The visual construction of the people’s country and the Chinese nation: political aesthetics in the Ethno-documentaries of New China

Abstract

This paper discusses the political positioning of the people and the cultural image of the Chinese nation through the lens of the Social-historical Scientific Documentary Films of China’s ethnic minorities (hereafter referred to as “the Ethno-documentaries”) by restoring the problem to the site of the investigation of humanities and social sciences and the General Surveys on (Folk) Arts in the early years of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. Through detailed analysis of specific Ethno-documentary films, this paper explores how the social sciences conducted its “Social and Historical Investigation of China’s Ethnic Minorities” via the medium of film to convey the advanced social concepts and ideological work of the new regime through the historical narrative of art and politics. This study highlights three key points. First, the “Chinese nation” as a modern political concept dates its origins back to the 1920s with the emergence of the “National Heritage Reorganization Movement” and the “Doubting Antiquity School.” However, it was only through the medium of the Ethno-documentaries that this concept was visually and aurally represented in films for the first time, which draws our attention to the fact that the entry point for understanding modern China lies in discerning the relationship between culture and politics. Second, when discussing the relationship between culture and politics, this study juxtaposes the Ethno-documentaries and “art for workers-peasants-soldiers,” which developed during the same period. These two forms of art focus respectively on national history and the suffering of the lower classes of society, and it is this intertextual nature of the historical narrative that jointly anchors the cultural and historical view of New China. Lastly, historical view is the core of the humanities, social sciences, and art disciplines in New China. Previous studies have mainly attributed certain phenomena to the “politicization” or “pan-politicization” of a particular historical period due to disciplinary barriers and cultural trauma and have stopped discussing such topics in depth. In contrast, the significance of the political aesthetics in the Ethno-documentaries is to have transformed classical Chinese artistic language into a modern one to represent the Chinese people and the Chinese nation. It also raises a question of re-sinicization of many modern political issues that have persisted until now: How do today’s Chinese art works vividly depict the prosperity of this country and its hardworking and courageous people?