6 Qian, Crossing The Same River Twice

Crossing the Same River Twice: Documentary Reenactment and the
Founding of PRC Documentary Cinema
Oxford Handbooks Online

Crossing the Same River Twice: Documentary
Reenactment and the Founding of PRC Documentary
Cinema
Ying Qian
The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas
Edited by Carlos Rojas
Print Publication Date: Apr 2013 Subject: Literature, Film

Online Publication Date: Oct 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199765607.013.0032
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter studies a Sino-Soviet coproduced color documentary film entitled Victory of
the Chinese People, directed by the Soviet war filmmaker Leonid Varlamov and completed
in 1950. The film mobilized tens of thousands of soldiers and spent a large amount of
ammunition to reenact four “great battles” in the Chinese civil war, despite the fact that
all these battles had been recorded in real time by Chinese filmmakers just months
before. By comparing this film’s reenactment of the battles with Chinese filmmakers’
actuality footage, and by examining the translation of Soviet discourses on documentary
cinema at the time, this chapter argues that the making of this film and the adoption of
Soviet theories and practices of documentary dramaturgy in the early 1950s constituted a
critical learning moment for Chinese filmmakers and helped lay the foundation for a PRC
documentary cinema.
Keywords: documentary, actuality, reenactment, war, Soviet influence
In October 1949, soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Fourth Field Army, who
had just recently arrived and settled in their new station near Tianjin, were told that they
would again be transferred back to the northeast, where their battalions had fought
deadly but victorious battles against the Nationalist army a year before. Cannons, tanks,
and tens of thousands of soldiers were swiftly loaded onto trains. Soon the open plains
near Jinzhou, where the dust of war had barely settled, were shaken again by cannons
and gunfire. In the eight-month period between autumn 1949 and summer 1950, four
battles marking PLA’s most important turns to victory during its war against the
Nationalists were re-enacted by the same army units who had fought in them.1 Also
reenacted were numerous celebratory scenes of the PLA soldiers marching into liberated
cities such as Tianjin, Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai. The result was a bill of millions of
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RMB for the young PRC’s state budget, a Stalin Prize in cinema, and the CCP’s first-ever
color “documentary,” Victory of the Chinese People (中國人民的勝利, 1950), directed by
Leonid Varlamov, the prize-winning Soviet war cinema specialist.2
This cinematic event was a high-profile undertaking. The making of the film had been
suggested by Stalin himself, shortly before the founding of the PRC, when it became clear
that the CCP’s triumph in the civil war was only a matter of time.3 The whole venture
enjoyed maximal support from the new Chinese state. Liu Shaoqi 劉少奇 was put in charge
of the film’s overall planning, and Mao Zedong 毛澤東 was involved as well: he took upon
himself to personally write to General Lin Biao 林彪, asking Lin and his troops to offer
every help to the Soviet filmmakers in the reenactment of the Battle of Liaoshen, which
the troops had fought victoriously in the autumn of 1948. The army also generously
permitted the Soviet filmmakers to use real cannonballs and bullets, which had cost lives
to acquire from the retreating Nationalist army on battlefields and (p. 591) were precious
for the young and resource-limited People’s Republic. Wu Benli 吳本立, a veteran
filmmaker from the CCP’s Yan’an era who assisted the making of Victory of the Chinese
People, confessed that he had shed tears watching these real cannonballs and bullets
being used for nothing but cinematic effects.4
Reenactments of battle scenes were not uncommon in the history of documentary cinema,
particularly in instances when the actuality, filmed on location during the battle, proved
too difficult to produce. However, all four of these reenacted battles had also left real-
time film footage: CCP filmmakers associated with the Yan’an Film Troupe (延安電影團),
the Northeast Film Studio (東北電影製片廠) and the Central North Film Team (華北電影隊)
had filmed them in real time and on the actual battlegrounds. The Battle of Liaoshen, for
example, was covered by more than thirty filmmakers, including Wu Benli, the Chinese
filmmaker who collaborated with Varlamov on Victory of the Chinese People in 1949.
Among these thirty filmmakers, three were killed while documenting the battle. The
Battle of Crossing the Yangtze, in which the PLA crossed the Yangtze River in thousands
of small ferryboats en route to take over Nanjing and Shanghai, was covered by a team of
ten cameramen led by Wu Benli.5 Footage from these battles had been edited into
actuality films and, according to Wu Benli, the Soviet filmmakers had watched these films
when preparing to film their reenactments.6 Given the fact that actuality footage of the
battles had been filmed less than a year before, it is perhaps puzzling why costly
reenactments were considered necessary for the making of Victory of the Chinese People.
Was Wu Benli shedding tears for the wasteful use of real cannons and guns; or was he,
instead, weeping for his fellow filmmakers who had fallen on battlefields, and whose
precious footage would soon be replaced by a more masterful, dramatic, yet fictitious
rendition?
In this chapter, I examine the reenacted film Victory of the Chinese People together with
the original documentary film Million Heroes Crossing the Yangtze (百萬雄獅下江南, 1949),
filmed by Wu Benli and other Chinese filmmakers during the actual battle between April
and June 1949. I argue that these two films embodied two different visions of war and two
distinct documentary practices defined by their openness to contingency and their
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relationship to theater. The massive cinematic reenactment to make Victory, and the
simultaneous importation of Soviet film theory, practice, and organization, constituted
one of the founding moments of PRC newsreel and documentary practice. Enforcing a
fundamental distrust of the contingent visible world and consolidating film’s bond to
theater through the practice of documentary dramaturgy, this pair of works marked a
turning point where a Yan’an cinema gave way to a PRC cinema.
Visions of War and Cinema between Battle

