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Journal of Chinese Cinemas

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Listening to films: Politics of the auditory in 1970sChina

Nicole Huang

To cite this article: Nicole Huang (2013) Listening to films: Politics of the auditory in 1970sChina, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 7:3, 187-206

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jcc.7.3.187_1

Published online: 03 Jan 2014.

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187

JCC 7 (3) pp. 187–206 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of Chinese Cinemas Volume 7 Number 3

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcc.7.3.187_1

Keywords

radiototal soundscapeclose listeningephemeratranslated filmsdubbing

Nicole HuaNgUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison

listening to films: Politics of

the auditory in 1970s china

abstract

This article focuses on listening practices in 1970s China and examines the cinematic soundtracks of a handful of films, domestic and foreign, that were edited specifi-cally for the purpose of radio broadcasting. Coined as ‘edited film recording’, this made-for-radio sonic compilation is a new product, one that takes crucial pieces from the original soundtrack but has significant editorial input, specifically in the insertion of an omniscient narrator. The narrator tells the story, expands narrative at times and comes in at crucial moments to drive key messages home. Film production was also designed for auditory consumption outside of the theatre, on gramophone and radio, before television entered individual households in China. Film literacy thus could be achieved without an actual access to the film products themselves. The hybridity of the genre created an illusion of broader and equal access to the symbolic order of a socialist visual culture. While communal life in 1970s China can be characterized by an infatuation with film and film culture, a web of other media, particularly those of sound, facilitated this fascination. The transitional period in China can be seen as a decade of cross-platform saturation of media culture on a high level.

The grey period of the 1970s in China, one that includes the second half of the Cultural Revolution era (1964–1978) and the first few years of the Reform era, was characterized by many undercurrents and gradual changes. The widespread violence and destruction that defined the early years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1969) subsided in late Mao years of the 1970s. Life seemed to have become normalized. Students returned to schools.

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Non-students returned to their work units. American president Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, made a few highly visible stops in major Chinese cities, and initiated the so-called ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ that led to final formali-zation of Sino-American diplomacy in 1974. The return of the Americans added much popular interest, marking the beginning of an era of broader and deeper global engagement. The demonized West, the image that had been prevalent in political posters throughout the Mao period, began to look more human. Together with a pair of musk oxen and two large redwood trees, the legacy of Nixon and his entourage also included bell bottoms and dark shades sneaking up from some corners of urban China. More colours and variations of shapes were added to street fashion by the middle of the decade. Most notably, a number of feature films were made between 1972 and 1976, that is, after much of the film industry had been shut down since the mid-1960s. And foreign films from the capitalist world, in addition to those from China’s socialist ‘brothers and sisters’, began to creep into mass consumption and became more prominent in the latter half of the decade. The leisure life in 1970s was characterized by an obsession with film and film culture, domestic and foreign.

This generational obsession was aided by the cinematic sounds that filled the auditory space in 1970s China. Screen songs and classic film dialogues occupied an important position in a socialist visual culture. A close look at how films were listened to then becomes a meaningful path towards a deeper understanding of cinema’s cross-platform hybrid design. This present study focuses on one key genre that best illustrates the expansiveness of film culture of the time: the cinematic soundtracks of a handful of films, domestic and foreign, that were reproduced specifically for the purpose of radio broadcasting. Coined as dianying luyin jianji, or ‘edited film recording’, this made-for-radio sonic compilation retains much of the music and dialogue from the original track, complemented by a voice-over narrator that supplies backgrounds, settings and connections between different scenes and figures, and comes in at optimum moments to drive critical messages home. The compilation is not a segment of a film, but a new product, one that takes crucial pieces from the original soundtrack but inserts significant editorial input, specifically in the presence of an omniscient narrator.

With the prevalence of edited film recording in 1970s China, film literacy could be achieved without an actual access to the film products themselves. The hybridity of the form created an illusion of broader and equal access to the symbolic order of a socialist visual culture. Together with serialized radio novels and radio plays, edited film recordings were among the most popular forms of mass entertainment throughout the decade. While communal life in late Mao China can be characterized by an infatuation with film and film culture, a web of other media, particularly those of sound, facilitated this fascination. In an era of total political saturation of daily life, edited film recording as a versatile plat-form effectively delivered centrally ordained messages for daily consumption; it also became a place where close listening took on divergent political contours, and ‘listening against’ was frequently practised along with ‘listening in’.

A totAl soundscApe

How does a total political saturation of the auditory space work and what does it sound like? The discussion will begin with the location of a total soundscape. ‘After a long hiatus of ten years, upon hearing a familiar voice on radio singing

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“Waves after waves in Honghu lake”, I was overtaken by sorrow’, writes Wang Meng (b. 1934), prolific writer, cultural statesman and one-time cultural minis-ter of China, in the concluding paragraph of the first volume of his sprawling autobiography. The narrator recounts drastic changes in the aftermath of the regime shift in 1976 as embodied in a range of sounds and voices that seems to have gushed into the air waves overnight. He continues:

Listening to the singing of ‘mountain after mountain, river after river, our Red Army finally arrived in Northern Shaanxi,’ I sobbed uncontrollably. Watching the Peking Opera Dielian hua on the televi-sion screen and listening to Yang Kaihui – Chairman Mao’s first wife, played by Li Weikang – singing the aria ‘Aiwan ting,’ my tears streamed down upon hearing the first words ‘Juzi zhoutou.’ And listening to Chang Xiangyu singing Guo Moruo’s ci poem set to the melody of Henan Yuju opera, ‘what a joyful event, smashing the Gang of Four, smashing them, ah ah ah …,’ I laughed out loud. I surprised myself, how could I still care about politics? Wouldn’t it be better if I just focused on being a man of letters, a survivor of the bygone era, a lofty old man who remained awake and uncontaminated while everyone else was either muddled in dirty politics or sunken in a deep slumber? But I am hopeless; I had already meddled in this world too deeply. I was still filled with passion; I still had a sharp sense of right and wrong, love and hate. […] My heart was still entangled with the fate of China, with the world, with the society. I sincerely prayed for the beginning of a new era in Chinese history. […] A new era was set to begin.

