A Song at Midnight – Chinese film history from 1929 to 1964

Chinese film has received widespread global attention since the 1980s. Directors such as Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhang-ke and Wang Bing have created a sensation at international film festivals and are acknowledged as chroniclers of a society in transition. Recent Chinese films are largely presented and received on the assumption that its (presumed or actual) subversive tendencies and criticism of the state differs fundamentally from those that preceded them; further, that their precise observation of social transformation processes represent a liberation from banal and dogmatic cinema and communist propaganda, and that their aim is to detach themselves from the past. But upon closer scrutiny, this opposition does not bear up and what instead becomes clear is that Chinese cinema has always been multi-faceted and dynamic and cannot be reduced to simple ideological positioning. Moreover, even when cinema has been used for reasons of propaganda it has been impressively heterogeneous and varied in form.