In Search of Laughter in Maoist China

Download or read book In Search of Laughter in Maoist China written by Ying Bao and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situating my study in the current scholarship of comedy and Chinese cinema, Chapter 1 historicizes the genre of comedy and provides an overview of its definitions in both Western cinema and Chinese cultural criticism. Using Unfinished Comedy -- a 1957 satire banned before its completion -- as a starting point, Chapter 2 revisits the crisis of the genre in the early years of the PRC and examines the tensions between artistic autonomy and the control of the authorities through a case study of the director Lü Ban. Chapter 3 looks into the mechanism of how ideal social relations were imagined and articulated in eulogistic comedy. Chapter 4 focuses on dialect comedies and film adaptations of folk comedies across regional divisions, which engage a complex dialogue between the local and the national. Chapter 5 examines how filmmakers tried to fuse satire and eulogy in lighthearted comedies of family life and work life. The epilogue reflects on how comedy films transcend a binary opposition between propaganda and entertainment, and it seeks to prompt further studies on the resonance of films from the Mao era in contemporary China.