(Wang 2006: 378)

Here, the list of close listening includes several iconic singing voices that were revered in the first seventeen years under Mao Zedong’s rule, but later deemed politically incorrect during the Cultural Revolution and banished from the auditory space for ten years. ‘Waves after waves in Honglu Lake’ was a popular screen song in a film titled Honghu chiweidui/The Red Guerilla on Honghu Lake (Xie, 1961) adapted from a 1956 production by the Hubei Opera Troupe. The song about the Red Army’s long march, arguably the most endearing in the genre, was titled ‘Shandanda kaihua hongyanyan’/‘Alpine Flowers Blooming in Brilliant Red’ and sung by celebrated soprano Guo Lanying, who was tortured during the Cultural Revolution and found new life and renewed iconic status in post-Mao era.

These revived iconic sounds and voices from the past are then joined by new tunes that also speak of a revived revolutionary heritage. The 1977 opera portraying Mao’s first wife Yang Kaihui mixes romance with a tale of political sacrifice, a chapter in the supreme leader’s past widely believed to have been suppressed by Mao’s last wife, Jiang Qing, the mastermind of the Gang of Four who was accused of having instigated much of the suffering and devastation in the preceding violent decade. Reinstating Mao’s first and ‘original’ wife as a celebrated romantic heroine onstage should then be seen as signalling a resto-ration of all orders, political, social and familial (Ding 1995: 8–11). And Chang Xiangyu, the queen of Henan Yuju opera, or Henan bangzi, sings another new tune, one that she was said to have composed overnight, together with her husband, upon hearing the news of the fall of the Gang of Four. Chang’s new tune is charged with heightened spirit and liberated laughter, rendered in her signature vocal style, heard on radio and other broadcasting channels

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throughout the country following the dramatic shift in political landscape in the fall of 1976 (Zhang 2012: 48–9).

This list of close listening is not arbitrary. Wang Meng, a decorated man of letters, concludes a treacherous journey through the political minefield of Mao’s China with a series of poignant auditory comments. His narrative about social esteem achieved, lost and regained follows a familiar pattern, one that underscores the year 1976 as a watershed moment in China’s recent political history. Personal vicissitudes are meticulously set in sync with the fate of the nation. Published after much anticipation and fanfare, the reception of Wang’s autobiography has been lukewarm, despite rave reviews in official channels. Critics who have long waited for Wang’s historical insights from his unique vintage point encounter a banal personal narrative where the personal is often banished to the far corner of a life saturated with political aspirations (Zhou 2006: 42).

The work is of course worth a second and closer look. Here Wang’s conclusion to the first volume reveals something quite meaningful. There is no immediate discussion of how the literary scene is restored after the fall of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution. A new era is being ushered in by way of sounds and voices. The first volume reveals that in the years in which the narrator has been shut out of public life, he has never stopped ‘listening in’. The reader could imagine the narrator closing his eyes, crouching in his exile, leaving only his ears open, and tuning in to all sonic movements. Sound bytes are barometers, signalling at one moment the impending fall from grace, and at another moment a new found opportunity that will mend all previous failings. Sights can be shut out, but sounds are relentless as soundscape’s permeation is depicted as total and thorough and its impact is presented as immediate.

Wang’s text is then a testimony to the longevity and pervasiveness of a total soundscape, which characterizes auditory culture of Mao’s China. After all, messages of Mao’s continuing revolution were first propagated by radio waves and wired loudspeakers placed everywhere – school playgrounds, factories, rice paddies, corner stores, alleyways and communal courtyards. Wang’s renaissance through sounds and voices also suggests that the thor-oughness of this soundscape’s reach carried well into the beginning years of post-Mao China. Despite the regime shift in 1976, a total soundscape main-tained its hold throughout the decade and well into the reform era. Wang’s narrator never steps out of this soundscape throughout his life’s journey. Feeling the pulse of the time through its sound bytes, he sets his own pulse in accordance with the changing political climate. Close listening is then a way to gauge the context, that is, to earwitness, to remain in tune and thereby to stay relevant.

Here, I add a modifier ‘total’ to the concept of ‘soundscape’ as a revision to R. Murray Schafer’s original concept (1994: 1–12). An ecological term referring to natural acoustic environments, soundscape also refers to sonic environ-ments created by a host of human activities. Emily Thompson, for instance, has expanded the concept of soundscape to include both ‘a physical envi-ronment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world’ (2004: 1). Schafer’s other key concepts such as ‘sonography’, ‘earwitness’ and ‘soundmarks’ have also lead to theoretical rethinking beyond his immediate field of acoustic ecology. The idea of a total soundscape further removes the concept from its pastoral origin and resituates it in a highly politicized society where every corner of social

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life was thoroughly saturated with centrally ordained and politically charged sound bytes. Sounds stemmed from the Centre and radiated to all corners of the society, including those where light failed to penetrate.

