Discussion
After Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union enters the Thaw period in which Stalinist policies gets discarded and criticized. Mainland China goes through a similar process at the end of Cultural Revolution when it starts the phase called “Reform and Opening-up”. In these two historical contexts, both societies underwent profound ideological and political transformations. The crises and challenges facing Soviet society during the Thaw period and that of Chinese society in the 80s bear a striking resemblance: how to reconstruct a “self” within the socialist framework after the collapse of the previous ideological program.
This paper undertakes a comparative study of Soviet and Chinese cinema that aim to reconstruct collective faith in the upheavals of social consensus.
Using Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956) and Romance on Lushan Mountain (1980) as primary case study films, it studies how popular romantic blockbusters integrate national ideologies into the narrative of love stories. By juxtaposing the effort to shape national self-images in both the Soviet “Thaw” films of the late 50s and the Chinese “New Era” films in the early 80s, this paper discusses the similarities and differences in their emphases and approaches. I will analyze how the two films, both melodramatic and romantic, reshape the collective identity of their societies through melodramatic emotional appeal.
Whereas Spring on Zarechnaya Street features the centrality of the working class in society, Romance on Lushan Mountain turns to a national identity and downplays class consciousness. Both films center on the narrative model that the romantic coming-together of two individuals realizes the reconciliation of conflicting groups. While the Soviet film strives to bring together the dividing working class and intelligentsia, the Chinese one unites opposing political parties during the civil war under the identification with the Chinese nation. The comparison reveals to us that the Chinese society in the early 1980s seems to undergo a more radical ideological transition than the Soviet society in the late 1950s despite their similar historical and societal context.
