Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
PAINTING THE CITY RED examines the relationship between cinematic and theatrical productions and the changing urban landscape in China, revealing the extent to which cultural productions dealing with city life have been crafted to influence public opinion on urban development and the changes wrought in urban neighborhoods. Chinese policymakers, Yomi Braester argues, have made a sustained effort to affect cultural change, and he documents this effort in the creation, production, and dissemination of movies and plays. Exploring roughly 150 works, Braester traces connections between the cultural productions themselves, professional city plans, and political decisions by drawing upon archival documents (e.g., correspondence between municipal planners and memos of consultations within Communist Party units) and interviews with over forty playwrights, theater professionals, film directors, city planners, urban residents, journalists, and public intellectuals. He presents a behind-the-scenes view of changes to scripts and sets, meetings of the censors board, neighborhood community dynamics, and unreported residents’ protests to provide a revealing view of how the state intervenes in the representation of urban spaces.
Braester argues that urban film studies that concentrate exclusively on the construction of urban aesthetics, urban consciousness, and urban identity, however valuable, can be misleading in what they omit and are relevant mostly for works that seek to diverge from official texts and constructions. Directly addressing the role of propaganda in film criticism, he argues that the study of propaganda not only is necessitated by the subject matter of urban transformation but also is important for resituating film within the power structure constituted by the entire set of all those involved in the production of an artwork: not only the scriptwriters, filmmakers, distributors, censors and critics, but also municipal and state level policymakers, professional planners, and—when their voice is heard—city residents and grassroots activists. Because they are seats of political power and cultural hegemony, Braester focuses on specific locales within Beijing, Shanghai, and also Taipei in Taiwan. These locales include the Beijing slum Longxugou in the early 1950s and the projection of an image of a socialist utopia; Nanjing Road, the commercial center of Shanghai, depicted as a site of decadence and corruption at the apex of the Maoist period; the transformation of Tiananmen Square and its attendant symbolism as a marker of both change and continuity; and the destruction of housing and the booming real estate market in Beijing in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics.