The soundscape from which Wang Meng’s narrator is unable to escape is shaped by the technology that transmits sounds and voices. Technological devices of sound were omnipresent and immediately visible in decades of Mao’s China. Wired loudspeaker was a crucial technological device in ensur-ing that centralized sonic waves canvassed every single corner of social life. Statistics show that by the early 1970s, up to 70 million loudspeakers had been installed nationwide. The omnipresence of loudspeakers sent sound waves into rural villages, townships and urban communities (Huang and Yu 1997: 563–74). Rare travelogues of westerners in China of the 1970s often remarked on the omnipresence of the loudspeakers in practically every corner of one’s living space. They were seen hanging from roofs, from telephone poles and on treetops. Michelanglo Antonioni’s 1972 sweeping documentary Chung Kuo – Cina is the pinnacle of such travelogues in the form of an enchanting visual narrative. Filmed at the invitation of Premier Zhou Enlai and subse-quently banned in China after its completion, the film crew were only allowed to film in areas that were permitted by the government (Liang 2010: 55–57). In the third and last part of the film that showcases the port city Shanghai and its industrial setting, there is a scene that depicts the Shanghai Bund commanded by a loudspeaker, blasting sound waves and echoes that enve-lope the entire waterway and the cityscape.

This particular scene and the sound effect it evokes find its manifestation in other forms of visual art from the period. A 1974 political poster titled ‘Hongse dianbo chuan xixun’/‘The Red Electromagnetic Wave Transmits Happy News’ (original size: 53.5×77 cm) depicts construction work on roads and irrigation system that continues into the night. The starry night is lit up as in broad daylight. Workers listen to broadcasted radio programmes during a break. All seem elated by the content of the news. The wired loudspeaker attached to a pole prominently located in the picture frame commands central visual interest, a stand-in for the voices from the political centre. This is a visual testimony of how sound waves are designed to touch and impact individuals (Liu 1974) (Figure 1).

Loudspeakers commanded large public spaces; they were also placed inside neighbourhood alleyways and individual courtyards. The volumes were always turned up high, with sound penetrating through walls, windows and doors. A 1972 poster titled ‘Hongse laba jiajia xiang’/‘The Red Loudspeaker Sounding in Every Household’ (original size: 77×53 cm) drives home the message that a total soundscape ensures that domestic space is not to be spared. The rural family and their community, who seem to have taken their activities outside to the front yard, are enveloped by the imaginary sound bytes transmitted from the little red box hung high up on the door frame. A woman in a red jacket pulls on the cord that must have switched on the speaker, from which sound bytes immediately fill the space. Several people turn their heads to look at the source of the sounds and voices. Others pictured in the poster have their backs towards the Mao portrait and the speaker, but there is no doubt that everyone is touched by the waves, including a flock of chicken, a pair of lambs and a little boy playing peek-a-boo with animals. If visual images fail to grab their attention for the moment, the penetrating sound waves ensure that the saturation is complete and thorough. The man in the fore-ground seems to be fixing a wired red box. Could it be another speaker to be

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placed in another compound? A total soundscape depends on fast multiplica-tion of sound devices with this one appearing rather rudimentary but serving its purpose nonetheless. The door frame where the loudspeaker hinges on also frames the foyer area of the interior space, where a Mao shrine is clearly defined, complete with a portrait, a pair of red slogans and a stack of red books. Here the listening device might be rudimentary, but the two bicycles in the foreground are apparently signs of affluence. A bicycle, particularly one of a name brand, was considered a luxury item in 1970s China. For two of them (very shiny ones) to appear in a rural setting is indeed rare. The image speaks of affluence, abundance, happiness and total saturation of a political life (Huang 1972) (Figure 2).

The wired loudspeakers were, of course, not the only sound-making devices shaping a shared sonic environment. There was also a network of individually owned ‘talking machines’ (xiazi), in popular brand names such as ‘Red Star’, ‘Peony’, ‘Red Lamp’, ‘Red Plum’ and ‘Panda’, which were installed inside many private homes and contributed to an all encompass-ing network of sounds and waves (Zhang 2007: 68–69). A 1973 poster titled ‘Jiating’/‘Family’ (original size: 77x106 cm) depicts the interior of a worker’s family: father, mother, a son and a daughter. Bare, muted and grey, there is little hint of warmth or personal touch in the setting. The prominent feature in this poster is the crystal radio set in the background, possibly the only luxury item in this family, neatly set in the background but quietly commanding the space. The radio is the family’s fifth member (Chen 1973) (Figure 3).

All five members of the family are engaged in busy and productive activi-ties. The daughter is doing her schoolwork. Seated next to her is her brother, who is reading an issue of Renmin huabao/People’s Pictorial, the Chinese

Figure 1: Liu Zhigui, ‘The Red Electromagnetic Wave Transmits Happy News’ (1974). Image courtesy of the Stephen Landsberger Chinese Posters Collection, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Figure 2: Huang Entao, ‘The Red Loudspeaker Sounding in Every Household’ (1972). Image courtesy of the Stephen Landsberger Chinese Posters Collection, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

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Communist Party’s official pictorial magazine. The mother is engaged in her needlework. The father is reading a newspaper but also engaged in a conver-sation with the mother, apparently sharing the news he has been reading. The radio lurking in the background must be consistently sending out sound waves, echoing the messages conveyed in the newspaper and the pictorial. The imaginary sound bytes are only meaningful when juxtaposed with other forms of daily activities including reading, writing, conversing, bonding and homemaking.