Actualities and Reenactments
Battlefield filmmaking is almost as old as cinema itself. As early as the 1898 Spanish-
American War, both battle actualities and reenactments were made.7 The first (p. 592)
cinematic images of war from China were the numerous actualities and reenactments
made of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, including actualities by Raymond Ackerman of the
American Mutoscope & Biograph Company and by the Japanese filmmaker Shibata
Tsunekichi,8 together with reenactments such as James Williamson’s Attack on a China
Mission, filmed in Hove, England, in 1900,9 and the Edison Company’s Bombardment of
the Taku Forts [by the Allied Fleets] (1900).10 These early battlefield films testify to the
popularity of war images for turn-of-the-century audiences, whose imagination and
curiosity were shaped by a zeitgeist of industrial modernity and imperialism.
In cinema’s early years, battle actualities and reenactments coexisted, and the distinction
between them went largely unnoticed. Richard Abel shows that before 1908 the French
film company Pathé placed actualities and reenactments in the same category for
distribution purposes, with there being no evidence that contemporary audiences saw any
meaningful distinction between the two.11 According to Miriam Hansen, the same was
true of early American cinema.12 For the audiences, what was more important was the
distinction between a representation of “historical” event and that of a purely “fictive” or
imaginary event. In other words, the actuality and reenactment belonged to the same
family of films reviving “historical scenes,” considered real for the historical referents
they depicted.
Actuality and reenactment not only shared a family resemblance in cinema’s earliest
years, they also engaged in the same pursuit to render modern warfare visible on cinema.
Few battlefields automatically yielded spectacular views. Paul Virilio argues that war
depends on concealment rather than visibility, as a target can be destroyed much more
easily if it can be seen.13 Working with letters and diaries written by U.S. soldiers fighting
in the Spanish-American War and a memoir of a filmmaker filming the British soldiers on
battlefields of the Boer War, Kristen Whissel shows that as weapons and soldiers were
camouflaged in the vast landscape, the visual terrains of modern warfare were constantly
shifting, inherently unstable, and full of self-erasure.14 The battle reenactments, on the
other hand, were filmed in a controlled environment, with multiple takes. They offered
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filmmakers a laboratory setting to work out the most effective representations of war. The
modes of vision developed in reenactments then helped filmmakers to navigate and
document actual battlefields.15 In other words, reenactments not only served as a
substitute when battlefields were too difficult or dangerous to film physically, but were
also part of a dialectical process in which direct observation and reenactment together
generated representational modes of war.
In China, no distinction was made between actuality and reenactments in film catalogs,
either in the Republican or the PRC period. Both were labeled “news film” (新聞片) or
“current affairs documentary” (時事紀錄片) in the Republican period, or “newsreel and
documentary” (新聞紀錄片) in the PRC. Chinese filmmaking on the battlefields began as
early as during the 1911 Revolution. The earliest known such film was The Battle of
Wuhan (武漢戰爭, 1911), by the world-renowned magician Zhu Liankui 朱連奎 (aka Ching
Ling Foo), which he produced in the wake of the Wuchang uprising of October 10, 1911,
and showed as part of his travel acts.16 Another early battlefield filmmaker was Li Minwei
黎民偉 (aka Lai Man-wai), whose passionate promotion of (p. 593) cinema as a propaganda
tool for China’s revolution earned him the position of the official cinematographer for Sun
Yat-sen 孫中山 from 1921 to 1925. Li filmed many actualities of Sun’s political activities as
well as the Nationalist army’s military actions. After Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925, Li
compiled years of actuality footage into a nine-reel compilation documentary entitled The
National Revolutionary Army’s War on Sea, Land, and Air (國民革命軍海陸空大戰記, 1927).
Both Zhu and Li had been influenced by cinematic images of war from America and
Europe. Zhu encountered war newsreels when performing overseas in America and
Europe. Li became a film lover when growing up in Hong Kong, and among the first films
he watched was a work about the Russo-Japanese War, most likely one of the
reconstructions made by the Biograph Company (Battle of Chemulpo Bay, 1904), the
Edison Company (The Battle of the Yalu, 1904), or Pathé.17 At the same time, both Zhu
and Li were influenced by the understanding of cinema in China as a form of theater and
shadow play. An advertisement on Zhu Liankui’s The Battle of Wuhan, put out by a
teahouse in Beijing in 1911, called the film “moving photography” (活動寫真) and an
“electric shadowplay” (電光影戲) and praised it for putting together “real scenes” (真影) of
battles, such that a chronology of the revolution, its spectacular scenes and glorious
heroes such as Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing 黃興, could all “play out, one after
another” (一一演出).18 Similarly, Li Minwei placed equal stress on cinema’s photographic
ability and its dramatic potential. He began his artistic career in theater and made
battlefield actualities as well as fiction films, perceiving both as equally valid ways of
educating and mobilizing the Chinese population for patriotic and revolutionary causes.
This particular understanding of cinema may have been the reason that Li Minwei, a
pioneering filmmaker at the front of cinematic innovations, never theorized the
distinction between actualities and reenactments, nor did any of his contemporaries. In
the Soviet Union, however, heated debates erupted on this topic. Since the mid-1920s
Dziga Vertov had been advocating a particular approach to filmmaking that he called
kinopravda, that is, seeking truth with an objective “kino-eye” and filming “life caught
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unawares.” Calling theatrical performances and film dramas “surrogates for life,” Vertov
believed that actualities by definition were superior to reenactments, because only
footage from unrehearsed everyday life could serve as “a thermometer or aerometer of
our reality, and its significance is unquestionably higher than the inventions of individual
authors, individual writers, or directors.”19 According to Vertov, a film must be led by
footage from everyday life, rather than by a predetermined theme. “Newsreel is
organized from bits of life into a theme, and not the reverse,” he wrote. “Kinopravda
doesn’t order life to proceed according to a writer’s scenario, but observes and records
life as it is, and only then draws conclusions from these observations.”20
Vertov’s insistance on kinopravda, or the “cinematic truth,” was indicative of the anxieties
experienced by filmmakers in the early years of the USSR, when theatrical reenactments
became one of the ways in which the new Soviet state fostered collective experience of
foundational narratives to consolidate its political legitimacy. Immediately after the
founding of the USSR, theatrical reenactments of the “storming of the Winter Palace”
were organized by radical dramatists to transform large numbers of citizens (p. 594) from
onlookers into revolutionaries. While the original attack on the Winter Palace was
relatively small, involving only about a hundred people, the largest reenactment at the
actual location of the Winter Palace mobilized eight thousand amateur actors and a
hundred thousand spectators in 1920, achieving what Frederick C. Corney called “the
apotheosis of the October Revolution.”21 In 1927, Sergei Eisenstein made October, a
cinematic reenactment of the October Revolution, to commemorate the revolution’s tenth
anniversary. Learning from the previous dramatic reenactments, Eisenstein’s cinematic
reenactment mobilized thousands of local residents and presented a far more spectacular
act of “storming the Winter Palace” than the actual event.22 The film received severe
attacks from Vertov, who criticized it as a “complete flop,” despite the immense
government funding behind it, “because the method of the theatrical fiction cannot
sustain any significant theme, and this theme is squandered for fictional, toy-shop
trivia.”23 Other like-minded filmmakers joined the debate. In 1927, the same year Li
Minwei compiled the actuality footage he had shot earlier and finished his cinematic
tribute to Sun Yat-sen, the Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub finished work on her well-known
trilogy, Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. Together with Vertov, Shub expressed a strong belief
in the ontological authenticity of actuality footage. Her use of a large quantity of actuality
footage from eclectic sources to compose a historical narrative greatly influenced
documentary practice in Europe and in the United States in the 1930s as well as during
World War II.24
In 1927, Li Minwei and Esfir Shub, drawing inspiration from a common international
circulation of actuality films as well as from their respective cultural contexts, produced
remarkably similar works. Yet soon afterward, Chinese and Soviet cinematic practices
diverged. Between 1928 and 1932, the Soviet Union underwent a “cultural revolution” in
which socialist realism was established as the guiding principle for the arts, and both
Vertov and Shub were sidelined.25 Meanwhile, the use of reenactment and dramatization
in nonfiction films became a common practice. Eisenstein’s reenactment of the October
Revolution, for instance, was deemed so superb that “it was for many years passed off by
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the Soviet leadership as the authentic newsreel footage of this historical event.”26 By
1932, skillful and seamless reenactment and staging had become a point of pride among
filmmakers. At a 1932 conference of filmmakers in the USSR, a participant reported that
one of his film studio’s reconstructions was so successful that “there is not a single shot
that has not been staged. Everything, right down to the most distant long shot was staged
yet at numerous screenings no one noticed….Since we organized the facts ourselves, we
were able to impart a certain dynamism, we could choose what to include, and so the
work acquired a dramatic spine.”27
In China, on the other hand, there occurred no such “cultural revolution” favoring
dramatization over actuality. Filmmakers continued making actualities, following Li
Minwei’s legacy, and comforming to an international practice of war propaganda,
influenced by early Soviet documentarians such as Vertov and Shub, as well as practices
from American, Japanese, German, and Italian cinematic traditions.28 In the 1930s and
1940s, as China was shaken by the Sino-Japanese conflict and then the war, many war
documentaries were produced, initially by commercial film companies in Shanghai and
Hong Kong in the early 1930s, and after the Japanese occupation of Shanghai by the
state-run (p. 595) Central Film Studio (中央電影攝影場) and the China Motion Picture
Corporation (中國電影製片廠).29 In 1938, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) founded the
Yan’an Film Troupe, which made numerous battlefield actuality films during the civil war
between the CCP and the Nationalist armies. The Yan’an Film Troupe received material
support from the Soviet Union, such as film stock, projectors, and power generators, and
Soviet films were sent to Yan’an for screening, which influenced Yan’an filmmakers
stylistically.30 However, there was no indication that Yan’an filmmakers were aware of the
changing conceptions of documentary in the Soviet Union. Yan’an filmmakers, including
Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之, Wu Yinxian 吴印咸, and Xu Xiaobing 徐肖冰, gained their experiences
working for years in Hollywood-influenced film studios in Shanghai. Some had also
worked for China’s Central Film Studio and the China Motion Picture Association.
Therefore, stylistically and conceptually the Yan’an practice of documentary was largely
undistinguishable from that of the rest of China, though Yan’an filmmaking was severely
limited by shortage of equipment and film stock.
While reenactments in the first decade of the twentieth century had helped filmmakers
overcome technical difficulties and develop a cinematic template to navigate real
battlefields, improvements in film technology helped make on-location filming easier, and
the number of battle reenactments declined sharply in Europe and America between
1907 and 1908, after which most battle newsreels were actualities filmed on location.31
However, reenactment as a technology of creating templates for new vision, this time a
distinctively Socialist one, was revived in the USSR in the 1920s, and consolidated in the
1930s. In 1949, the making of Sino-Soviet reenactments of the Chinese civil war battles
brought this particular template of vision from the USSR to the new PRC. In the next
section, I examine the differences between the actuality film produced by the CCP and
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the reenactment film coproduced by the Soviet Union and China, to understand what this
template was and why reenactment was deemed necessary.
From Million Heroes to Victory of the Chinese

