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Mia Yinxing Liu, "Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era" (U Hawai’i Press, 2019)
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Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Jing Mi, a scholar of Chinese cinema and cultural studies, and today I'm delighted to speak with Dr. Mia Liu, author of Literati Wearing Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2019 and Dr. Liu received her PhD in art history from University of Chicago and is currently an assistant professor at John Hopkins University, specializing in modern and contemporary Chinese art, cinema and media culture. Chinese cinema has long drawn inspiration from China's artistic traditions and literati landscape painting has been one of the most enduring. In nigrati lenses, Dr. Liu explores this relationship during the Mao era, when film was tightly bound to ideological campaigns and political control. Looking closely at four films, Li Shizhen, Stage Sisters, Early Spring in February, and Legend of Tavian Mountain, she shows how landscape on screen became more than decoration. It opened up A space for creative expression, subtle critique, and even alternative ways of thinking. And I found this book not only very insightful, but also full of words. I was actually touched by your analysis more than once while reading it. Dr. Liu, welcome to the New Books Network. As we usually do, let's begin with the question of origins. So what first drew you to this topic? And could you briefly share your academic journey with us?
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Certainly. Thank you so much, Jing. And I'm very happy that the book has some audience. So the topic. So I went to the University of Chicago pursuing a degree, PhD in art history. But I also did a master's there in art history, but I also did another master's somewhere else, actually, at Penn State, Comparative Literature. My. My undergrad major was English Literature. So I would say my academic journey started with literature and then media studies and theory, actually. But then I think my more profound journey, which started when I was very little, was in art history and film. So my uncle was a painter for a billboard in the local cinema in the small town I grew up in. So I actually watching him painting those billboards, he was kind of transferring official posters for films onto those big acrylic painting board hanging on the town square. That was his daily job. And watching him do and also watching all those free movies when I was little, really prepared a lot of those. I would say what you're experiencing too, perhaps the moving, the kind of emotional response to films. So kind of prepared for a love for. A passion for cinema and a passion for art, and then how they kind of find each other in common places. That's pretty much how my journey starts. And then, of course, the academic journey in this country, in the United States, at the University of Chicago, the great place for interdisciplinary humanities studies. And I was very lucky to study under Wuhang, the great art historian and also the great film historian, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Yuri Tivian. So I was extremely lucky to be able to do that.
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C
Okay, thank you for the introduction. Yeah. So now let's go to the book, the introduction of the book, and where you set the stage for the whole book. And you begin by reminding us that the film theory has often focused on the human face or body, while the landscapes tend to fit into the background. So what made you want to shift your spotlight onto the landscape? And why do you think. Think it's such a powerful, yet overlooked presence in the cinema?
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Yeah, that's really a key factor in my interest, which is I love cinematic faces, I love cinematic bodies, but yet I also love the cinematic representation of landscape. Which I found has been not as talked about as the other parts. And being in the art historical tradition of landscape art in China, we know that landscape is not just a subject, but also a form, an ideal. And I'm actually teaching a seminar on nude in world art this semester. I keep telling my students that the absence of nude in Chinese art can be actually is not so much of an absence, but you have to look for the same kind of equivalent of European nude in landscape, actually. So you can find a lot of languages in Chinese art history that informs our understanding of landscape. In my understanding of landscape in cinema, how it functioned, and it could be also an allegory of human life, politics, a mirror of the age and a commentary on national affairs. And that's all over the history of landscape painting in Chinese art. And I found it continued to evolve in Chinese cinema as well, but because it's also often viewed as an inert backdrop, its potential, and it's actually the COVID kind of function of landscape to carry profound and sometimes radical or even subversive meaning is usually underestimated by the sometimes the audience. But I think in my case, the study that I included in the book, the audience actually quite got it, but not so much by the film studies or even the most stringent film censors.
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C
And early on you draw a distinction between the literary cinema and what you call literati landscape in the films. So for listeners who may not be familiar with these terms, could you briefly explain the difference and why it was important for you to focus on the landscape tradition rather than on literati cinema as a whole?
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Right, this is a great question, literati landscape, obviously it's a very specific visual tradition in art that existed long way long before cinema and literati lands at literati cinema. It's a very contested term, wen ren dian Ying, that has many different ways of defining it, and very few of them actually really argue so far at least before my book tried to do this, having wherein cinema has. Literati cinema has not been really defined vis a vis literati art as a concept. And sometimes it has been defined as cinema for literature people, for particular kind of literary minded scholars. And then you can obviously find similarities. But I think I debated, of course, I talked about this in introduction as well, but I found it to kind of focus on the literati landscape as a artistic tradition and also as the kind of philosophical roots in visual art can kind of help us rethink about those terms a little bit. And of course, literati cinematic, that term right now is also not Quite a circulating. It doesn't really quite have that much relevancy, but literality. Landscape is kind of an evergreen kind of term to describe how to represent landscape and how it functions in social life as well.
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C
Yeah, thanks for clarifying the difference. And also you suggested that the landscapes in the Mao era films could sleep past the censorship in the ways that the scripted dialogue could, not that they offered a freer and more elusive form of expression. So could you say more about how landscape operated as this kind of alternative text in such a tightly controlled cultural environment?
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Yeah, it's. It was. It was kind of an amazing discovery for me when I was doing my research, reading some records saying that the film usually have to go. The film script had to go through seven rounds of censor review, but only the script, the written text. But then in the end, when the film, the actual film is being screened for the final censor review, the reviewers found problem with the film. So I wonder what happened there, what's not presented in the text, in the story and then what actually happened? The two viewers, in this case the reviewers response to a film and also a political problem, not just sensorial response to the film. So that's pretty much what intrigued me. And then I treated this particular period, Maoist era, with such strict sensor policy. I treat it as sort of a lab, a kind of controlled lab. It's very. It's sort of a capsule. And then you can. You can see this extreme condition. Under this extreme condition, you can see how landscape actually on screen, the visual part of the mise en scene of the landscape, how that actually played a part in what I would call the subversive subtext of the film, independent of the story and whatever can transpire in a text. So another thing is about what particular kind of landscape. So of course a lot of films include all sorts of landscape in it. But I'm actually talking in this book, I talk about the connection to Chinese literati art, the specific type of representation of landscape. So this tradition is already rich with cultural meaning, memory and history. By alluding to it, the filmmakers could tap into a shared cultural understanding. So it could be kind of. It's politically charged and critically reflective and it can be reactivated through kind of viewing and also representing on screen. And it does not need to be stated verbally and explicitly, it's just kind of. Even though it's the backdrop in most cases, but it actually can transport the audience into different portals of ideology. Right. And also because literati obviously means scholar, official particularly, and then transition from the older the dynastic pre modern scholar official, after the abolition of the scholar official exam in the 1910s. And now Chinese intellectuals are transitioning into new roles and new identity and then a new name, too. And now we no longer longer call Chinese intellectuals Wen Ren. We call them intellectual or the knowledge, the knowledgeable elements. And of course, in the 1930s and 40s, they also wore different names as well. So I would say that by kind of tracing back and by presenting by this landscape on screen, Chinese filmmakers also kind of exercised a historical journey of that identity transformation of the lithuan themselves, which would include the filmmakers themselves.