What could the family be listening to? They could be listening to centralized news, or repeated playing of ‘quotation songs’, which by the 1970s were included in a larger category called geming wenyi, or ‘revolutionary performance art’. They could also be listening to an edited film recording. Cinematic culture of the 1970s hinged on the culture of radio broadcasting. Broadcasting venues played an essential role in a pre-television era when venues of film screen-ings were limited to more developed regions of China. More precisely, radio waves provided a market for an even broader consumption of filmic images. One would even argue that the centrality of cinematic culture in 1970s and 1980s China to a great extent relied on the omnipresence of radio waves.

arcHive aNd ePHemera

Many questions then follow: Does a total soundscape dictate ‘listening in’ and preclude other forms of listening? Could listening practice sideswipe official history and point to the trends and sentiments that are often at odds with leading political leitmotif of the time? Could ‘listening in’ morph into ‘listening against’? Within a total soundscape, are there ways to listen in order to tune ‘out’, or to stay ‘irrelevant’?

This line of enquiry is informed by the work of anthropologists of sound. Stefan Helmreich, for instance, asks the interesting question of how to listen

Figure 3: Chen Jizhong, ‘Family’ (1973).

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against the soundscape as ‘the soundscape has become haunted by the notion of immersion – the arrival of listeners at a sense of being at once emplaced in space and, at times, porously continuous with it’ (2010: 10). Helmreich has taken his cue from Tim Ingold, who argues against objectifying sound:

[…] neither sound nor light, strictly speaking, can be an object of our perception. Sound is not what we hear, any more than light is what we see. […] When we look around on a fine day, we see a landscape bathed in sunlight, not a lightscape. Likewise, listening to our surroundings, we do not hear a soundscape. For sound is not the object but the medium of our perception. It is what we hear in. Similarly, we do not see light but see in it.

(Ingold 2007: 10–11, original emphasis)

Taking the cue of sound as the medium, and not the object, I argue that China’s transitional period of the 1970s provided an opportunity for various forms of listening to materialize, specifically, the opportunity to listen ‘in’ and listen ‘against’ within a total soundscape. To many, revived sound bytes did not gush into the air waves overnight in 1976, as Wang Meng unabashedly relates. On the contrary, they sneaked into daily life little by little, beginning in the early 1970s, that is, years before the Cultural Revolution ended. Changing sounds of the decade shaped the auditory experiences of a generation and the continuity of the entire decade of the 1970s in terms of auditory consumption needs to be maintained.

Treating the 1970s as one continuous decade helps highlight the changes that took a decade to materialize. China of the 1970s witnessed both the heyday and the gradual decline of a socialist visual culture. There was an unprecedented fascination with the visual, a kind of fascination that was, I argue, often mediated through the auditory. Sounds and voices occupied such a prominent position in daily experiences that various memoir writers dubbed the decade as an shengyin de shidai/era of sounds (Sun 2010: 82–8). These memoir writers often point to edited film recording, that is, cinematic soundtracks of a handful of films, including model opera films, feature films and translated films, that were edited specifically for the purpose of radio broadcasting.

The prevalence of the genre edited film recording in Mao’s China under-scores the necessity to locate an often elusive archive and to define the mate-riality of auditory expressions. Where do we locate a body of material that will help reconstruct an archive of sounds and voices? While recent decades witnessed a massive effort at constructing an archive of images bearing the distinctive trademarks of the Mao era, what has fallen through the crack is a form of ephemeral expression that is much harder to capture either on tape or paper: sounds, voices, noises, that is, the auditory. The material is ephem-era, defined as ‘the minor transient documents of everyday life’; but unlike most objects characterized as ephemera that were printed matters, auditory expressions were far more intangible and immaterial. Sound has this ephem-eral quality to easily dissipate into the thin air (Rickards 1988: 7).

While the concept of ephemera is typically defined as printed matters, historians of sounds have tried to fight off sounds’ ephemeral fate by tying them to other, and more material, forms of expression (Thompson 2004: 1–12). In searching for an archive of sounds and voices from the Mao era, I witnessed reels after reels of magnetic audiotape – mostly recordings of

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radio programmes – sitting in mould- and mildew-infested local storage cells. Most of these deteriorated completely or were tossed to make room for the arrival of new media. Years ago, I located a few still useable open reels in a local archive, but those were all that could be salvaged. The storage space and the content within soon disappeared, making way for future development, an inevitable process that makes sound preservation almost an impossible task. How to define the auditory form of Maoist cultural expression as ephemera then is more than a theoretical question. It is every bit a practical issue for researchers.

Not all was lost. Edited film recordings emerged from this barely exist-ent physical archive as one body of material that was clearly preserved, and in recent years have been repackaged for new waves of consumption. The preferential treatment of this body of auditory material has everything to do with its entanglement with the cinematic culture of the time. Much of the auditory material from the Mao era would fit the definition of political ephem-era, that is, it was made for immediate use and instant dissemination and became disposable once it had served its function of the particular moment. Edited film recordings, as a contrast, were made to last. They were played over and over through radio waves throughout the 1970s, became an important component of the total soundscape and remained till the present as ‘sound souvenirs’, that is, ‘endangered sounds’ that were not only archived but also remembered.