People
A comparison of Million Heroes and Victory reveals differences between the CCP’s own
battlefield documentary practice prior to the founding of the PRC and the practice of
documentary cinema in the USSR at the time. Most obvious was that Victory was in color,
while Million Heroes was black-and-white, and the scale of action was consistently larger
in Victory. The bigger scale was achieved by mobilizing a larger number of people, more
frequent use of unobstructed and continuous panorama shots, and the commentator’s
verbal reminders of the fact that what was on the screen was only one of the many similar
scenes happening simultaneously along the Yangtze River. The second difference involved
the overall emotional tone: Victory of the People was far more joyful and optimistic than
Million Heroes, creating celebrative emotions with folk music fanfares and (p. 596) bright
and upbeat color schemes. Third, compared to Million Heroes, Victory was more attentive
to collective action and interested in representing leadership and hierarchy. Finally,
Victory and Million Heroes had different temporal structures. Million Heroes followed a
strictly chronological timeline, though willing to stop the forward thrust of the narrative
of the combat to allow digressions and interruptions, if events in real life called for them.
Victory on the other hand reorganized the order of events, and the cinematic time it
created was further removed from a historical timeline.
Consider how the two films portrayed the activities leading up to the Battle of Crossing
the Yangtze. In Victory, on the last day before the battle a massive oath-taking rally is
held in a big plaza. PLA soldiers line up, raise their arms, shout slogans, and vow bravery.
The camera films from a high angle, emphasizing the geometry of the soldiers’ lineup and
the large area it covers, and abstracts from individualizing characteristics of each soldier
in the frame. Meanwhile, shots taken at the front and from behind are intercut to show an
undivided collective of soldiers acting in unison. The army officials stand on a large and
elevated platform adorned with huge portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhu De 朱德 at the
front of the plaza. A clear visual hierarchy is created by the physical division of the
soldiers and their top officers, and the portraits of Mao Zedong and Zhu De looming
above as the ultimate location of power to which the soldiers’ vows are directed.
The oath-taking ceremony is followed by two other scenes. The first scene depicts the
arrival of villagers sending food and water to the soldiers. Accompanied by vibrant folk
music of the Yangtze region, the camera portrays congenial interactions between the
soldiers and the masses, singling out representatives of villagers, old and young, men and
women, and framing them in intimate medium-distance shots with the soldiers as they
offer the soldiers bowls of water. Two performances of drum dances follow. “Propaganda
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workers” dressed in folk costumes beat waist-drums and dance for a plaza of attentive
soldiers sitting on the floor. The last shot of the sequence is a close-up of the lead actor
beating a big red drum. The camera zooms onto the actor’s face, which appears full of
intensity, dynamism, and ecstasy. Meanwhile, the commentator speaks on the sound
track: “Tomorrow is the day of the battle. Let today’s joyful drums beat even louder; they
anticipate tomorrow’s victory.” The oath-taking ceremony and the two scenes that
followed were filmed with a consistently celebrative, joyful, and optimistic emotional
tone.
Million Heroes also features an oath-taking ceremony, though the scale is much smaller
and it takes place at the army’s military base, rather than by the river on the day before
the battle. The camera is mostly positioned at eye level, prioritizing individualization over
abstract geometry of collective forms. There is no platform and no portrait of Mao
Zedong or Zhu De. Officers and soldiers can’t be easily differentiated, as they stand on
the same level. There are no folk dances, villagers sending food, or grand oath-taking
ceremony. The voice-over describes soldiers signing up for the dangerous task of crossing
the river in the first dispatch of boats, while the camera shows dozens of soldiers lined
up, looking relaxed and wearing worn-out military outfits and helmets tilting to all
directions. The camera frames these soldiers at eye level in a medium-long shot, (p. 597)
panning slowly from left to right, revealing a multitude of facial expressions: some
apprehensive, some indifferent, and others relaxed and confident. Compared to the order
and magnitude of the oath-taking ceremony in Victory, these relaxed shots are much
more mundane.
The next shot features numerous fishing boats parked at the riverbank in a long shot. The
voice-over notes that the boats belong to local fishermen who volunteered to ferry the
soldiers across the river. Then the comments break off, and a moment of silence ensues.
On the boats, villagers are waiting. No one seems particularly excited, and instead they
appear contemplative. The Yangtze River was considered one of the toughest natural
defense-lines in the country, and the Nationalist army, though at the time weakened
significantly by previous CCP victories, had good weaponry and a formidable air force.
Even though the PLA had already won crucial battles, and many anticipated it would
triumph in the end, the outcome of this particular battle was not clear. In Million Heroes
the pensive and private moments before the battle reflected this grave uncertainty. Both
soldiers and fishermen withdrew into themselves, taking a moment of respite from
collective actions, lighting a cigarette, and getting lost in thought. They were, at that
moment, neither soldiers nor heroes, but rather ordinary people facing the possibility of
violent death.
The battle begins in Million Heroes with a melodic sound of a single trumpet playing the
tune signaling the start of action. With the trumpet playing on the sound track, a single
cannon slowly raises its long dark barrel, and a white sail is slowly raised from the
bottom of a boat and flutters in the air. In the next few shots, these movements are
repeated by a large number of cannons and sails, raising their barrels and sails at the
same time, getting ready for the battle. Juxtaposing the solidly dark, firm, and pointed
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iron tubes of the cannons with the softly white, translucent, and expansive sails,
beginning with an individual action and expanding into a collective endeavor, this
montage is masterfully dialectical. The soft and vulnerable fabric of the sails and the
human lives beneath them are put into direct confrontation with the violent potentials of
the cannons. As soldiers and fishermen begin to row away from the riverbank and the
cannons begin to fire, a group of about fifteen people, mostly villagers and some soldiers,
stands by the river and shouts slogans. With the explosive noise from the cannons in the
background, these human voices shouting revolutionary slogans beside the Yangtze sound
vulnerable, slight, yet musical, adding forlornness and sorrow to the otherwise grand
departure, and at one point quoting from the classic historical text Records of the
Historian (史記): “Wind blows and sighs, and the Yi River is cold. The hero leaves and will
not return” (風蕭蕭兮易水寒，壯士一去兮不復還). Compared to the loud, assured, and unified
beatings of the drum in Victory, this scene from Million Heroes is all the more pluralistic:
military might and human vulnerability, sanguine hopes for collective victory and
sorrowful premonitions of individual demises, all find their place in this rich tapestry
woven by none other than the battle itself.
The management of time in the two films differs greatly. This can be seen clearly in the
scenes immediately after the PLA crosses the river. After the first group of soldiers and
(p. 598) boats fords the river, destroys the enemies’ defenses, and wins the battle, Million
Heroes goes into a long sequence depicting horses, tanks, and heavy weaponry being
transported across the river on large boats. The camera captures the horses happily
walking off the boats, using no less than five shots from various angles (including a comic
angle from the horses’ rear). A comparable number of shots is devoted to the tanks as
they roll off boats onto the riverbank. Even though the commentator speaks objectively of
the necessity of transporting the horses and weapons across the river, the playful
composition of shots reveals the cameraman’s subjective joyful and comic state of mind.
Victory, on the other hand, allows no such moment of respite and play. Instead, the army
is portrayed marching forward without a moment of rest. The voice-over states that
“there is no time to waste. We must move forward, move forward fast, to give the enemies
no time to react. We must move forward to liberate Nanjing and Shanghai.” While the
moment of victory is savored in Million Heroes, the dedication to the next target
overwhelms the present moment in Victory.
At the level of narrative structure, Million Heroes is more open to interruptions and
digressions if the real timeline of events calls for them. The temporal structure of Victory,
on the other hand, corresponds less to the real timeline than to one determined by the
film’s internal logic and aesthetic requirements. For example, when PLA soldiers and
civilians are busy making preparations for crossing the Yangtze, the CCP begins a peace
negotiation with the Nationalist Party. In Victory, the war preparation is never
interrupted. On the screen, soldiers and villagers continue to dig canals and prepare the
boats and weapons. The peace negotiation has no visual representation and instead is
only described by the voice-over: “The American imperialists supported Li Zongren 李宗仁
and attempted to cheat the Chinese people with a fake peace negotiation. However, led
by Chairman Mao, the Chinese people exposed the enemies’ conspiracy and were firmly
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determined to carry out the revolution to the end.” This not only prevents digressions
from the narrative thrust, but also erases other possible alternatives in historical
development. It builds into the narrative a time structure of preknowledge, as if from the
very beginning Mao and the “Chinese people” had already known that the peace
negotiation was a mere conspiracy.
In the case of the peace negotiation, Million Heroes cuts from the war preparations to
images of meetings between the two parties’ high officials. The film shows the arrival of
the Nationalist delegation, and the congenial meeting between them and the CCP
representatives who had been waiting at the Beiping airport, with both parties behaving
more like friends than enemies. Then the film cuts to the negotiation table, where the
delegates and CCP leaders spent twenty days and finally arrived at the “Agreement of
Domestic Peace.” The negotiation is depicted quite economically. The camera films the
two parties sitting at an oval table, with speeches by Zhou Enlai 周恩來. Yet details such as
a smile on one participant’s face, a long handshake, and a vase of carefully arranged
fresh-cut flowers convey a sense of normalcy and a friendliness and seriousness with
which the CCP leadership approached the negotiation. They complicate the mise-en-
scène, allowing viewers to imagine potential multitudes inherent in any historical
moment.
Page 10 of 23