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Oh, great. So that's a very fascinating foundation for the book. And with that in mind, let's move into the chapter one, where you turn to Huangshan, this iconic celestial mountain of the literary tradition, and explore how it was reimagined on screen in the 1950s and beyond. And you open this chapter with the 1956 biopic Li Shizhen, and you show how this film transforms Huangshan from a mystical, even secret space into a very grounded and even politicized setting. So what's at stake in relocating a scientific hero like Li Shizhen to this immortal mountain? And why Huangshan not, say, Wudangshan, which has a clear Daoist associations, And what made Huangshan the rat place for this ideological transformation?
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Yeah, great. So Huangxian is a paramount symbol in the traditional Chinese artistic imagination and cultural identity. And of course, it's also an icon in literary landscape painting. So what we call Wen Ren Xian shui especially, I would say there is another episode of Huangshan's reinvention that's also important for its status today in art history, which would be the early Republic, the Republic era, in the early decades of 20th century, its reinvention. And I'm not sure if I talked about this in detail in the book, in this current book, but I'm going to talk about that in the next book. So anyway, so Huangshan is known for its kind of a. Kind of a simulation of celestial realm, kind of close to the ideal, the idealistic vision for celestial realm for Chinese slithy. And it is also a notorious difficult side until the Republic era, when they developed roads. And then, of course, today you can go. But before, it was quite a forbidding, majestic site. It's very hard to access to it and dangerous too. So because of that, Huangshan was associated with reclusive scholars and hermits and Taoist immortality. And during the Ming Qing transition, it was kind of a hideout place for refugees, for the remnant citizens, the Yiming who were the loyalists to Ming. So this kind of made Huangshan the perfect embodiment of the escapist culture that the Communist Party sought to eliminate or repurpose. So that's not the part that Huangshan was kind of was hoped to be in the new era, because those were kind of. Huangshan is such a mystic place, right? It also kind of stands for political dissidence to a large extent too. But it is the Mecca of Chinese literati art. In particular, the Huangshan school painters such as Shitao and Mei Qing, those people who. Even those who. Who don't know too much about Chinese literati landscape art, probably would know the name of Shitao and Mei Qing and the particular kind of landscape style of representation that they adopted too, because they lived there, they lived in Huangshan. So the so called Huangshan school painter became a revered group of artists who kind of defined literati art for us too. So they were associated with the Huangshan Mountain and of course, Huangshan Mountain at the time was also a very important headquarter for the Ming loyalists for kind of to push back and to fight for Han ethnicity and to define the identity of what it means to be Chinese. So I also want to emphasize that because of those paintings and because of those artists and Huangshan has already been produced in painting, in ink and in brush strokes, and then to and itself. Huangshan itself, of course, geologically is beautiful. I don't know how many of you have been there. Me personally, I found it to be the most efficient, I mean, one of the most, if not the most magnificent, beautiful mountains in the world. So it does appear photogenic too. We can never underestimate the power of the form, right? The visual form. So it is beautiful and it has its cultural legacy and has been produced in image richly and profoundly. So the filmmakers must be aware of the mountains iconic image in our history, and they were right to mine such our historical treasure by choosing Fangsheng. Of course, Wudangshan, as you mentioned, is also another mountain. I'm sure it's beautiful too. But I think because of our historical heritage and also Fangsheng's association with the literati classes in specifically that particular group of people. The choice of Huangshan as the background for the biopic Li Shizhen seemed to be deliberate in bridging the movie to that particular heritage of literati. So the act of conquering and politically recoding this most iconic monument in literati art must be intentional and it really marks the ideological victory Far more visible and impactful than a less revered location. I mean, Wu Dongshan has its own. I mean, if they made the movie set on Wudangshan, it would be entirely different movie. It would be about the Taoist tradition and it would actually kind of move towards a particular, kind of another kind of subtext. That's why locations are important. And then I think Huangxian Mountain is especially important because of its political leaning towards a specific type of people. And this specific. A part of Chinese art history. So. Right, so the Huangshui also was. So this. This choice of location was. Was made by Sang Hu, the filmmaker, the director and its crew. So I discovered directorial notes and then the choice of location. I think you can see it in every CH chapter, every case I study in the book about the choice of location that they went through. They usually scout different locations and think about the complications and also how it would appear on screen, but also the cultural implication and the historical significances for each site. So I think the. To part of the landscape studies, part of studying landscape in cinema is think about the sights too. So it's a combination of many things.
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C
Yeah, I agree that Hongsha is a very beautiful mountain. I love your analysis of how Li Xi Zheng dizzy chart the mountain and there's the moment where he reaches the summit and. And the camera gives us a very quick and scientific scan of the panorama. And you contrast that scene with Zhongbin's notion of spiritual awe. Can you say more about how this thing signals a break with the maternity landscape tradition? And is this also a kind of thematic re education, training the audiences to look differently at the landscape and not with rebels, but with utilitarian, modern gaze.