Here, the concept of ‘sound souvenir’ is originally coined by Schafer (1994: 240). In an edited volume by Karin Bijsterveld and José van Dijck, the concept is more clearly defined as ‘endangered sounds, such as the sounds of pre-industrial life, that could be captured by recording technologies or stored in archives, and thus remembered after their extinction’ (2009: 13). The concept highlights materiality of auditory expressions. While much of the sound production fits in the category of ephemera, such as those quickly dete-riorating reel-to-reel magnetic tapes, with careful collecting, archiving, resus-citating and restoring, past sounds can also become physical objects that take a prominent position on one’s bookshelves. Scholars of past sounds often have to deal with their own memories and nostalgia while carefully examining the close connection between music technologies and cultural memory.

Radio in 1970s China then was not blind, as Rudolf Arnheim might have romanticized in his classic essay ‘In praise of blindness: Emancipation from the body’ (1936: 133–203). On the contrary, transmitted sounds became vehicles for light, for sights and for movements. Sound’s invisibility is never absolute; what is audible underscores what is also visible. Here visibility depends on the seemingly invisible role of sounds and voices, and a pattern of visibility as embedded in the genre of edited film recording incorporates radio and other sound technologies into a larger web of socialist visual culture.

To take this argument one step further, the centrality of auditory practice in this era went on to transform another new visual medium into a sound transmitter, and by this I am specifically referring to the advent of televi-sion in Mao’s China. Typically, television is seen as a technological device that only made a difference in China beginning from the early 1980s; this presumption overlooks decades of what I call ‘communal television’ in China. A small television set (nine inch, black and white) was playing to a commu-nity of viewers. Television signals were often unstable and images were often blurred, which would be missing to a roomful of viewers. But the volume could be blasted high, thereby turning the machine into one that primarily

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transmitted sound bytes, not unlike a radio. While radio was not blind, tele-vision could be blinded. The enthusiasm surrounding communal television in 1970s China was then an extension of radio culture. The sensory migration or restructuring associated with the introduction of television in Mao’s China is another powerful example of the close integration between the visual and the auditory, where the boundary between invisibility and visibility is further blurred (Huang 2003: 161–82).

While much of the sound archive from the Mao era no longer exists, a portion of it has been preserved, repackaged and re-entered into everyday consumption in today’s China, by virtue of its central position within cine-matic culture of the period. A discussion of some of the key texts in this inte-grated cinematic culture is then in order.

Domestic heroes

What kind of films were people listening to through the radio waves in 1970s China? A quick answer is: the same films that were shown in theatres. After being shut down during the first half of the Cultural Revolution (except for the cinematic productions of eight model works masterminded by Jiang Qing), the film industry showed signs of revival around 1972. Veteran film-makers were reappointed to make new feature films in response to popular demands for a wider variety of visual entertainment. For instance, Xie Tieli, a veteran film-maker from the Yan’an generation, was acclaimed for his pre-Cultural Revolution work of Zaochun eryue/Early Spring in February (1963), which became a target of criticisms a few years later. During the Cultural Revolution, he was temporarily ‘liberated’ by Jiang Qing who commissioned him to work on three titles of model cinema (yangban dianying): On the Harbor (Haigang, 1972, co-directed with Xie Jin), Longjiang song/Songs of the Dragon River, 1972 and Dujuan shan/Azalea Mountain, 1974. During this brief period of limited freedom, Xie repeatedly tried his hand at feature film. The 1975 film Haixia, produced by the Beijing Film Studio, featuring an original score by famed popular songwriter Wang Ming, which was one reason why the film was popu-lar, was Xie’s first feature film after his ‘liberation’ (Huang 2010: 402–25).

Feature films made during the last few years of the Cultural Revolution era turned out to be a set of key texts whose distribution and dissemination played a central role in organizing leisure within an urban culture that was essentially communal. Cinema with its political messages were channelled into leisure and served primarily to organize leisure. The revived film industry in the mid-1970s became a crucial site in the negotiations over education and re-education of the successors of revolutionary heritage.

Important feature films made between 1973 and 1976 include Yanyang tian/A Brilliant Sunny Day (1973), Qingsong ling/Pine Ridge (1973), Xiangyangyuan de gushi/Stories from a Sun-facing Courtyard (1974), Shanshan de hongxing/Sparkling Red Stars (1974), Chuangye/The Pioneers (1974), Jinguang dadao/Golden Boulevard (1975), Chunmiao/Spring Sprout (1975), Hongyu/Red Rain (1975) and Juelie/Breaking (1975). Among these films, Sparkling Red Star stands out as a key text not only for its narrative appeal to the youngest of Mao’s audience, but also for its cross-platform hybrid design that lends it perfectly to a sonic amplification, suitable for endless circulation on-screens (big and small), via printed pages (various forms of pictorial art such as lianhuanhua or ‘linked picture books’) and through the air waves (repeated broadcast of screen songs and edited film recordings).

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In the sonic compilation of Sparkling Red Star made for radio, a female narrator recounts the narrative and strings together the original dialogues, musical scores and sound effect. The edited film recording is a thorough rework of the original soundtrack. What emerges is a new product, one that takes crucial pieces from the original soundtrack but has significant editorial input, specifically in the insertion of an omniscient narrator. The narrator tells the story, expands narrative at times and also comes in at crucial moments to drive key messages home. The edited film recording was published in a set of three vinyl records by Zhongguo changpian she in 1974, almost immediately after the release of the film. Vinyl records of edited film recordings from the 1970s and 1980s have in recent years become collectibles, as is the case with other sound souvenirs. They are a reminder that the film production, from the very beginning, was also meant to be for the consumption at home, on gramophone, on radio and later on television.