(p. 599) From a Yan’an Cinema to a PRC Cinema

The fact that the CCP had filmed actualities for each of the “Four Great Battles” testified
to its growing filmmaking capacity prior to 1949. As I showed in the previous two
sections, this capacity came from a long tradition of filmmaking in the first half of the
twentieth century and bore influences from an international circulation of war images.
While Chinese filmmakers had not developed major theorization on the distinction
between actualities and reenactments, and anecdotal evidence suggests that battle
reenactments existed sporadically, most of the battle newsreels were filmed as
actualities.32 Coproduction with the Soviet Union on Victory was the beginning of a major
Sovietization campaign where Chinese filmmakers learned to adopt the Soviet practice of
documentary dramaturgy and reenactment by reading translated Soviet film criticism and
through direct experience working with Soviet filmmakers.
Soviet film theory, organization, and practices were introduced to the new China through
translation. In 1951, a volume of Soviet film theory entitled Party on Cinema (黨論電影)
was published in the PRC, with a preface by Yuan Muzhi, then the head of the State Film
Bureau. Yuan recounts how he discovered the book’s original 1938 Russian edition
(entitled Lenin, Stalin, Party on Cinema) in a bookstore in Moscow in 1941.33 A filmmaker
and actor who had founded the Yan’an Film Troupe after many years of experience in
Shanghai’s film studios, Yuan Muzhi was at the time in Moscow on a mission to complete
the postproduction of Yan’an Film Troupe’s first documentary film, Yan’an and the Earth
Route Army (延安與八路軍). This trip proved disastrous: the precious film reels were lost in
Soviet territory following German attacks in 1941. Both Yuan and Xian Xinghai 冼星海, the
talented composer who had gone to Moscow with Yuan to compose for the film, got stuck
in the Soviet Union, unable to return to China, and Xian Xinghai died of illness in Moscow
in 1945.34 When Yuan finally made his way back to China, he was carrying little more
than this worn-out book, which he deemed crucial for the development of Chinese
cinema.35
While the theory and practice of Soviet cinema had already been introduced to China in
the 1920s, and Lenin’s famous line, “Remember, of all the arts for us, the most important
is cinema,” had been widely circulated, Party on Cinema was the first comprehensive
document appearing in China that offered a systematic overview of Soviet filmmaking and
film criticism under Party leadership.36 It established cinema as the most important art
form for mass propaganda and cited the development of cinema as “a measure of socialist
achievement of a country,” as Stalin proclaimed at the Seventeenth Party Congress in
1934.37 The volume also established the central importance of documentary and newsreel
films. Among different kinds of cinema, Lenin particularly favored the “serious and
educational” genre of documentary and newsreel. Newsreel and documentary, for Lenin,
were visual newspapers and illustrated public lectures, serving similar functions as the
best Party newspapers.38 They were more (p. 600) likely to be “imbued with Communist
ideas and reflecting Soviet reality,” in contrast to “useless picture of the more or less
Page 11 of 23

usual type,” namely feature and other films for entertainment purposes.39 The volume’s
editor, Lebenov, also considered rapid development of documentary and newsreel cinema
as among the most important achievements of Soviet cinema.40
Party on Cinema praised film as a “great” art form yet also warned of the danger of its
falling into hands of the enemies. “In the hands of banal opportunists, film would often
lead people to a path of decadence,” warned Lenin as early as 1907; “only in the hands of
the masses and true socialist cultural workers would film become most powerful tool to
educate the masses.”41 Cinema was powerful, and therefore it must remain securely in
the hands of the Party. Party on Cinema included a rich collection of Party directives
concerned with day-to-day management of cinema: nationalizing film productions,
cultivating politically correct film cadres and scriptwriters, developing the USSR’s own
industrial capacity for filmmaking technology and film stock, and setting up extensive
networks of film production and exhibition throughout the USSR, especially in the Far
East republics and rural areas. Building the film industry had been repeatedly cited in the
USSR’s five-year plans, and these directives became models of emulation for post-1949
China. In 1953, as China initiated its First Five-Year Plan with help from Soviet Union, it
began building the nation’s own film industry, and many of its priorities seemed identical
to those outlined in Party on Cinema.42
Party on Cinema provided ideas on how to macromanage the budding film industry in the
young PRC; other translations of Soviet film literature offered insights into the
micromanagement of film styles. In February 1952, a new bimonthly film magazine, Film
Art Resources (電影藝術資料叢刊), was founded by the China Film Bureau, and the
introduction of Soviet film theory and practice became the magazine’s central task. As
the articles were mostly translations of Soviet film theory and practice, the name of the
magazine was changed to Film Art in Translation (電影藝術譯叢) in 1953. Between 1952
and 1953, this magazine published numerous translated essays by Soviet filmmakers and
critics on documentary cinema, focusing on issues of documentary dramaturgy,
reenactment, and authenticity. Originally published in Soviet film journals in 1950 and
1951, these essays were more up-to-date than the 1938 publication Party on Cinema and
reflected the dominant discourses on documentary in the Soviet Union around the time
when Victory of the Chinese People was made.43
The most important target of criticism in these essays was “on-the-spot realism” or
“documentalism” (紀實主義). In an article entitled “Authenticity in Documentary,” I.
Nazarov observes, “In the debate on documentary, there used to be a very incorrect,
careless point of view that newsreel filmmakers must not conceptualize, but rather must
return to the principle of documentalism, as if only this principle could guarantee the
authenticity of documentary cinema.”44 On-the-spot realism would lead filmmakers to
“photograph reality with a cold and detached naturalism, superficially gliding over the
appearance of reality,” he warned, and the result would be the exact opposite of the
intention. What was meant to be “objective” would in the end distort reality, in a way “no
less toxic than fabrication.”45
Page 12 of 23