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Yeah, that's a. Yeah, that's a very great question too. So I contrasted this particular. I mean, in the film, if you watch the film, you'll see they climb up the mountain and then the mountain then they start to pan and it does. It's in some ways it's very similar to what we would imagine a little artist experience or a landscape art artist like Zong Bing, their experience. But it's also fundamentally different, that particular panning movement and also what they were looking for. Zong Bing is one of the writers that's considered sort of the original. The most original essays in Chinese art history about landscape art. And he particularly talked about a kind of a mystical experience with mountains, with mountains and water, obviously. But also he mentioned in one of his treatises, the most famous one did mention that the point of making landscape art to the point of painting the landscape is that he could paint the landscape on his walls, in his chamber, and so that he can roam in. He can still travel in whenever he wants to, while he's reclining, I mean, presumably in his bed or. And he would play. You can play music, and then the sound would bounce off and echo in those painted landscape. So the experience with the landscape, this idea of traveling, and also the idea of how echo, how landscape echo with you, it can be conveyed very well in the kind of a pan after, you know, after Li Shizhen and his entourage reached the summit of the mountain. And then, of course, I also talked about the sound of that, and that's what got me very interested too, for this film, is how they kind of illustrate Zong Bing's ideal with sound, but in an entirely different way, because Zong Bing was a personal and a religious, semi religious kind of experience with the mountain and connecting to the cosmos and also the point of, the very point of painting landscape. But Li Shizhen's movie, by setting this. By kind of setting up this shot, this moment of Li Shizhen reaching up to the top of the mountain. But his purpose was, the entire purpose was to look for herbs, of course. So instead of a mystical destination for immortal hermits, Huang Shen is presented as a kind of a practical resource. So it's like a vast pharmacy where Li Shizhen can, together with his proletarian assistants, it's a place for labor. They could climb up and doing research and then gather medicinal herbs to actually to cure, to heal the people. So this kind of a practical gaze is transforming this monumental landscape with the insertion of the gaze from a national hero of science and medicine, and also to kind of tag this space with the value of physical labor. So the prestige of the mountain, which was associated with a particular kind of gaze and a particular kind of class, is effectively being rebranded. So its majesty also, when you see this beautiful panoramic shot of the peaks and the clouds, all became kind of refashioned into a new kind of monument for new political goals for the new nation. So it's not so much of a pilgrim skates, right? So maybe, maybe it is still a kind of pilgrim, though. It's a pilgrim of science and pilgrim of labor, and then a pilgrim of the service, the attitude of service and sacrifice for the mass. So as audience, we participate in the gaze of Li Shizhen. I think you are very acutely noting that. That part too. So as audience, we follow him and we're emotionally invested in his medicinal journey. As a doctor. And we participate in this gaze of Li Shizheng. We survey that landscape too, but with a different, very, very refashioned kind of gaze. So I call this the disenchantment of. Of the landscape of Huangshan. But then I also call it a re. Enchantment, because the following shots, the following sequences, especially through sound, I think we can talk a little more about that too, which is actually kind of rebirthing or kind of recanonization into a new kind of monument, and with less. With no less sense of enchantment, too. So I would call. So I. In the book, I call it the kind of a re. Enchantment process.
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C
Okay, now let's go to the fun card. Yeah. So one of the most striking sequences is the Li Shizhen's assistant Lao Wei's death. And he fell the mountain while protecting Li Shizhen's notebook. And you frame this as a secular, even revolutionary form of sacrifice. So how does this shift our understanding of Huangshan from a spiritual refugee to a set of political martyrdom? And when the characters call out La Wei into the list, you describe this as a kind of spiritual summoning. It's Zhong Huan. So was that meant to override Huangshan's old spirit with a new kind of people's spirit?
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Yeah, the Huangshan is obviously known for its mist, Yunhai, or it's ever changing. And then you climb on the top of the mountain, you see an ocean of clouds, and then you see mountain peaks floating in this ocean of clouds like little islands. And that's kind of iconic. You can see it in posters or even. Probably even on Chinese currency. I don't really know know. It's what Huangshan is known for. So the mist and cloud is part of Huangshan's image. But of course, the mist and cloud in Chinese cultural history, and then art history is the carrier for the traditional qi in a Taoist literature. And sometimes we translate as vital energy. And for landscape art, too. So you can rarely see a Chinese landscape painting in pre modern times that does not have cloud and then kind of left blank sometimes. But the representation of mist and clouds in it, it has to be there, because then a lot of art critics and artists believe that that's the vital energy of the painted landscape too. Without it, the landscape will be dead or is not enl, or it's not connected to the divine. So the notion of qi is linked to Taoist mysticism and the idea of transcendence and of course, immortality and then sometimes moral character too. So It's a very important, but also a vast concept. The Qi is equally as vague and all encompassing as the look of the mist itself. So it's been in this film I found the representation of mist and clouds actually in other films focusing on Fangsheng 2 that I also mention in the book. It's also vital, the representation of that mist and how to kind of of recreate Huangshan on film screen in a feature film. And in this particular sequence that you mentioned about Lao Wei's death after he falls into the precipice of Huang Shen, the group Li Shizhen and his assistants, they kind of performed this repetitive kind of act by calling the name of Lao Wei, which become a political martyr because he was essentially murdered. Right? So they perform this calling of the name repeatedly. They climb on every peak of Guangsheng, actually, and calling Lao Wei into the mist. And then you can see that they are calling, not looking down. Actually, they don't look down. They look towards the horizon, to the void, which is, for me, it's very. I mean, if you are looking for someone, that doesn't seem to be the reasonable thing to do. So it's a quite. For me, it's a quite symbolic and ritualistic act itself. The representation of that act. And now, of course, kind of conquer, like go to each peak, go to every peak of Huangshuan and perform that. It's really a kind of a ritualistic performance to re. Inject the landscape with a new kind of Qi. And of course, we don't. In this era, we don't talk about Qi as much because Taoist association of the concept. And I think for this particular film, it does kind of try to. In the disenchantment and the re. Enchantment project of Huangshan through this film, it reintroduces and transforming the mist into a kind of what they call Jingshen in Chinese. Right? The kind of moral energy of the new time and also of the revolutionary martyr. So the landscape, the Huangshan landscape, are shrouded in the mist. I mean, it has always been kind of a remind people of a void. And that's why it's being associated with the idea of cosmos. Huntun, which was once an escape from a container, an escape for refugees, for exiles, for dissidents, and for the recluses and hermits, and now is being kind of transformed into entirely changed into a new kind of container. This void is to hold the truth that the world has been kind of the truth and the heroism of the new era and transforming its Aura, the transcendental aura, into a powerful and permanent memorial to a new political consciousness.
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C
Yeah. And also later, you track how Huangxian goes from a refugee for the poets and painters and to a national feno to a national icon. It becomes a stunning for Chinese territory in war films like Shandenling in 1956. And how does the Mancha's meaning change as it moves from the literati groves to the patriotic montage? And is there a tension here between the mountain as a timeless symbol of Chinese culture and its deployment in very specific political narratives?
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Yeah, yeah, of course.
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C
Right.