An episode in the film, one that might be called ‘the journey of table salt’, is a case in point. The story is set in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period that the mainland Chinese historiography terms the era of ‘white terror’. The Chinese Communist party was at the verge of extinction. The remain-ing Red Army troops were ready to launch the Long March to the Northwest region. The remaining loyalists retreated into the deep mountains to regroup. The returning Nationalist troops regained the control of the area, sealed these pockets of ‘red remnants’, aiming at starving the soldiers to death. In the film, Nationalist guards are seen stationed at all mountain passes to make sure that no rice or salt would be sneaked into the mountains. The film presents the situation as dire. The narrator in the edited film recording further stresses the severity of the situation. And here comes our young protago-nist Dongzi, a boy of ten or eleven, who takes this opportunity and moulds himself into a hero.

This is an episode about how to smuggle table salt into the mountains. It is also an episode that teaches some basic principles about sodium chloride. Two clips in the film are narrated in a scientific tone in the edited film record-ing. In clip one, a Red Army soldier explains to Dongzi, our young protago-nist, why salt is an essential part of everyday diet. Without salt, the soldiers will not have energy and will not be able to fight the enemies. And the current supply of salt is scarce, which amounts to a dire situation. In clip two, in order to smuggle salt into the mountain region, Dongzi dissolves salt in water and pours the solution to the inside of his thick padded jacket. Once he clears the check point, the jacket is soaked in a water basin to unload the solution. The solution is then set on a stove until all water is evaporated and sodium chloride is re-solidified. With the narrator’s guidance, the listening audience would repeatedly witness how ordinary table salt dissolves in water and how crystallization happens when liquid solution of sodium chloride evaporates, returning table salt to its solidified, and purer, form.

Two images from the lianhuanhua version of the film have captured this process of magical transformation and can serve as fine examples to illustrate cross-platform saturation of media culture. As with the edited film recording, the lianhuanhua version was published soon after the film was released, as another effective measure to enhance film literacy. In the first image, Dongzi opens up his jacket that is completely soaked by the sodium chloride solution after having safely cleared the enemy check point. And in the next, Grandpa helps Dongzi drain the solution from his jacket, pouring the solution into a wok that is already set on fire to let the water evaporate (Figures 4 and 5).

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This basic chemistry lesson is performed over and over on-screen and printed pages, and through the radio waves where the omniscient narrator explains the magical process of smuggling salt through the enemy lines and witnessing it transformed into a purer, and better, form, a chemical process that comes to symbolize the course of moulding and literally crystallizing a revolutionary soldier. As the film is billed as a ‘red classic’ in today’s China, chemistry classes in junior high schools in China today still introduce the two clips from the classic film to illustrate the process, in what is called ‘situational approaches’ or ‘context-oriented teaching’. Chemistry teachers in today’s China then are assuming the role of the radio personality in the 1970s sonic compilation, constantly blending a revolutionary lesson together with basic science education (Zhang 2010: 117).

Children and youth who grew up in the 1970s would come to recite lines and themes from films such as Pine Ridge, Stories from the Courtyard Facing the Sun and Sparkling Red Star, evidence of the unparalleled popularity of these films (Zhang 1998: 4–7). A high level of film literacy had much to do with the fact that cinematic culture of the 1970s was intertwined with the culture of radio broadcasting. The popularity of feature films in the mid-1970s to a great extent relied on the omnipresence of the waves of the Central People’s Broadcast Radio Station in and around the individual households.

ForeigN romaNtics

Concurrently with the revival of feature film production in the first half of the 1970s, Chinese audiences were also greeted by an array of films from their socialist brothers and sisters (North Korea, Vietnam, Albania, Romania and Yugoslavia). In the latter half of the decade, feature films from the United States, England, Mexico and Japan were also introduced to the Chinese audience. Thus began an era of infatuation with voice artists behind the proc-ess of transcribing foreign features onto Chinese screens. By the end of the decade, the genre of edited film recording entered its last golden age when radio and film audiences alike revered a group of voice artists, based in

Figure 4: Page 117 of the lianhuanhua version of Sparkling Red Star (1975).

Figure 5: Page 119 of the lianhuanhua version of Sparkling Red Star (1975).

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Changchun and Shanghai, respectively, who translated and dubbed a series of foreign films. These artists were the true celebrities of the era though audi-ences rarely had a chance to see their true faces. A host of publications in recent years paid tribute to these iconic voices from the 1970s. Memoir writing by veteran voice artists Su Xiu and Cao Lei, for instance, supplies important information on the production of key auditory texts (Su 2005; Cao 2006).

The history of foreign films in the People’s Republic is a history of cultural memories. A different generation would associate their experiences of coming of age with watching certain transcribed films. Those who grew up in the 1950s would fondly remember their education in early Soviet cinema, a subject that Tina Mai Chen has dealt with in several of her publications (2007: 53–80). And the huge popularity of ‘Awara Hoon’ (screen song in the 1951 Hindi film Awara, starring Raj Kapoor) in China in the 1950s testifies to the endear-ing power of Bollywood features in contemporary China (Sarkar 2010: 50–51). Those who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s would remember children’s films from Vietnam and war films from Romania, Albania and Yugoslavia (Yan 2001: 65–76). And those who grew up in the 1980s would have a wider array of choices with the return of Hollywood to Chinese screens. In 2005, China’s Central TV Station produced a special series called Yizhipian huimou/Looking Back at Translated Films, in five installments. Other numerous TV programmes and personal memoirs also came out in recent years. The writing of a history of translated films in China began to take shape.

