What role did cinema play in the Chinese Communist Party’s political project of shaping ideal socialist citizens in the early People’s Republic? In Moulding the Socialist Subject, Xiaoning Lu deploys case studies from popular film genres, movie star culture and rural film exhibition practices to argue that Chinese cinema in 1949–1966, at once an important political instrument, an enjoyable yet instructive form of entertainment, and a specific manifestation of the socialist society of the spectacle, was an everyday site where the moulding of the new socialist person unfolded. While painting a broad picture of Chinese socialist cinema, Lu credits the human agency of film professionals, whose self-reflexivity and individual adaptability played an intrinsic role in the Party’s political project.

In Working the System: Motion Picture, Filmmakers, and Subjectivities in Mao-Era China, 1949–1966, Qiliang He inquired into the making of the new citizenry in Mao-era China (1949–1976) by studying five preeminent Shanghai-based filmmakers. These case studies shed light on how individuals’ subjectivities took shape in the cinematic arena under a new sociopolitical system after 1949. He suggests that a filmmaker’s subjectivity was not fixed or stable but constantly in flux, requiring a host of “subjectivizing practices” to (re)shape and consolidate it. These filmmakers endeavored to reap maximal benefits from Mao’s sociopolitical system and minimize the disadvantages that would make them victims under the system. In short, Qiliang He argues that the filmmakers not only worked under the socialist system imposed upon them but also worked the system in their best interests. “Through five chosen filmmakers’ creative control and their negotiation of their professional status within China’s newly adopted socialist system, the author presents a compelling case that illustrates how individual filmmakers constantly adjusted themselves professionally and ideologically to survive in a fast-changing industry and a highly politicized society.” —Lin Feng, University of Leicester “This book is a strong example of how much more we can learn about Mao-era Chinese culture if we approach it less as alien due to Cold War prejudices and instead think of artists as creating under professional constraints in China just as they do everywhere.” —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota

At a time when what it means to watch movies keeps changing, this book offers a case study that rethinks the institutional, ideological, and cultural role of film exhibition, demonstrating that film exhibition can produce meaning in itself apart from the films being shown. Cinema Off Screen advances the idea that cinema takes place off screen as much as on screen by exploring film exhibition in China from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Drawing on original archival research, interviews, and audience recollections, Cinema Off Screen decenters the filmic text and offers a study of institutional operations and lived experiences. Chenshu Zhou details how the screening space, media technology, and the human body mediate encounters with cinema in ways that have not been fully recognized, opening new conceptual avenues for rethinking the ever-changing institution of cinema.

Motion pictures were introduced to China in 1896, and today China is a major player in the global film industry. However, the story of how Chinese cinema became what it is today is exceptionally turbulent, encompassing incursions by foreign powers, warfare among contending rulers, the collapse of the Chinese empire, and the massive setback of the Cultural Revolution. This book coversthe cinematic history of mainland China spanning across over one hundred and twenty years since its inception. Historical Dictionary of Chinese Cinema, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 200 cross-referenced entries on the major filmmakers, actors, and historical figures, representative cinematic productions, genre evolution, significant events and institutions, and market changes. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Chinese Cinema.

Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury explores color filmmaking in a variety of countries and regions including India, China, Japan, and Russia, and across Europe and Africa. Most previous accounts of color film have concentrated on early 20th century color processes and Technicolor. Far less is known about the introduction and application of color technologies in the period from the mid-1940s to the 1980s, when photochemical, “monopack” color stocks came to dominate global film markets. As Eastmancolor, Agfacolor, Fujicolor and other film stocks became broadly available and affordable, national film industries increasingly converted to color, transforming the look and feel of global cinema. Covering a broad range of perspectives, the chapters explore themes such as transnational flows, knowledge exchange and transfer, the cyclical and asymmetrical circulation of technology in a global context, as well as the accompanying transformation of color film aesthetics in the postwar decades.

In this work, 17 essays by leading scholars examine how education has influenced the history of Latin America, from the restricted schools of the early 19th century to today's bureaucracy.

A comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planet Betting on Macau delves into the radical transformation of what was formerly the last remaining European territory in Asia, returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 after nearly half a millennium of Portuguese rule. Examining the unprecedented scale of its development and its key role in China’s economic revolution, Tim Simpson follows Macau’s emergence from historical obscurity to become the most profitable casino gaming locale in the world. Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and renowned for its unique blend of Chinese and Portuguese colonial-era architecture, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. Simpson situates Macau’s origins as a strategic trading port and its ensuing history alongside the emergence of the global capitalist system, charting the massive influx of foreign investment, construction, and tourism in the past two decades that helped generate the territory’s enormous wealth. Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture.

Engaging with fiction films devoted to heroic tales from the decade and a half between 1949 and 1966, this book reconceives state propaganda as aesthetic experiments that not only radically transformed acting, cinematography and screenwriting in socialist China, but also articulated a new socialist film theory and criticism. Rooted in the interwar avant-garde and commercial cinema, Chinese revolutionary cinema, as a state cinema for the newly established People's Republic, adapted Chinese literature for the screen, incorporated Hollywood narration, appropriated Soviet montage theory and orchestrated a new, glamorous, socialist star culture. In the wake of decolonisation, Chinese film journals were quick to project and disseminate the country's redefined self-image to Asia, Africa and Latin America as they helped to create an alternative vision of modernity and internationalism. Revealing the historical contingency of the term 'propaganda', Chan uncovers the visual, aural, kinaesthetic, sexual and ideological dynamics that gave rise to a new aesthetic of revolutionary heroism in world cinema. Based on extensive archival research, this book's focus on the distinctive rhetoric of post-war socialist China will be of value to East Asian Cinema scholars, Chinese Studies academics and those interested in the history of twentieth-century socialist culture.

As most political observers know, the powerful socialist parties of Western and Central Europe are facing a profound crisis due to their departure from the Marxist slogans of their youth and their increasing inability to define the meaning of "socialist" goals in the prosperous mixed economy of individual enterprise and welfare state now in full blast in most European countries. In Dr. Shell's judgment the Austrian Socialist Party exhibits this transformation most clearly. A modern "mass" party, containing more then ten per cent of the entire Austrian population as dues-paying members, it is no longer full of the sound and fury of Marxist class-war slogans. Instead, its traditional labels conceal a loss of direction, of clear sense of mission, and of the "State within a State" function originally envisaged. In tracing its history, its personalities, and achievements from World War I to the present day, Dr. Shell presents a complete and authoritative picture not only of the Austrian Socialist Party, but of what may well be the shape of things to come in the other Socialist parties of Central and Western Europe.