UCLA

Situated at the intersection of modern China studies, urban studies, and film and media studies, this dissertation assesses the development of an economically motivated Chinese film industry from the beginning of the “Reform and Opening” campaign (1978) to the outbreak of the Tiananmen Square Protest (1989). Taking the underexplored field of popular cinema as the vantage point for my research, it traces how the conception of cinema was reconditioned in the 1980s by examining a variety of cultural products and social spaces of the time: from movie magazines to entertainment films, and from reconstructed movie theaters to recently emerged video halls. Following Deng Xiaoping’s official announcement of the “Reform and Opening” campaign in December 1978, the Chinese film industry witnessed a reorientation toward the audience. The commencement of a series of market reform policies lured more filmmakers into producing profit-seeking entertainment films and provoked the proliferation of Chinese popular cinema, a phenomenon later coined by the Chinese Film Bureau as the “1980s’ Commercial Wave.” As a result, the cultural landscape of 1980s China was soon overwhelmed by not only the expansive quantity of popular films, but also the abrupt emergence of a new film culture. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines close readings of film and literary texts with archival research in newspapers, architectural design, construction blueprints, and government documents, the main goal of this dissertation is to provide a fresh account of 1980s Chinese film history with an emphasis on popular cinema. It argues that the production, distribution, and exhibition of entertainment films in early reform era China illustrate the complex connections and contestations between state policy and urban moviegoers’ modern experience of public life in the wake of the socialist state’s market turn. By exploring the ways in which the development of 1980s Chinese popular cinema became intertwined with post-Mao China’s modernization agenda, the overall aim of this dissertation is to offer an alternative view of cinematic modernity based on intermedia explorations of the mode of exhibition, the process of audience formation, and so on. It identifies that post-Mao film industry’s attempts at market reform, infrastructural renewal, and technological integration were part of its contribution to cinematic modernity paralleling the triumphant reception of Chinese art cinema (“the Fifth Generation cinema”) on the international scene but these signs of modernization were subsequently overlooked by the standard historiography.