Dubbing foreign films as a serious cinematic endeavour in China began with Changchun Film Studio (Changying), formerly Man’ei (the Manchurian Film Studio). Following the founding of the People’s Public, Changying began to dub films from early Soviet cinema and thus initiated a three-decade history of transcribing foreign-language films for daily consumption in a Chinese socialist visual culture. In 1950, the Shanghai Film Studio also estab-lished a facility that attempted to dub foreign films. The facility was later expanded into an independent film studio, the Shanghai Translated and Dubbed Film Studio (Shanghai yizhipian chang or Shangyi). From the 1950s to 1980s, Changying and Shangyi were the two main entities in processing foreign films. By mid-1980s, many other film studios joined the production (Su 2005: 54–58).

The North Korean feature Kotpanum chonio/Flower Girl (1972) was argu-ably the most popular foreign film introduced in the first half of the 1970s. Directed by Pak Hak and Ch’oe Ik-kyu, the film was said to be originated from a play written by Kim Il Sung in the 1940s when he was fighting a guerilla war in Japanese-occupied Manchuria alongside his Chinese counter-parts. The introduction of the film to its Chinese audiences was a complete media fanfare. It was the first widescreen production the Chinese audiences had ever seen. Posters featuring the beautiful female lead were posted every-where. The theme song, ‘Flower Selling Song’, could be heard on radio and on streets. Edited film recording was broadcasted repeatedly. And people trampled each other while standing in long lines trying to get into one after another of the sold-out shows. Some reports even claimed human casualties in these fights. New technological advancement in cinema was represented by North Korea for a long time. The 130-minute feature did not seem to be long enough. The sensational introduction of ‘Flower Girl’ in China in 1974 was a cultural phenomenon in and of itself (Yan 2012: 54–60) (Figure 6).

Valter Brani Sarajevo/Walter Defends Sarajevo, a former Yugoslav feature made in 1972 by acclaimed director Hajrudin Krvavac, was dubbed by the

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Beijing Film Studio in 1973, and began to be screened in Chinese theatres in 1977. Revolutionary legends, enhanced by an exciting action/spy thriller about the Sarajevo underground resistance towards the end of the World War II, intrigued the Chinese audience, particularly Chinese youth. While the film itself might be seen as an interesting document as to how cinema works to validate social norms and political legends, its reception in China speaks a different story. By the late 1970s, many Chinese youth could memorize much of the translated film dialogue from repeatedly listening to the edited film recording on radio. Segments of the translated film thus became coded language of the time. Urban gangs would mimic underground resistance forces portrayed in the film in exchanging secret codes in meetings and gath-erings. ‘Destroy fascism’ and ‘Freedom belongs to the people’ are two most frequently cited quotes from this and other films that portray the underground anti-fascist movement in previously German-occupied East European nations. Knowledge of these secret codes became entry tickets into urban gang culture of the late 1970s and early 1980s (Shen 2007: 51–54). Translated and dubbed filmic dialogues constructed a wealth of vocabulary nowhere to be found in standard dictionaries of the time. They provide a crucial site in illuminating the intersection between visual and verbal media (Figure 7).

The transcribed Walter Defends Sarajevo can be seen as a transitional text, taking us into a changed cultural terrain of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the film’s popularity lasted for another decade. Similarly, the transcribed Jane Eyre was another key text, one that signals the Chinese audience’s grad-ual shift from films made in other socialist nations to those from the capital-ist world of the West. Statistics of audience participation indicate that, while in 1977 films from Yugoslavia such as Walter Defends Sarajevo were voted as audience’s favourites, by 1979 films from England, such as Jane Eyre, Death on

Figure 6: A scene from Flower Girl.

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the Nile, and the 1948 version of Hamlet starring Laurence Olivier, quickly rose to be the favourites (Xu 1998: 25–31).

Charlotte Bronte’s gothic novel has been adapted for screen presenta-tion at least seven times, the earliest in 1934, and the latest in 1997. For the Chinese audiences, it was Delbert Mann’s 1970 British production, origi-nally made for television, that captured their imagination. George Scott and Susannah York were the only possible Mr Rochester and Miss Eyre for the Chinese audience. As for the 1944 production by Twentieth-Century Fox starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, an overwhelmingly favourite version in the English-speaking world, Chinese audiences would dismiss it as inauthentic. In the imagination of a generation of Chinese viewers and listeners, the transcribed film represents the highest form of the art of voice, one that brings out the musical, lyrical and romantic capacities of the modern Chinese language. And it was Qiu Yuefeng and Li Zi, two of the most beloved voice artists of the 1970s, who materialized these qualities and gave the two characters a renewed life in Chinese mass entertainment of the late 1970s. Chinese audiences adored the film’s original sound track, with its romantically haunting Thornfield theme created by harp, piano, harpsichord and orchestra, a musical score by John Williams. The sound effect is further enhanced by the jazzy and magnetic voice of Qiu Yuefeng, who makes George Scott’s Mr Rochester more dark, gloomy and romantically irresistible than all other Mr Rochesters, and by the silky and elastic tones of Li Zi, who turns intricate and strong-willed Miss Eyre into a new symbol of China’s ‘new woman’. This Chinese Mr Rochester, together with Japan’s legendary stoic and chivalrous yakuza man, Takakura Ken, became a symbol of a zhenzheng de nanzihan/truly masculine man. Jane Eyre’s declaration of love and independence and love because of independence entered into young Chinese women and girls’ daily dictionary, together with Shu Ting’s lyrical manifesto in her seminal poem ‘Zhi xiangshu’/‘To the Oak Tree’ (Liu 2001: 70–73) (Figure 8).

