China Initiative Events

This talk examines the global turn in cinematic technology and infrastructure towards a wider, stretched, horizontal film screen amid the Cold War, as embodied in the fervor over CinemaScope in both socialist China and Western capitalist countries. I argue that the simultaneous rise of CinemaScope in the 1950s and ’60s on both sides of the Iron Curtain, on the one hand, registered shared structures of feeling in socialist and capitalist countries alike, wherein filmgoers sought visceral escape from the horrific and apocalyptic realities of the Cold War through the enhanced immersive realism; on the other hand, this transnational movement of widescreen technology led to a revival, in both the United States and socialist China, of the frontier western genre, which was retooled as an important vehicle in the domestic governance of the southwestern frontier area and politics of the “discovery of ethnic minorities” in socialist China. I explore the complex connections between cinematic technological development, transnational film genre migrations, and the politics of identifying, representing, and governing ethnic minorities in their native land in the People’s Republic of China. Challenging the narrative of “technological competition” between socialist and capitalist camps that currently dominates scholarship on the technological history of the Cold War, I present a vision of the existence of a cinematic universe in which vibrant transnational movements of film form, technology, and infrastructure penetrated Cold War borders and undermined geopolitical separationism.

Chuanhui Meng is a Watson China Initiative postdoctoral research associate in the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown University. She completed her Ph.D. in Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, with a minor in Moving Image Studies. Her areas of specialization include modern and contemporary Chinese film and culture, with a particular interest in transnational migrations and translations of film genres, border-crossing circulations of film and media in the global 1950s and ’60s, as well as ecocritical studies of socialist and post-socialist China. Her current book project examines the formation of a “genre ecology” in socialist Chinese cinema of the 1950s and ’60s. It explores the domestic experiments as well as transnational constellation, circulation, and translation of film genres across Cold War geopolitical borders, tracing film genre as a dynamic process of becoming that mediates between the domestic cultural-political environment, transnational migrations of film forms and theories, and the affective and embodied experiences of audiences.