Why was documentalism so detrimental? Nazarov gave a few examples.
(p. 601)
Criticizing one scene in Y. M. Bliokh’s documentary Fishermen of the Caspian (1949), in

which a fishermen’s team is awarded a red flag for winning a productivity competition,
for instance, Nazarov wrote, “The scene was shot with low light, as if it had been
something very common, meaningless, and ordinary. The narration was vague and
hurried…without profoundly showing the essence of this event, and the great meaning of
socialist competition, which, as we know, is the basis of labor relations in the Soviet
society.”46 The biggest flaw of this scene was its lack of luster, which betrayed the
filmmakers’ lack of passion and Party spirit and hindered the expression of the “essence
of the matter.” In another example, a leader of a collective farm made an arrogant
appearance in a documentary, behaving in a boastful and self-centered way. Nazarov
reasoned that even though this cadre might indeed have been a bit arrogant, this would
not have been his “essential” character, but rather merely an “accidental and secondary
one that only became manifest because of the particular environment created by the act
of filming.”47 In both cases, the actual appearance of things captured by the camera was
considered inadequate in revealing the essential nature of things and people. It was
inadequate because the contingencies during the filmmaking—including inadequate light
and people’s “accidental” behavior in front of the camera—distracted the audience from
events’ true meaning and people’s essential character.
In Nazarov’s essay, one may discern a fundamental distrust of the visible world. The
visible world was considered superficial, messy, and full of contingencies that would
confuse and mislead. It was a world where the “essential” and the “accidental” coexist,
and it would be difficult to tell them apart. Documentalism, which Nazarov defined as
indiscriminate recording of the visible world, would inevitably distort “reality,” because
the visible world—or visuality itself—was a source of confusion and distortion, able to
either hide or reveal the underlying reality. Facing such a world, filmmakers could not be
detached record-keepers; instead they should be “artists and propagators” with a political
awareness that would allow them “to go deep into the essence of phenomena, reveal the
total meaning of a fact, call people to rush toward the future, and manifest the future in
the activities of today.”48 For Nazarov, the task of the filmmaker was to reorder the visual
world: to discern the important from the trivial, grasp the essential as distinct from the
contingent, understand the hierarchies of meaning and temporality, so that the films they
produced would render visible a reality more real than the observed world.
To aid filmmakers in the task of ordering the visible world and rendering visible its
obscured and invisible essentials and dynamics, the documentary script was of great
importance, as the film critic R. Grigoriev argued in “On Documentary Screenplay,”
published in June 1952, in the third issue of Film Art Resources. Writing was considered a
pathway to make order and art out of the raw materials of the physical world. Grigoriev
cited two great Soviet writers to prove his point. “Why we can’t stand it when a newsreel
is screened?” Mayakovsky asked in 1927, and answered: “Because our newsreels are
accidental collections of various shots and discrete events. Newsreel should be edited,
and become a system of its own. Such newsreels will not bore people; instead, one will
not be able to live without them.” Gorki similarly observed that “facts are not the entirety
Page 13 of 23

of truth, they are just raw materials. One must distill, pull real artistic truth from
(p. 602)
these raw materials. We cannot fry the chicken with its feathers. If we worship facts, it
will lead us to confuse accidental and unessential things with fundamental and typical
things. We must learn to pluck out the feathers of unessential facts, and be good at lifting
thoughts from facts.”49
Writing a script for a documentary beforehand would provide a basis for the film, argued
Griogoriev, “as it would subject our work to a unified intellectual and artistic vision.”
Using examples from Soviet documentary screenwriting, Griogoriev showed how a good
script could create scenes with an overall unified aesthetics and poetics and could help
filmmakers think through the sound treatment, montage rhythm, composition, and
arrangement of colors before the event. This would allow directors to better manage the
actual filming. This process of scripting, imagining, and staging was what Nazarov called
“conceptualization” (概括). Nazarov argued that documentary reenactments and staging
were legitimate because they were a form of “conceptualization” and were fundamentally
different from fabrication, which either had no basis in the material world or was a
mistaken conceptualization.50
Leonid Varlamov, director of Victory, was identified by Grigoriev as one of the Soviet
Union’s most skillful documentary scriptwriters.51 Indeed, during the filming of Victory,
Varlamov put many of the ideas expressed in these essays into practice, which exerted
much influence on the Chinese filmmakers with whom he worked. Those who
collaborated with Soviet filmmakers on these two films were all from the newly
established Beijing Film Studio,52 and according to the studio’s end-of-year report of
1950, they believed that their experiences working with the Soviets had “improved
production quality in the studio as a whole.”53
Chen Bo 陳播, a filmmaker who participated in the filming of Victory, wrote in a 1957
article, “I was deeply in awe of Comrade Varlamov’s talent and creativity in the artistic
creation of documentary films.”54 Varlamov impressed Chen not only with his written
script, which for Chen showed great knowledge about the Chinese revolution, but also his
“sharp political vision,” which endowed the film with “a rich power of visual expression.”
In the examples provided by Chen, Varlamov’s “political vision” had to do with his ability
to find or stage revolutionary symbols in the visual environment. When filming the grand
entry of PLA troops into liberated Beijing, Varlamov chose to film the closed gate of the
American Embassy at the moment when PLA soldiers passed by, so that the rifles on the
shoulders of the soldiers pointed right at the American national crest on top of the gate.
In Shanghai, inspired by the red flag flying on top of colonial style buildings, Varlamov
staged a scene in which the old Nationalist flag was torn down by PLA soldiers and
thrown from the top of a government building. The camera followed the discarded flag’s
dramatic descent from the rooftop, following its twists and turns, until it landed onto the
pavement below, to be swept into the dustbin of history. The two PLA soldiers selected for
the task of tearing down the Nationalist flag were model soldiers for whom the chance of
appearing in cinema was a great honor and pride. At the same time, Varlamov’s
“imaginative reenactment” impressed his Chinese colleagues deeply. Chen wrote,
Page 14 of 23