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The change from different media obviously is of central interest to me. The mountain in the landscape scroll, even if. I mean, does not matter if it's a hanging scroll or a hand scroll, a horizontal, unfurling kind of hand scroll, they represent the eternal stable cosmos and offering escape from the fleeting political and physical world. So in scroll paintings, in traditional, pre modern scroll paintings, the mountain in those landscape paintings, because of its kind of a stable form and it's kind of. They are always present there. It has a different association with time. Of course, in traditional painting, the sense of journey and then the sense of particular event happened in history is there too. It's present there too. Right. But the mountain always kind of reminds. It's kind of a reminder of a stable and eternal presence in human history, even though everything else shifts. So this is not just Chinese landscape art. It happened in Cezanne's painting too. Right, Cezanne's painting of the Mount Victoire. And that's what he discovered there as well. So we can see the idea. So that's why the mountain is such kind of a perennial presence in so many scroll paintings that we have in our painting history. And it's also a site. You live in the mountain and you can't live in the water. You can live on the boat on the water, but you can't live in the water. But the mountain also symbolizes a site for human residents too. So it's a kind of a site for reclusion, personality cultivation, personal kind of moral critique of the time, and personal transcendence. In a film montage like 1956, Shang Gan Lin. That's a quite a patriotic montage, if you have seen it. It's kind of a music montage. And it. It's a very strange moment too, in the middle of a war film, we have this kind of a gentle montage accompanied by a female singing. And in the very middle of the film, and Huangshan is there, and they're In Korea fighting. But then she's singing and then Huangshan suddenly become there in the middle of the film and then standing high. So I was in the book, I was thinking, I was arguing, I do argue that it has become a kind of a national monument. It has been in this film, in Shang Dan Lin, it stood a little differently than Li Shizhen. Right. How it appeared in Li Shizhen. But also it's also very similar. It's part of the same project of enchantment and re. Enchantment. But of course, in this particular film, and of course in every film, it's going to be a little different. In this film also, Huang Shen kind of stood for territory. This is Ling Tu. This is the whole point of Chinese participation of the war and heritage too, the kind of a cultural heritage. And this time because. Because of the war environment, the context against aggression, obviously the heritage is not so much of, kind of an internal cleansing or purification of the heritage, but of the embracing and then presentation of the heritage towards outsiders. And it also, very importantly, it functions very differently in this particular film's emotive regime. And if you remember the film very well, I think people tend to remember this, this particular montage very well. It's very effective emotionally. It's not just reflective, it's kind of like in the middle of fighting and war and they start to become kind of a maternal moment, of a neutral moment with the female singer. And it's also rousing and triumphant because it represents, this montage represents the collective will backed by the Chinese landscape and then backed by the nation's monumental history. And then it kind of embodies the victory of the new China.
- [44:01]
C
So we have gone from the peaks of Huangshan to the clouds of tea and back down into the political background of the 1950s cinema. But we are not done with nature yet. And in chapter two, the Phantom Landscape of Jiangmen, you take us on a fascinating journey through a region long cyber dated Chinese poetry, painting and popular imagination. Here you focus on Xie Jin's Stage Sisters, a film that was both politically fraught and aesthetically ambitious. And you begin by showing how Jiang Ma has always been more than a physical place, its cultural toho shaped by literary painting and by Shanghai cinema's long fascination with its waters and landscapes. So how does stage fixtures draw on this legacy of Zhangnan imagery? And why did its return through those associations become politically risky in the 1960s?
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A
Yeah, so I don't know if you discovered the structure of the book is actually also kind of Shen Shui kind of complementarity. And then we talk about Huangshan. And then there's the water canals of Jiangnan, and then the peach blossom, which is a stream, and then end with a mountain which is Tianyunshan. So that's actually kind of part of my design for the book too. So I view the film Stage Sisters as a formal experiment that used Jiangnan region's signature feature, the water canals and gentle rolling and flowing hills and flowing river, in a manner similar to the techniques found in traditional landscape scrolls. The waterways in the scrolls are usually used as guides for the flow of time and space journey. And they are also kind of used as a space dividers, structurally partitioning the scene or the narrative space and a framing device for time, creating a kind of a contemplative distance or historical scope for the story. And of course, just formally, it's kind of an extension of emotive space. So the kind of mystic, lyrical scenery mirrors the characters internal emotional states. So there's. So the return to those traditional association with water canals, with rivers became those kind of particular kind of traditions became risky in the mid-1960s. This was remind you, was right before the official study date of cultural evolution. So it's risky for a few reasons. The first is kind of the threat of aestheticism, the cinematic sensitivity and attention to the lyrical beauty of the landscape and the emotional depth of the women's opera. And it could run counter to the mandate for socialist realism and the evocative Jiangnan imagery, which has been historically a site for the literati culture, which has been under scrutiny and sometimes under criticism in the new regime, will hold its substance subversive power with that particular kind of intellectual identity. And of course, the Party has its own roots and its own history started there in that region. And so a revisit to those regions, it's actually also a memory going down the memory lane and review the history re examine the history of the Party itself and carry the its own risk of kind of invoking unwanted ghosts. And another layer for this revisit in the Jiangnan region in those waterways is also for Chinese film history. So for filmmakers, Jiannan was Chinese film's birthplace. And in the 1960s, the nostalgia for the golden days of Chinese Cinema in the 1930s can be especially could be actually too nostalgic and inspire too much reflections.
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C
Thank you for the answer. And one of the most striking parts of your analysis is how the film moves through so many different stages from the temple, the world stage, the tea house, the mountain theater, and then back to the countryside. So what does this shift in geography of performance tell us about how Yue opera and its audiences were being reimagined? And do you see those spaces as maybe a kind of political journey as well as an artistic one?
