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Chinese Pre Revolutionary Cinem Social Environment As The Antagonist

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Fletcher Zuo
Professor Maria Vinogradova
CINE-UT 55
12.15.2016
Chinese Pre-revolutionary Cinema:
Social Environment as the Antagonist In Chinese history, the pre-revolutionary period (1945-1949) is particularly associated with struggle and painfulness that are unprecedented in Chinese history. It is a period between China’s bitter victory in Sino-Japanese War and Communist Party’s takeover of the country, establishing the People’s Republic of China; while the former, lasted 8 years, caused more than 20 millions casualties, the later brought more than 10 million lives devastated, let alone incalculable economic and cultural losses. Yet just as an old Chinese saying that ‘Fate is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity’, the fate of Chinese people was devastated by countless numbers of floods, drought, earthquakes, causing severe famines and economic depressions, aggravating the fate of this country and its people. Struggle and Pain seem to be the idiosyncrasy of pre-revolutionary China. Such societal circumstances certainly had a profound impact on the contemporaneous artists. The subject-matter that artists concerned the most was struggle and pain. Instead of making ‘pure art’, artists had a profound concentration on social conflicts and difficulties. Such attention on social issue was even regarded as politically correct. Shen Congwen, a Chinese man of letters, indignantly denounced the poet Xu Zhimo, whose writings mainly concerned with polished rhetoric and

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