire. Furthermore, it posits the ways that the re-imagination of national popular is enriched with and complicated by the creative impulse of regional vernacular culture and technology of global gesture.
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