- [49:09]
A
Yeah, absolutely, I do. See, I was fascinated by those performance value changes alongside the river. It's kind of going against the river or going along with the river. So I see this kind of shifting geography of performances. It's also the mapping of a not just cultural but also political topography. This journey, the women's opera's journey, the sisters, the stage sisters journey is the film's central narrative. It's their journey. It's like a jing bing shang to, it's their version of it. Charting the ideological transformation of Yue Ju on the first level. Right, The Yue Opera and the redefinition of its audiences in the new era. So the early performance setting represent the art form's original, humble and indigenous, pretty raw, earthy kind of identity. So we see them performing on the water stage in the rural tea house. And those rural informal spaces symbolize the local communal origin of the Yue opera and Chinese art. Perhaps, you know, a huge part of Chinese art probably can find a similar journey that way. So the audiences there are poor peasants or Chinese gentryman. And then they are, of course, the gentryman is represented as polititude. And the art form is tied to also commercial survival. Survival was the mandate of that era, of that particular episode of the journey, and also the patriarchal exploitation of the female performance. So this kind of established this emotional necessity for revolution too. And the move to the city, to Shanghai especially, signifies the glamour of this urban modernism, this urban modernity, commercial success, and also the bourgeois temptation. The urban audience is affluent and politically ambiguous. But of course, there are cosmopolitan progressives amidst those audience which became the incentive, and also the teachers to guide the sister, especially Yuan Xuefen's character. So this face, this city face, shows one of the. One of the two stage sisters, Yuehong, who succumbed to the lure of fame and the bourgeois lifestyle. And so the urban space is also presented as dangerous, exploitative all the same, which again, kind of reinforced the necessity of revolution too. The later performance, however, demonstrated a reimagined identity. So it's kind of revolution within the art form itself. Yue Ju. So the Modern Theater After 1949 is an organized, state sanctioned space that represents a process of purification. So the art form, Yue Ju is no longer aimed for entertaining or glamorous exhibitions, but quite austere and morally pure, a medium for re Education and proletarian mobilization. So the audience is now not the audience anymore. It's called the masses. And they consist of the workers, peasants and soldiers. And they are recast from a fragmented group of local and peasant or urban, but kind of unified into a proletarian body, a block of audience. So the last one, the last performance stage is the return to the countryside, the water canals. That was how the film ended. They returned to the water canals at the end. It's very interesting, however, because it suggests a subtle subversion there. Because the opera, even as the opera formally aligns itself with the revolutionary project by setting such an opera, the different kind of modernized, purified revolutionary opera against the misty, evocative Jiangnan waterway is became a kind of made the landscape kind of a phantom landscape now, because it's quite jarring and re invoked the emotional history in a way. Because I call it phantom here, because it does kind of re invoke a localized aesthetic and a deep emotional history of the region. So as. As you can see, it's kind of a recurring theme in the book. I kind of see that this kind of go down the memory lane can be quite dangerous. And while the audience and purpose were politically redefined, Yue Ju, the art form, the cinema, and also cinema, the art form, it retained a lot of untamed power that can probably never be fully tamed.
- [55:03]
C
And due to the time reason, we'll skip some part of the book. And yeah, you mentioned how the film is layered with plays within the play, and how Xie Jin used those intertext to comment on the genre area itself, and maybe also the politics of cultural reform in the early 1960s. But we will skip that part. Go to the final sequence. And during the final scenes, the Jang Ma has been remaining to a landscape of modern highways, the red banners and the socialist optimism. But you also read about how the film is haunted by the phantom of an older genre. We see the empty theaters, the lingering nostalgia, and the memories of the performance spaces tied to another era. And so how do you read this tension between the revolutionary triumph and attachment to the past? And do you think Xie Jin himself was caught between celebrating the new Jiangnan and holding on to the older cultural words that shaped him?
- [56:15]
A
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I read the final sequence, the final sequence of stage 7 sisters is very interesting. So Xie Jin has famously designed the characters have this today. We look at it, it's a bit cringy conversation about how they are going to from now on, they're going to become a revolutionary opera singer. And make good revolutionary opera. It's kind of a declaration of their political will. But then after the film end, and then they have. The final sequence is a quite very strangely evocative and lyrical sequence of almost like mourning of a death. So it's a brilliant but also politically risky expression of the tension between this revolutionary history and the kind of political will at the end. But then the aesthetic memory kind of rushing in and then still have the final words. So the film concluding, the concluding scene of the film, actually when the credits start to pop up, is to kind of undermine the new Jiaman that you described in your question. This kind of new red banners and determined people. It's kind of a haunting scene by the phantom of the past. The highways, the red banners, the architectural projects are meant to signify the final victory of the revolution of the proletariat, and then try to represent a clear, unambiguous break from the feudal past. And embodying the principles of the new art, which is mostly socialist realism, but the camera persistently and lyrically captured the region's misty waterways and also kind of give us a litany of the past performance venues now abandoned and still and together accompanied with such a beautiful and I would say kind of a wailing kind of moment for music, which is quite astounding to watch as a audience. So those empty spaces, I would say it kind of suggests the notion of absence of the pre revolutionary life. Of course, absence suggests past presence too. So particularly immediately and powerfully undermined the audience's feeling. Just, you know, previously, at the very end of the story per se, a purely joyful sense of triumph is being undermined by this mournful kind of dirge like montage of the empty abandoned space of early performances. So it's being undercut, the narrative is being undercut by this profound sense of loss. Again, text and image, the words proclaim victory and triumph, but then the image undercuts it with a profound sense of loss. So I'll just briefly talk about Xie Jin's own journey as well. Right. Xie Jin was also deeply rooted in this cinematic tradition and also in the red juice culture. And of course, he's from the same birthplace of Yue Ju. And so his own journey, artistic journey, matches and find resonance with the stage sisters and of course the Chinese cinema's experience, the history of Chinese cinema, also find resonance with the story of the two stage sisters. So I would also mention that Xie Jin's preferred form, which is called the melodrama, is a genre focused on heightened emotion and a kind of complex personal tragedy. And he uses so greatly as his way of preserving kind of the emotional component and the ghost of the past, what I would would call it. And so by focusing on this kind of beauty of the music, the emotional cost of such a journey. So he gave this older cultural work that we are supposed to have left behind and cast aside. They are empty. They're just a monument. And they give it a weight. And that kind of drags down the revolutionary zeal and then. And give the revolutionary victory a quite big dose of emotional stagger.
- [61:37]
B
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- [61:52]
A
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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B
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- [61:59]
A
Liberty. Liberty.
- [62:01]
B
Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates.
- [62:04]
A
Excludes Massachusetts.
- [62:05]
C
Yeah. So with Stage Sisters, we have seen how the Jiangnan landscape became both a stage and a political background, haunted by nostalgia, yet claimed by the socialist modernity. And that sets up perfectly for our last chapter, where you turn to CTD's early spring in February. Here the question shifts from the sage landscapes to the utopian landscapes, and from the politics of nostalgia to the politics of vitriol. You describe how the film emerged during a brief window of the creative freedom, only to be frozen and denounced later. So why did this film, Early Spring, become so politically sensitive? And what does its fate reveal about the shifting role of cinema and intellectuals in the early 1960s?