The transcribed Jane Eyre was also representative of how the craze for foreign faces, themes and voices began in contemporary China. The trans-lated and dubbed version of the film was already produced during the last years of the Cultural Revolution. It was one of a series of foreign films that were transcribed for ‘internal viewing’. Together with Changchun Film Studio, the Shanghai Translated and Dubbed Film Studio was often assigned to provide the highest leaders and their immediate circles such entertain-ment. One theory was that Jiang Qing was the one who needed immediate

Figure 7: A battleground scene from Walter Defends Sarajevo.

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access to classic films from the West in order to seek inspirations in her direc-tion of China’s own film industry (Cao and Su 2010: 18–21). Whatever the reason might be behind such a concerted venture, translated films produced for internal use in the early and mid-1970s ventured into the public space for broad consumption a few years later. When these voice artists were summoned by the order from above to make these films, they could not have imagined that soon enough their sonic ensembles would be entering into the spiritual lives of millions of men and women and occupying a bright spot in cultural memories of a whole generation (Zhang 2010: 251). The early years of ‘reform and opening’ unleashed some of the ‘internal’ material into public consumption and also set free a desire to know the ‘other’ in the shapes and voices of ‘us’.

ConClusion

In this generational desire to know the other, Qiu Yuefeng (1922–1980) was singled out as one voice artist who was most successful in transmitting the ‘alien’ sounds. By the late 1970s, Qiu’s half Chinese, half White Russian line-age was an open secret to the Chinese audience, but few had seen his face. So how could Qiu’s listening audience be so certain that what they were hearing was indeed the sounds and voices of the other, that is, the West? Few had any contact with the West under Mao’s China. Why was Qiu’s vocal contour immediately recognized as ‘foreign’? In answering these questions, the artist and cultural critic Chen Danqing resorts to ‘decadence’ as an all-encompass-ing aesthetic category, one that lumps together all treacherous categories that become relevant in the case of Qiu Yuefeng: race, gender, culture, class, age and voice. Chen writes:

Decadence, the essence of Qiu Yuefeng’s vocal signature. … … That’s right, there were things we really wanted to do and just were not given access to. All sorts of pleasures and needs were suppressed for such a

Figure 8: A 1979 poster of dubbed version of Jane Eyre.

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long time. And Qiu Yuefeng’s voice pointed to decadence as a source of pleasure. It was he who gave us an outlet to express anger, to engage in verbal dispute, to utter profanity, to be sneaky, to tease and to seduce. What a genius in amplification. In his tonal explosion so out of the ordinary, he lead us into a virtual world where we tortured ourselves and expanded our ego. Even that hypocrisy in our everyday speech acquired a state of beauty because of him. In Qiu Yuefeng’s vocal anomaly, in his state of auditory madness, and through an aestheticized ugliness he conveyed, we cured ourselves, mutated into ‘foreigners,’ and were completely let loose. Locked in intense listening, our subjectivity was displaced and we roamed in a world of pure fantasy.

(Chen 2003: 113–14)

What Chen Danqing calls the ‘vocal anomaly’ then comes naturally out of the political stricture of the time. Foreignness is constructed out of a complete unknown, that is, a void. In this celebratory article dedicated to a beloved voice artist, it is indeed the ‘we’, the listening audience of Qiu, who acquires a true sense of agency, able to mend wounds, to see beauty in ugliness and to turn a familiar home into a strange land. Qiu Yuefeng and his voice have indeed become a signifier, one created by many like Chen Danqing, who are driven by an intense desire to see and hear the ‘other’ and ‘there’ in the shapes and voices of ‘us’ and ‘here’. Here close listening to dubbed foreign films has become a clandestine act, and ‘listening in’ morphs into ‘listening against’. A total soundscape begins to erode.

Chen Danqing’s emotional tribute to voice artists of a bygone era forms an interesting contrast to Wang Meng’s dignified journey in seeking a political restitution, cited early on in this article. Here, close listening takes on divergent political contours. While Wang Meng’s narrator anxiously listens in and persistently attempts to stay relevant, Chen seeks immersion in a different order, aesthetic or political. The politics of the auditory in contem-porary China was equally divided as other cultural terrains. Edited film recording as a key genre effectively delivered key political messages for daily consumption; it also conveyed many sounds and voices from an imagined darkness, of a romanticized decadent era and place, which became some of the most visible aspects of 1970s China. There might not be anything glamor-ous in the life that gave rise to such auditory forms, but the voices that came out of it made it possible for the listeners of the time to envision a brand of glamour that could only be pieced together through sounds and voices, whose visibility depends on their being invisible, deeply personal, non-physical and never realistic.

acKNowledgemeNts

Research for the paper was funded by an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at various institutions and forums, including University of Washington, University of Hong Kong, University of California at Berkeley and University of Wisconsin at Madison. I thank organizers and audience members for their feedback. Reports by the two anonymous readers provided many valuable suggestions. Guest editors Jean Ma and Matthew Johnson offered much needed support and critical insights. Weihong Bao read an earlier version of the paper and provided a long list of detailed suggestions. I thank her and others for their support.

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suggested citatioN

Huang, N. (2013), ‘Listening to films: Politics of the auditory in 1970s China’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7: 3, pp. 187–206, doi: 10.1386/jcc.7.3.187_1

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coNtributor details

Nicole Huang is Professor of Chinese Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently completing a book manu-script on auditory culture and daily practice in 1970s China.

Contact: Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1116 Van Hise, 1220 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA.E-mail: nhuang@wisc.edu

Nicole Huang has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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