“Comrade Varlamov’s sensitive political vision and his ingenuous artistic (p. 603)
imagination combined to create a documentary. These great, moving, and authentic (真實
的) scenes used to excite countless hearts of Chinese and foreign audiences and left me—
a beginner in filmmaking—with indelible impressions. If I could claim to have some ideas
about documentary-making later, it all came from experiences with this teacher….From
his creative work, I began to understand the creative strategies of socialist realism in film
art.”55
Conclusion
The Sino-Soviet coproduction Victory of the Chinese People, being one of the first cases of
reenactment and staging in PRC’s documentary film history, helped establish the
legitimacy of reenactment and documentary dramaturgy and paved the way for even
bolder documentary staging in later periods. Even though China in the late 1950s
attempted to rid itself of Soviet influence and sought a more “national” approach in
revolutionary art, documentary reenactment and staging remained in practice. Following
Mao Zedong’s call to combine “revolutionary romanticism” with “revolutionary realism,”
documentary and newsreel filmmakers were even encouraged to engage in a practice of
“documenting the future,” to stage aspirations of people as if they were already realities
on screen.
In October 1958, at the height of the Great Leap Forward, which film studios across the
country enthusiastically documented, the journal Film Art published a series of articles
espousing the application of “revolutionary romanticism” in documentary production. The
critic Ding Jiao 丁嶠 recounts a discussion that had taken place in April 1958 at the
Central Film Bureau among a number of filmmakers, writers, and critics, following
screenings of several documentary films on the Great Leap Forward. During the
discussion, the poet and dramatist He Jingzhi 賀敬之 observed that while some films
featured monumental scenes of collective labor, they seemed to depict the fruits of that
labor in an unsatisfactory fashion: “After watching the film Spring in the Mountainous
Region (山區的春天) and witnessing the touching scenes of people’s hard work…I felt very
unsatisfied with just seeing a few small trees and a small patch of irrigated rice field at
the end of the film.” In his eyes, another documentary entitled Split Open Mountains to
Bring in Water (劈山引水) had the same flaw: while the film depicted an amazing feat to
transform nature, the new irrigation system shown at the end of the work only produced
“a small stream of water, flowing toward us all too modestly.” Expressing his
dissatisfaction with these films, He Jingzhi requested that the filmmakers “give us more
splendid sceneries of the spring and bigger waves of water.” Anticipating objections from
those who believed documentaries had to portray reality, He asked, “why can’t
documentaries document tomorrow?” The answer he proposed was, “Even if we show in
the end of the films the spring sceneries from the Yangtze region, the audience wouldn’t
Page 15 of 23

deem it unreal, as we could add voice-over to clarify that this is what the tomorrow will
be like. Wouldn’t such a film give us more encouragement?”56
After recounting He Jingzhi’s observations and requests, Ding Jiao expressed his
(p. 604)
agreement. Yes, documentary could also document the future, he affirmed, and those who
believed that revolutionary romanticism could not be applied to documentary were
wrong, because documentary realism and revolutionary romanticism were both rooted in
social reality. “Our people are bold in thinking and courageous in action. Their unceasing
energy for perpetual revolution and progress has placed new demands on the art of
today,” he concluded. Revolutionary romanticism was “realistic,” as it reflected the
zeitgeist of the day and registered the passion and energy of the people. Hence,
reenactments of past victories of the Chinese people made way for cinematic enactments
of future victories, moving not only the documentary genre but also real life further into
the realm of fiction.
Works Cited
Abel, Richard. “The Cinema of Attraction in France: 1896–1904.” The Silent Cinema
Reader. Ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer. New York, Routledge, 2004. 63–76.
Abel, Richard. Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Chen Bo 陳播. “Huiyi Wa’erlamofu zai zhongguo” 回憶瓦爾拉莫夫在中國 [Recalling Varlamov

in China]. Zhongguo dianying 中國電影 [Chinese cinema], November and December 1957.
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Corney, Frederick C. Tell October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Ding Jiao 丁嶠. “Xinde tansuo: geming xianshi zhuyi yu geming langman zhuyi xiang jiehe
de chuangzuo fangfa ruhe zai xinwen dianying zhong tixian” 新的探索：革命現實主義與革命
浪漫主義相結合的創作方法如何在新聞電影中體現 [New explorations: How to manifest the
creative method of combining revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism in
news films]. Zhongguo dianying 中國電影 [Chinese cinema], January 1958. 5–7.
Fang Fang 方方. Zhongguo jilupian fazhan shi 中國紀錄片發展史 [The historical development
of the Chinese documentary]. Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2003.
Gao Weijin 高維進. Zhongguo xinwen jilu dianying shi 中國新聞紀錄電影史 [A history of
Chinese documentary filmmaking]. Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2003.
Gillespie, David C. Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda. London:
Wallflower Press, 2000.
Page 16 of 23

Grigoriev, R. “Lun jilupian de juben” 論紀錄片的劇本 [A discussion of documentary
(p. 608)
filmscripts]. Dianying yishu ziliao congkan 電影藝術資料叢刊 [Film art resources] 1952: no.
3, 10–30.
Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1991.
Hicks, Jeremy. Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007.
Johnson, Matthew. “International and Wartime Origins of the Propaganda State: Motion
Picture in China, 1897–1955.” PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 2008.
Lebenov, N., ed. Danglun dianying 黨論電影 [Party on cinema]. Trans. Xu Guming 徐谷明.
Beijing: Shidai chubanshe, 1951.
Li Minwei 黎民偉. “Shibaizhe zhiyan—Zhongguo dianying yaolan shidai zhi baomu” 失敗者
之言－中國電影搖籃時代之保姆 [Words of a man who has failed: The nanny of Chinese film in
its infancy]. Li Minwei: ren, shidai, dianying 黎民偉: 人，時代，電影 [Li Minwei: The person,
the times, and cinema]. Ed. Luo Ka 羅卡 and Li Xi 黎錫. Hong Kong: Mingchuang
chubanshe, 1999. 169.
Lin Danqiu 林淡秋. “Xinzhongguo renmin dianying shiye de shengli” 新中國人民電影事業的勝

利 [The victory of the enterprise of people’s cinema in new China]. Renmin ribao 人民日報
[People’s daily], March 7, 1951.
Liu Nianqu 劉念渠. “Lüetan sulian dianying” 略談蘇聯電影 [A brief discussion of Soviet
cinema]. People’s Daily, October 30, 1949.
Liu Yuqing 劉玉清. Zhongguo dianying de lishi shensi yu dangxia guancha 中國電影的審視和
當下觀察 [Historical reflections and contemporary observations on Chinese cinema].
Beijing: Zhongguo chuanmei daxue chubanshe, 2009.
Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Manufacturing
Company. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991,
Musser, Charles. Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography. 602.

Catalog no. 837.
Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990.
McKernan, Luke. “C. Frank Ackerman.” Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide
Survey. Ed. Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan. London: British Film Institute, 1996.
Retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.victorian-cinema.net/ackerman.htm.
McKernan, Luke. “Shibata Tsunekichi.” Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide

Survey. Ed. Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan. London: British Film Institute, 1996.
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Retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.victorian-cinema.net/shibata.htm.
Retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://www.victorian-cinema.net/shibata.htm.
Nazarov, I. “Jilupian zhong de zhenshixing” 紀錄片中的真實性 [The realism of documentary].