- [63:01]
A
Right. So the Early Spring in February, the was a movie made in 1963. It was denounced publicly and then because it was perceived as promoting bourgeois sentimentality, sentiment, especially sentimentality. We can see this is kind of another recurring word in the book too, and individualism and escapist melancholy of the old intellectual class. So the film's fate in 1963, being singled out to criticism was a crucial indicator of the shifting and also the narrowing role of cinema and intellectuals in the early 1960s. This is right before the Cultural Revolution, of course. So the leading male character, Xiao Jieqiu, this character in, is rooted in the post May 4th intellectual tradition, a figure preoccupied with personal salvation, ethical dilemmas, and a failure to fully commit to the next collective revolutionary mission. Because they participated in the first one, the previous one, and it failed. So in the intensifying political climate in 1963, this representation was viewed as a return, a dangerous return, and also A dangerous defense of this Zhi Shi Fenci intellectual as a. In that moment of the earlier in the 1930s and 20s, that moment as a fundamentally indecisive and bourgeois figure who dwells on their personal cris. And it was the denouncement of this one was not just about one film. It was a political signal that marked the beginning of a severe crackdown and revealed a critical shift in power and ideology. The cinema's role at the time with this crackdown is being kind of stripped of any remaining ambiguity. You cannot hesitate, you cannot be indecisive, you cannot be ambivalent anymore. You need to make a decision. You have to. Because the Xiao Zhenqiu's character and the denouncement of him as represented in the film is a great barometer to kind of send that message. And this is at the end of the Hundred Flowers. It kind of echoes the end of 100 flowers. So the brief window of creative freedom that allowed the film to be made in 1963 has been abruptly slammed shut. So signaling the end of any exploring different tendencies in the cultural sphere and paved the way for the impending Cultural Revolution.
- [66:18]
C
That political background set the stage. But at the heart of your reading is something much older, the way the film explicitly draw on the Peach Blossom Spring story. So for listeners less familiar. So why does this ancient tale of a hidden utopia become such a powerful interpretive learns for the film? And how did it shape both the film's meaning and the intensity of its criticism?
- [66:50]
A
Right, yeah. So the Peach Blossom Spring was written by the poet Tao Yanming around 421 CE. It tells the story of a fisherman who stumbles upon a hidden village, completely isolated from the outside world and outside worlds, especially outside worlds. Political chaos. So the inhabitants in the Peach Blossom Spring are simple, happy, and unaware of the dynasties that have passed. So the Peach Blossom Spring Taoyuan is the archetypal symbol for a Chinese utopia. It's. It's a utopia defined by its separation, its suspension from the society of fisholdom and history and politics. So because of this structure, the kind of spatial structure of Peach Blossom Spring, and it goes in. The original fishermen accessed the Peach Blossom Spring village through a boat and then through a cave. And then he entered, he discovered this world. And this world is in the mountains. But this journey, the particular journey is also very interesting. The special configuration of this place and because of its separation from politics, from history, from the societal obligations, it has special allure. It kind of holds a special allure for Chinese intellectuals. Of course, it's written by the poet Tao Yueming, one of the iconic figures for Chinese scholars and poets. So for centuries, the Chinese scholars and intellectuals have evoked this story to express a longing for a sanctuary for both their political visions and their personal peace. So it is, I discovered that this is truly at the center of the film's structure, spatial structure and the narrative structure, and also the philosophical structure as well, precisely because it is the desire, it's the center of the desire of Chinese intellectual. And then now we are in the 1960s and the Chinese intellectuals can feel the change of mandate in the air. So the protagonist of Early Spring, Xiao Jianqiu, it does embody this intense yearning. So his original intention to go into it is to look for that personal peace. But then his he re entered the Peach Blossom Spring. And of course, the story, the original story of the film is actually set in the 1920s, not the current 1960s. But he entered the story that unfolds after he comes to this little village through water and this kind of like a isolated place. It became a story of failure. Of course, failure is also a keyword to the original story of Peach Blossom Spring because it was a lost utopia. Everybody who tried to go back and look for it failed to find it. And the film, of course, basically presents this idea, the entire idea of this utopia, this original scholar's utopia, is a failure. It's a false promise because it does not. That idea of the utopia is pronounced defunct, bankrupt. So Jian Qiu also failed in this village to save anybody. So he failed his mission to be an enlightenment figure or as a savior for the female, suffering female figures in the film. But the most damning part about this film is actually the portrayal of the people in this, the inhabitants in this so called Peach Blossom Spring. They are not good people in the film and they climb down on. On our intellectuals who are the protagonists. They were suspicious and they were malicious gossipers and they obviously do not support anybody. And then by huddling together, create this kind of malicious community, and they also create this claustrophobia kind of environment. So it fundamentally undermines and critically kind of cut the idealism of community. And then the mass, the so called the mass, which is part of the new utopian narrative in Maoism too. So I see that the drawing on Peach Blossom Spring, this kind of archetypal Chinese utopian site, Early Spring, is a film that provided a very sophisticated counter narrative to the official version of utopia and history.
- [72:38]
C
Yeah, and of course, the story, the Peach Blossom Spring wasn't just a literary story and you show how the film borrows from the literati painting and from the 1930s Shanghai cinema includes the motifs like the boats, the grottoes and the peach blossoms, but also the recurring figure of the intellectual and tragic country women. That visual and cinematic borrowing is very striking. But your chapter goes even further by layering allegories from Kaohemi's grotto to Palito's cave and Lu Shen. So how does this combination of allegories reshape our understanding of Shao Jingqiu, the film's intellectual protagonist, especially his irrevolution and failure?
