The Animal and the Animalistic in China’s Late 1950s Socialist Satires

• In Event: The Art of Laughter in Maoist Cinema

Abstract

The wave of comedy films produced in late 1950s China were didactic satires intended to legitimize the new socialist government by chastising “old” behaviors and mentality that were considered incongruent with the image of a socialist “new” citizen. In the satires under study, the binary of the “old” vs. the “new” is staged in institutions that are themselves wrestling with the political transition. These institutions include a film studio (An Imperfect Comedy), a zoo (Startled in a Dream during a Zoo Trip), a rural production team (The Story of Following into the River), and a bureau (Before the New Director Arrives). Staged within the institutional space, the ideological drama is further inscribed on the physical bodies of the comedians and the animals. Here the animalistic and the animal discourses come into clash in their shared screen, resulting in mutual deconstruction.
My paper dissects the ways in which abject animality is attributed to comedians-characters haunted by their perceived inglorious, pre-socialist histories both diegetically and extra-diegetically, while animals are interpellated for the new socialist economy and biogovernance. I trace Chinese cinema and its critics’ difficult negotiation with excessive bodily humor, especially as it resurfaced with pre-socialist comedians recruited for the late 1950s socialist satires. I further unpack the tension between the perceived abject animality and the films’ positive focus on actual animals. My goal is to shed light on the socialist discourse’s fundamentally ambivalent stance on human and animals’ corporeal performances due to their variant amenability to ideological didacticism.

Author

• Yiman Wang, University of California, Santa Crutz