Dianying yishu yicong 電影藝術譯叢 [Film art in translation] 1953: no. 1, 51–61.
Roberts, Graham. Forward Soviet! History and Non-fiction Film in the USSR. London: I.B.
Tauris, 1999.
Shanghai dianying zhi 上海電影志 [Shanghai film chronicle]. Shanghai: Shanghai difangzhi
bangongshi, 1999.
Sopocy, Martin. James Williamson: Studies and Documents of a Pioneer of the Film
Narrative. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.
Vertov, Dziga. “The Essence of Kino-Eye” (1925). Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov.
Trans. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 45–50.
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller.
London: Verso, 1989.
Whissel, Kristen. “Placing the Spectator on the Scene of History: The Battle Re-
(p. 609)
enactment at the Turn of the Century, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the Early Cinema.”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22.3 (2002): 225–243.
Wu Zhuqing 吳築清 and Zhang Dai 張岱, eds. Zhongguo dianying de fengbei: Yan’an
dianyingtuan de gushi 中國電影的豐碑：延安電影團的故事 [Monument of Chinese cinema:
Story of the Yan’an Film Troupe]. Beijing: Renmin University Press, 2008.
Zhongguo dianying tu zhi 中國電影圖志 (1905–2005) [A pictorial history of Chinese cinema

1905–2005]. Beijing: Zhongguo chuanmei daxue chubanshe, 2007.
Zhongyang renmin zhengfu zhengwuyuan guanyu jiaqiang dianying zhipian gongzuo de

jueding 中央人民政府政務院關於加強電影制片工作的決定 [Decision by the Administration
Council of the Central People’s Government to strengthen film production]. Renmin ribao
人民日報 [People’s daily], January 12, 1954.
Notes:
(1.) The four battles that were reenacted were the Battles of Liaoshen 遼瀋, Huaihai 淮海,
Pingjin 平津, and Crossing the Yangtze 渡江.
(2.) Leonid Varlamov was a multiple winner of the Stalin Prize, and his World War II
documentary Moscow Strikes Back won an Oscar in 1943.
Page 18 of 23

(3.) Victory of the Chinese People was one of the two “documentary” films produced in
collaboration with the Soviet Union in 1949 and 1950. The other was entitled Liberated
China (解放了的中國, 1950), directed by Sergei Gerasimov. The latter work focused on the
beginning of socialist constructions in postwar China and didn’t require expensive
reenactments of battle scenes.
(4.) Interview with Wu Benli, in Fang Fang 方方, Zhongguo jilupian fazhan shi 中國紀錄片發
展史 [The historical development of the Chinese documentary] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju
chubanshe, 2003), 215.
(5.) Fang Fang, Historical Development, 164,5.
(6.) Fang Fang, Historical Development, 215.
(7.) For a discussion of films depicting the Spanish-American War, see Musser Charles,
The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 255–261, and Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the
Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 126–137. For
early films on the Boer War, see Abel Richard, Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 7.
(8.) McKernan Luke, “C. Frank Ackerman,” and “Shibata Tsunekichi,” in Who’s Who of
Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey, ed. Herbert Stephen and McKernan Luke
(London: British Film Institute, 1996). Entries retrieved October 24, 2012, from http://
www.victorian-cinema.net/ackerman.htm and http://www.victorian-cinema.net/
shibata.htm. Quoted in Johnson Matthew, “International and Wartime Origins of the
Propaganda State: Motion Picture in China, 1897–1955,” PhD diss., University of
California, San Diego, 2008, 48–50. Ackerman’s actualities probably circulated in
America under the title The War in China.
(9.) Sopocy Martin, James Williamson: Studies and Documents of a Pioneer of the Film
Narrative (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998). Quoted in Matthew
Johnson, “International and Wartime Origins,” 50.
(10.) Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography,

602 (catalog no. 837). Quoted in Matthew Johnson, “International and Wartime Origins,”
50.
(11.) Richard Abel, “The Cinema of Attraction in France: 1896–1904,” in The Silent
Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson and Peter Krämer (New York: Routledge, 2004), 71.
Also see Richard Abel, Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 7.
(12.) Hansen Miriam, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 30–31.
(13.) Virilio Paul, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller
(London: Verso, 1989), 4.
Page 19 of 23

(14.) Whissel Kristen, “Placing the Spectator on the Scene of History: The Battle Re-
enactment at the Turn of the Century, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the Early Cinema,”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22.3 (2002): 234–236.
(15.) Kristen Whissel, “Placing the Spectator.”
(16.) Weijin Gao 高維進, Zhongguo xinwen jilu dianying shi 中國新聞紀錄電影史 [A history of
Chinese documentary filmmaking] (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 2003), 9.
(17.) Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 273. For Li Minwei’s early cinema
experience, see Li Minwei 黎民偉, “Shibaizhe zhiyan—Zhongguo dianying yaolan shidai zhi
baomu,” 失敗者之言－中國電影搖籃時代之保姆 [Words of a man who has failed: The nanny of
Chinese film in its infancy], Dianying shuangzhoukan 電影雙周刊 [Film bimonthly], nos.
375–376 (Hong Kong, 1993), reprinted in Li Minwei: ren, shidai, dianying 黎民偉: 人，時
代，電影 [Li Minwei: the person, the times, and cinema], ed.Law Kar 羅卡 and Li Xi 黎錫
(Hong Kong: Mingchuang chubanshe, 1999), 169.
(18.) Reprinted in Zhongguo dianying tu zhi 中國電影圖志 (1905–2005) [A pictorial history

of Chinese cinema 1905–2005] (Beijing: Zhongguo chuanmei daxue chubanshe, 2007), 15.
(19.) Vertov Dziga, “The Essence of Kino-Eye” (1925), in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga
Vertov, trans. Michelson Annette (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 50, 48.
(20.) Dziga Vertov, “On Kinopravda,” in Kino-Eye, 45.
(21.) Corney Frederick C., Tell October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik
Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 76.
(22.) Gillespie David C., Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda
(London: Wallflower Press, 2000), 45.
(23.) Yuri Tsivian, Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2005), 152.
(24.) Yuri Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 76.
(25.) Vertov was denounced as following a “documentalism” that was too naturalistic and
dispassionate to be revolutionary.
(26.) For the campaign against “documentalism” targeting Vertov and other filmmakers,
see Graham Roberts, Forward Soviet: History and Non-fiction Film in the USSR (London:
I.B. Tauris, 1999), 93–104. For Eisenstein’s October serving as historical footage, David C.
Gillespie, Early Soviet Cinema, 45.
(27.) Hicks Jeremy, Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007),
88.
(28.) Matthew Johnson, “International and Wartime Origins,” 157–255.
Page 20 of 23

(29.) Matthew Johnson, “International and Wartime Origins,” 114.
(30.) Fang Fang, Historical Development, 96–99, 105.
(31.) Richard Abel, Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 8.
(32.) In 1928, Bai Chongxi 白崇禧, a general in the National Revolutionary Army,
commissioned The Chronicle of the Completion of the Northern Expedition (北伐完成紀,
1928), a cinematic reconstruction of one of the major battles that led to the successful
completion of the Northern Expedition, and lent his soldiers to play both themselves and
the enemy army. See Shanghai dianying zhi 上海電影志 [Shanghai film chronicle]
(Shanghai: Shanghai difangzhi bangongshi, 1999). Retrieved January 15, 2012, from
http://www.shtong.gov.cn/node2/node2245/node4509/node15254/node16773/node63939/
userobject1ai11747.html.
(33.) The Russian version of the book was produced in two stages. In 1925, a year after
Lenin’s passing, the Soviet filmmaker Grigori Boltyansky edited a book collection of
Lenin’s thoughts on cinema, entitled Lenin and Cinema (Lenin i kino). In 1938, to pay
tribute to Stalin’s love of cinema and affirm his status on a par with Lenin, the book was
reedited by the film critic Nikolai Alekseevich Lebedev to include Stalin’s thoughts as
well as Party directives on cinema. The new edition was named Lenin, Stalin, Party on
Cinema (Lenin, Stalin, Partiia o kino) (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo “Iskusstvo,” 1938). The
Chinese edition can be found in N. Lebenov, ed., Danglun dianying 黨論電影 [Party on
cinema], trans. Xu Guming 徐谷明 (Beijing: Shidai chubanshe, 1951). All subsequent
references to this work will be to the Chinese edition.
(34.) Wu Zhuqing 吳築清 and Zhang Dai 張岱, eds. Zhongguo dianying de fengbei: Yan’an
dianyingtuan de gushi 中國電影的豐碑：延安電影團的故事 [Monument of Chinese cinema:
Story of the Yan’an Film Troupe] (Beijing: Renmin University Press, 2008), 93–101.
(35.) Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之, preface to N. Lebenov, Party on Cinema, 7.
(36.) Soviet film theory was first introduced by the playwright Hong Shen, who translated
the collective statement on sound cinema by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Alexandrov and Vertov,
for the December 1928 issue of Dianying yuebao 電影月報 [Film monthly]. In 1930, the
dramatist Tian Han edited a special issue on Soviet cinema for Nanguo yuekan 南國月刊
[Nanguo monthly], introducing Lenin’s idea on the place of cinema as well as Anatoly
Lunacharsky’s writings. Liu Yuqing 劉玉清, Zhongguo dianying de lishi shensi yu dangxia
guancha 中國電影的審視和當下觀察 [Historical reflections and contemporary observations on
Chinese cinema] (Beijing: Zhongguo chuanmei daxue chubanshe, 2009), 63. Early PRC
publications on Soviet cinema include Liu Nianqu’s 劉念渠 article “Lüetan Sulian
dianying” 略談蘇聯電影 [A brief discussion of Soviet cinema], Renmin ribao 人民日報
[People’s daily], October 30, 1949; and Lin Danqiu 林淡秋, “Xinzhongguo renmin dianying
shiye de shengli” 新中國人民電影事業的勝利 [The victory of the enterprise of people’s cinema
in new China], People’s Daily, March 7, 1951.
Page 21 of 23