- [73:30]
A
Right, yeah. So by kind of layering up those different cave imagery for, you know, the allegorical Plato's Cave. And then of course, Peach Blossom Spring is a cave and Lu Xun's iron house can be a cave too, because it's kind of enclosed space. By layering all this up, the film does so it kind of provides a more far reaching critique, kind of transforming the human figure, the protagonist, from not just one particular type of intellectuals from a particular era in the 1920s, but more of a allegorical figure of intellectual. I mean, a story of a failure in the broader history, in the Enlightenment project, in revolution. And of course, I would say also, perhaps highlight also kind of the gender problems in those narratives too. So fundamentally, it's the Peach Blossom Spring. Tang Hua Yuan, this kind of bankruptcy of Peach Blossom Spring in this film, it provides a critique to the belief that a private and ethical utopia exists, can be found in outside of the political and social turmoil. And the film basically said, made it very clear that that's not. That's not possible, that's a failure in creating that kind of illusion. And then the tragedy of the female figure Wen Sao, who committed suicide, shatters that illusion further. So he's definitely not a savior. And this is not a utopia, but a site of ongoing tragedy. So the Plato's allegory of the cave is very important for this film too, because of quite a few images that the film layered on it. And one of the image is the idea, the kind of a meta reference to cinema itself, you know, the projection of a dream. This enslave the notion of enslavement and also the notion of sleeping. The person in the cave is in deep sleep and unaware and unenlightened. And it is up to the outsider who come into this cave to wake them up. Of course, this is presented as a failure too, because Xiao Zhenqiu could not be that person. And the most damning layer of allegory in this film is actually the reference to Lu Xun's Iron House analogy. And in Lu Xun's original critique, he presents. Presents the Chinese society as this pitch dark, windowless iron house where people are slowly suffocating in their sleep. So of course it has a lot of playdoh in it and enlightenment in it, but has particular urgency in the Chinese context. So in face of this Iron House, Xiao Jianqiu, our protagonist, chooses humanist compassion over active salvation and system change, which is basically confirming the Mao era's critique that such humanist compassion or personal salvation cannot do, cannot actually make any difference. But then, so by layering all those allegories, the film demonstrates that Xiao Yan Chou's failure in his. His E resolution is a kind of a three hold. Sorry, threefold historical failure. He failed the original revolution, he failed the personal utopia, and then he also failed the enlightenment. And of course he's not equipped for the impending and current project as well. And then in the end, I think the. The most revealing part, of course that would draw the fire from the critics is actually also the portrayal. We have focused on the figure of the returning and intellectual to this. The stranger, the visitor to this Peach Blossom Spring. But the. The most challenging part about the film to the censors, to the critics, is the portrayal of the inhabitants of the Peach Blossom Spring. And they are portrayed as not imaginable. And they're not really quite. They're suffocating. They are the one who instigate this Iron Hound House. They are the one who built the Iron House and then make enlightenment not possible. And so this is quite contrary to the happy and the revolutionary force that Amass Ren Min Chingzhou that the current cultural policy tried to portray.
- [79:19]
C
Wonderful.
- [79:20]
A
Yeah.
- [79:20]
C
The last part about how this film is kind of position itself against the Maoist visions of future. Yeah, it's very brilliant. So now let's go to the chapter four. You turn to Xie Jin's legend, Legend of Tian Y Mountain. This is a film made right after the Cultural Revolution that takes us from utopias to ruins. And in the beginning of the chapter, you note that the film generated enormous debate. It some praised its puzzles and others worried it went too far in critiquing the party history. So could you set a thing for us? And what was so remarkable about the film? And why did the audiences respond so intensely?
- [80:07]
A
Right, that's it. Yes. Did the Xian Jin's film, this particular film, Legend of Tianyun Mountain, Kei Yunshan Chuan Qi, go too far? Yes, it did go very far. So it was remarkable because one of the first major films in the post Mao era, and this was started in 1978 and 79 to not just comment on the recent Cultural Revolution, of course, that's, you know, the scar art, the scar literature, scar film project, focus on the recent Cultural Revolution. And bracketed that way, it's as if it was just a small. I mean, it's a one off era of the Party's policy actually when directly and emotionally addressed the injustices all the way back in the 1950s, the anti rightist campaign and the subsequent political purges. So the historical scope of the film is much further. And of course that's the reason why it was considered went too far. And that's the duration of the Party's history. And then also it goes kind of to almost the DNA of the Party. So that's very disconcerting for a lot of people. But of course also the other problem for Xie Jin's film is not so much of a problem obviously, but problem for some is the audience's response to this film. It was so intense because the film validated the suffering of millions who have suffered from those political purges. And. And then it's kind of offered. Created this public space for the acknowledgment and the emotional catharsis following the decades of those trauma, political trauma. And the film's protagonist, male protagonist, I would say, because it is rather debatable who exactly is the film's protagonist. But we do have a male protagonist, Luo Chun. And he was a. He's a party cadre labeled a rightist in 1957. And his identity is a little ambiguous because he's not so much of an intellectual. He actually denied that he's a scholar publicly, I mean verbally in the film. But he reads, he is a scholar, he studies. So he is not just. He's not just a scholar, but he represents those who actually who encompass the different facets of Chinese intellectual and political leader, scholar, the new kind of scholar official too. So his fate, his story in the film that he was persecuted, he was labeled a riotist in 1957 and subsequently sent to exile and basically ruined and became a recluse in the mountains of Ken Yishan. And this film, when the film was made in 1979, this issue was still highly sensitive about this particular. Especially concerning the anti rightist campaign. So this film directly address the severity of those campaigns and. And condemned. Which condemned thousands of intellectuals and officials. And of course, Xie Jin's signature melodramatic style is also quite effective. And then the audience responded to it so enormously and it became kind of a cinematic event that publicly, that first publicly mourned the victims of the political past. And in this film it reclaimed the moral high ground, especially with the help of the melodramatic form. This kind of clear moral high ground is being claimed for the intellectuals and Decaturs that has been condemned before. So it's kind of quite potent mix. And I would also argue, of course, we can talk more later about the importance of the female story here.
- [84:54]
C
Yeah. So you talk about in the book, you talk about the narrative form of the film. Right. It's both Chan Qi and a melodrama and also about the landscape. So one of the most distracting insights in this chapter is how Xie Jin used rings. The pavilion, the stele, the ring heart to tie Luo Chun to a long lineage of Qu Yuan Yan Jianqing and reclusive library. So why do you think rings become such a powerful visual device in this film? And how do they help Xie Jin position the modern electro in relation to both ancient culture and the recent.
- [85:33]
A
Good problem. Yeah, I found ruins in. His use of ruins is very powerful here because he provides quite a few ruins and actually quite a few types of ruins. It's. It's like almost like a treatise of ruins in the context of 1979. So of course the, The. The. The ruination of the people is pretty obvious.
- [85:59]
C
Yes.
- [86:00]
A
Lo Chun is being ruined and his house, his body is ruined. And also he chose to. He had to live in a small dilapidated hut in the mountain that looks like a recluse hermit's abode, but also is in ruins as well. So that's a sign of this. The kind of ruins as a representation of recent devastation, the political devastation of the nation. That's one layer. And it also kind of anchor the different types of ruins in this film also anchored Youchun's story within the cycle of Chinese history. So by doing so evokes the figure of Qu Yuan, the exiled official Lian Chen. And then in this lineage epitomized by our great Kong Ye Quan, cast the intellectual as a morally superior individual whose banishment or political suffering is the proof of his its integrity in corrupt work. So the more they suffer, the better they are as a moral character. So Luo Ching is persecuted not because he's a rightist, actually in this film. And sensitive viewers probably will realize very quickly that it's not because of his political issue actually in this film, it's because he's a man of honor. It's his moral character that became the problem, that became the source culprit of his suffering. I think that's a pretty deep cultural critique that Xie Jin actually provided. It goes beyond the so called errors of the party policy, but go deep into the cultural roots of a lot of those. The construction of integrity and then the political stories usually constructed around those kind of moral combat in Chinese cultural history. So. And also he also introduced Xie Jin, also introduced another type of ruin, which is the steles. And I found that the sequence of the steles and the pavilions quite astonishing and introduces a few different characters, such as Yan Zhenqing, the famous Tang, the great morally upright Tang official. And this is a direct nod to the literati, to the Wen Ren tradition. And then kind of start to tell the story in the language of the literati by invoking the.
- [89:03]
C
Those.
- [89:04]
A
Those moments.
- [89:06]
C
So now let's move to the female characters of the film. And you argue that the real weight of the film may lie less with Luo Qing than with the women around him like Feng Qinglan, Stone Wei and Zhou Yuzhen. So how do these female figures reshape the narrative? And what does the film reveal when we read it through what you call in its feminine text?
- [89:32]
A
Yeah, I love this film for that is Luo Qing. Luo Jing's character is quite pale and it's kind of unremarkable. I don't think Xie Jin, really, his real passion is on erecting this male hero. Even though it is, I mean, to some extent it is. Right, because as the vehicle of party, because that's the way it is, the patriarchal kind of structure of the political history of it. But then the real weight, the real story, is kind of fragmented. I wouldn't say fragmented might not be the right word. It's being kind of diffused, but yet not in a way that it's been diminished. It's being carried by three different female figures. And they reshape the narrative quite a bit. And in my book I use the metaphor. If Luo Jun's character, the male character, is the monument that the film erects. The shadow of the monument lying on the ground are the female text and they tell the real story. So it is by kind of using those three female figures in this narrative, it kind of transformed this epic into epic of integrity, sacrifice and the preservation of history. So the monument might mark a particular kind of history, a narrative of history, but the real preservation of the history is actually lying on the ground. By the feminine text that I call the female figures. So Luo Chun's tragedy in the story is the Party's apparatus failure, right? And then. But his good wife, Feng Qinglan, this particular female character who actually dies in the film is he. She acts as a preserver and of course she preserves the body of Luo Cheng. She feeds him and she takes care of him. But then she also, her unwavering loyalty preserves Luo Chun's spiritual dignity. And she acts as a constant living rebuke to the injustice. And she kind of symbolizes the spirit of the people who recognize the hero's intrinsic worth despite the Party's policy. She's Cassette's the modern counterpart to the loyal wife and follower in the Littleotti tradition who validated the exiled scholars moral superiorities through her own sacrifice. She literally sustains the martyr too. And then she dies in substitution for the mansion of Mandalorian. She's the kind of the sacrifice thrown into the tomb so that the ritualistic conclusion can be made. So the other two characters, Zhou Yu Zhen obviously is a very vibrant character. She's the youthful character. So she's the new woman from the hopeful new era. And she has the audacity and candor and resolution to initiate the historical reckoning and the future. It's obvious in the end that the future belongs to her, not the other two. Song Wei is the lover of Luo Chun, but she embodies the effect of the corrupting power of political opportunism. And she betrayed, obviously she betrayed Luo Chun and then now she represents the painful, necessary process of introspection and self criticism that the country, the nation is engaged into and has to undertake in the postmodern era. So the women's choices provide the clearest. It's very clear. And the three and most emotional resonant delineation between what is considered political and what is considered ethical. So there's two lines in the. As in the film and they are also the carriers of history. It's truth and the truth. Not just the truth of Luo Chun's innocence and the truth of the villainy of a certain party powerful figure, but also kind of the truth of the male dominated political system who's not capable of preserving not is the emotional truth, truth and the truth of the cost of human too. And so this necessary kind of provide this kind of necessary emotional legitimacy for a political critique. And this tears and pathos. And of course we weep for the females, right? Watching the film. And I would imagine nobody would weep before Lo Chin. But it's the female story, the feminine text in this film that provide the tears and pathos and allowed the film to bypass a intellectual defense of the party's policies, but to focus, to reveal the true intentions behind those kind of rhetoric, those intellectual rhetoric of debate of whether you know what policy is good, what policy is not. So reveal the true intention behind those kind of debate and also speaking instead to the shared human cost of the era. And I also want to point out that the three women also respectively represent the nation's painful past, which is, I'm sorry, the painful past, which is Qingnan and the remorseful present, that's Song Wei and the hopeful future. So it's kind of like a really kind of alternative way, a monument and then a historical account of how to look at the film party history and the Chinese history backwards and are present in the future through this kind of female daughter. Yeah, great.
- [96:19]
C
I really want the conversation keep going. But due to the pandemic now we have to wrap up. So could you share what you are working on now and where your research is headed next?
- [96:33]
A
Right. So in the past few years I've been working on photography actually. So I'm writing a book on the history, the international history of Chinese pictorialism. And part of it actually kind of the inspiration of this second book came from during the process of research for the first book. I know that a lot of the questions and issues that came up in my probe into the literality landscape in Chinese cinema should also be answered. A lot of those questions should be addressed in photography because this is a lot of those, you know, cinema is a photo based media anyway, so I became interested in the topic. But I knew that I have to write a different book because it would be not possible for me to address two media at the same time within this framework because that was my interest. So I'm writing that book right now and I've been writing the pictorialist history, the history of pictorialism, art photography in China, and then another project which is actually pretty much related to the majority of our talk of this interview right now. It's about female, about women and landscape. So I'm interested in the gendered part of the landscape and also in modern media, the landscape representation of modern era.
- [98:05]
C
Wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with me today. And this has been such a rich conversation. I learned a lot from it. And so the book really opened my eyes to how landscapes on screen could carry not just beauty, but also politics, history and memory. So the book is Literary Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao era. All from University of Hawaii Press. I'm Jing Li and you have been listening to the New Books Network. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time.
- [98:41]
A
Thank you.