(37.) N. Lebenov, Party on Cinema, 62.
(42.) “Zhongyang renmin zhengfu zhengwuyuan guanyu jiaqiang dianying zhipian

gongzuo de jueding” 中央人民政府政務院關於加強電影制片工作的決定 [Decision by the
Administration Council of the Central People’s Government to strengthen film
production], People’s Daily, January 12, 1954.
(43.) For the evolution of documentary and newsreel cinema in the Soviet Union, see
Graham Roberts, Forward Soviet!
(44.) I. Nazarov, “Jilupian zhong de zhenshixing” 紀錄片中的真實性 [The realism of

documentary], Dianying yishu yicong 電影藝術譯叢 [Film art in translation] 1953: no. 1, 53.
(45.) I. Nazarov, “The Realism of Documentary,” 53.
(49.) R. Grigoriev, “Lun jilupian de juben” 論紀錄片的劇本 [A discussion of documentary

filmscripts], Dianying yishu ziliao congkan 電影藝術資料叢刊 [Film art resources] 1952: no.
3, 10.
(51.) R. Grigoriev, “Discussion of Documentary Filmscripts,” 11.
(52.) The Beijing Film Studio was established in 1949, after incorporating equipment and
staff from the Nationalists’ No. 3 Central Film Studio.
(53.) Beijing dianying zhipianchang xingzheng chu 北京電影制片廠行政處 [Beijing Film

Studio Administrative Unit], ed., Yijiuwuling nian gongzuo zongjie ji yijiuwuyi nian
gongzuo fangzhen yu renwu 一九五零年工作總結及一九五一年工作方針與任務 [Work summary
of year 1950 and direction and tasks for year 1951] (Beijing, 1951), 3. Quoted in Matthew
Johnson, “International and Wartime Origins,” 409.
(54.) Chen Bo 陳播, “Huiyi Wa’erlamofu zai zhongguo,” 回憶瓦爾拉莫夫在中國 [Recalling

Varlamov in China], Zhongguo dianying 中國電影 [Chinese cinema], November and
December 1957, 106.
Page 22 of 23

(55.) Chen Bo, “Recalling Varlamov in China,” 106.
(56.) Ding Jiao 丁嶠, “Xinde tansuo: Geming xianshi zhuyi yu geming langman zhuyi xiang
jiehe de chuangzuo fangfa ruhe zai xinwen dianying zhong tixian” 新的探索：革命現實主義與
革命浪漫主義相結合的創作方法如何在新聞電影中體現 [New explorations: How to manifest the
creative method of combining revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism in
news films], Chinese Cinema, January 1958, 5.
Ying Qian
Ying Qian is a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian Center for China in the World,
Australian National University. She has a PhD from the Department of East Asian
Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, specializing in Chinese cultural
history and film studies. She has published on Chinese independent documentary
cinema, and is working on a book manuscript on newsreel and documentary Cinema
of China's Mao-era.
Page 23 of 23

6 Qian, Crossing The Same River Twice

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Crossing the Same River Twice: Documentary Reenactment and the

Founding of PRC Documentary Cinema

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Apr 2013 Subject: Literature, Film

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: documentary, actuality, reenactment, war, Soviet influence

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Visions of War and Cinema between Battle

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

From Million Heroes to Victory of the Chinese

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

(p. 599) From a Yan’an Cinema to a PRC Cinema

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Criticizing one scene in Y. M. Bliokh’s documentary Fishermen of the Caspian (1949), in

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Abel, Richard. Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Chen Bo 陳播. “Huiyi Wa’erlamofu zai zhongguo” 回憶瓦爾拉莫夫在中國 [Recalling Varlamov

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Lin Danqiu 林淡秋. “Xinzhongguo renmin dianying shiye de shengli” 新中國人民電影事業的勝

Musser, Charles. Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography. 602.

McKernan, Luke. “Shibata Tsunekichi.” Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

Nazarov, I. “Jilupian zhong de zhenshixing” 紀錄片中的真實性 [The realism of documentary].

Zhongguo dianying tu zhi 中國電影圖志 (1905–2005) [A pictorial history of Chinese cinema

Zhongyang renmin zhengfu zhengwuyuan guanyu jiaqiang dianying zhipian gongzuo de

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

(5.) Fang Fang, Historical Development, 164,5.

(6.) Fang Fang, Historical Development, 215.

(10.) Charles Musser, Edison Motion Pictures, 1890–1900: An Annotated Filmography,

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

(15.) Kristen Whissel, “Placing the Spectator.”

(18.) Reprinted in Zhongguo dianying tu zhi 中國電影圖志 (1905–2005) [A pictorial history

(20.) Dziga Vertov, “On Kinopravda,” in Kino-Eye, 45.

(24.) Yuri Tsivian, Lines of Resistance, 76.

(28.) Matthew Johnson, “International and Wartime Origins,” 157–255.

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

(30.) Fang Fang, Historical Development, 96–99, 105.

(31.) Richard Abel, Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, 8.

(35.) Yuan Muzhi 袁牧之, preface to N. Lebenov, Party on Cinema, 7.

Subscriber: Brown University; date: 18 September 2018

(38.) N. Lebenov, Party on Cinema, 51.

(39.) N. Lebenov, Party on Cinema, 50.

(40.) N. Lebenov, Party on Cinema, 11.

(41.) N. Lebenov, Party on Cinema, 24.

(42.) “Zhongyang renmin zhengfu zhengwuyuan guanyu jiaqiang dianying zhipian

(44.) I. Nazarov, “Jilupian zhong de zhenshixing” 紀錄片中的真實性 [The realism of

(45.) I. Nazarov, “The Realism of Documentary,” 53.

(46.) I. Nazarov, “The Realism of Documentary,” 58.

(47.) I. Nazarov, “The Realism of Documentary,” 57.

(48.) I. Nazarov, “The Realism of Documentary,” 53.

(49.) R. Grigoriev, “Lun jilupian de juben” 論紀錄片的劇本 [A discussion of documentary

(50.) I. Nazarov, “The Realism of Documentary,” 59.

(51.) R. Grigoriev, “Discussion of Documentary Filmscripts,” 11.