About Film Art

Film Art

Film Art, in Chinese Dianying Yishu, is a Beijing film magazine first published in October 1956 under the name Chinese Film and renamed Film Art in July 1959. Suspended during the Cultural Revolution and revived in October 1979, it is one of China's most important film-theory journals: for more than sixty years it has recorded the development of Chinese cinema and, through its criticism, translations and debates, participated in shaping Chinese film scholarship. Together with Popular Cinema, the mass-circulation film magazine, it formed the twin peaks of Chinese film publishing in the twentieth century — Film Art addressing filmmakers, critics and scholars, Popular Cinema addressing the audience at large.

Founding in 1956 and the first years

Film Art began publication in October 1956, in the period Chinese film history calls the "seventeen years" between the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 and the Cultural Revolution. Its original name was Chinese Film (Zhongguo Dianying). It was a comprehensive professional film publication, carrying film theory, criticism, creative experience and discussion of new films. Academic study of the magazine's first period, from 1956 to 1958, examines the literary and artistic environment in which it operated, the content of its articles and the situation of its authors, and assesses its contribution to the film industry, to film history writing and to film reviewing in those years. In July 1959 the journal was renamed Film Art (Dianying Yishu), the name it has kept ever since. The new title announced its self-understanding: not a trade bulletin but a journal of cinema as an art, concerned with aesthetics, technique and the education of filmmakers and critics.

The translation work: bringing world film theory to China

One of Film Art's most consequential activities in its early decades was translation. A companion translation series, Film Art Translations, had begun in the early 1950s — the Film Art Collection appeared from 1952 — as the first Chinese professional publication devoted to foreign film theory. Its contents introduced the artistic theories, creative techniques, experience summaries, film reviews and noted filmmakers of the Soviet Union and the people's democratic countries: the work of Soviet writers, directors and actors above all, presented so that Chinese film art could learn from them. Scholars of the series describe it as the sole channel of its kind in the 1950s, a bridge between Chinese and foreign film culture through which Soviet montage theory and socialist-realist practice entered Chinese film education. The translation mission made Film Art and its associated publications a library in periodical form at a time when foreign film books were scarce in China, and it shaped the vocabulary in which Chinese filmmakers of the era discussed their craft.

Suspension and revival

Like almost all Chinese cultural publications, Film Art was caught by the Cultural Revolution. Publication was suspended in 1966 and remained suspended for twelve years. It was formally revived in October 1979, in the first years of the reform era, and has continued since. The revival was not merely administrative: the journal returned as a forum for rethinking Chinese cinema after a decade in which film production and criticism had been drastically narrowed. Paul Clark's well-known study of Chinese filmmaking from the Cultural Revolution to 1981 shows the two main film periodicals, Film Art and Popular Cinema, publishing editorials around 1980 on the need for systemic reform in film production — evidence that the revived journal saw itself as an active participant in rebuilding the industry, not a passive record of it. Its December 1980 editorial pages were cited by historians alongside Popular Cinema's as signs of the profession's mood at the turning point of Chinese cinema.

A journal that records and shapes

Chinese scholarship on Film Art summarises its dual function precisely: film magazines are not only recording the development of Chinese films, they are participating in that development in different ways. A comprehensive study of the magazine from the perspective of film history takes as its scope the sixty-three years from its founding in 1956 to 2019, tracing through its pages the changing roles of theory, criticism and the industry. Through those decades the journal published the debates that defined successive eras of Chinese film thought: discussions of realism and national style in the early years; the encounter with Western film theory in the 1980s, when semiotics, psychoanalysis and auteur theory were translated and argued over in Chinese journals; the rise of the Fifth Generation directors and the critical frameworks built around them; and the industrial transformation of Chinese cinema in the market era. Because its contributors included the country's leading critics, theorists and film historians, its back issues constitute one of the fullest continuous archives of Chinese film discourse in existence.

Film Art among China's film journals

Chinese film publishing has traditionally been divided by audience. At one pole stood the academic and professional journals — Film Art alongside Contemporary Cinema, World Cinema and the Journal of Beijing Film Academy — and at the other the popular magazines led by Popular Cinema. Film Art occupied the senior position within the professional group by virtue of its age, its Beijing base and its closeness to the national film institutions. Where Popular Cinema measured its success in millions of copies and reader votes, Film Art measured its influence in the concepts its articles introduced and the careers its criticism sustained. The two were frequently cited together, as the pair of main film periodicals through which the state of Chinese cinema could be read at any given moment — in editorials on reform in 1980, in debates about film's direction in the 1980s and 1990s, and in the scholarly literature that now studies both as primary sources.

The magazine as historical source

Today Film Art is studied as much as it is read. Master's and doctoral theses in China have taken the magazine itself as their subject, analysing its contribution to film academics and the film industry in specific periods, the trajectory of its translation series between 1953 and 1958, and its role in forming the context of Chinese film culture. The attraction for researchers is the completeness of the record: a journal founded in 1956 that published through the "seventeen years", fell silent for the Cultural Revolution's twelve years, and revived in 1979 to continue into the present offers a single thread through the whole history of cinema in the People's Republic. Its pages preserve what Chinese critics thought film was for at each stage — an instrument of national education, an art of realism, a modernist practice, a commercial industry — in the words of the people arguing those positions at the time.

The journal's periods

Read as a whole, Film Art's history falls into clear periods, and the scholarly literature organises it that way. The founding period ran from October 1956, as Chinese Film, through the renaming of July 1959 and the journal's work in the "seventeen years" of pre-1966 cinema, including the great translation enterprise that introduced Soviet and other foreign film theory. The silence that followed lasted twelve years, from the 1966 suspension to the revival of October 1979. The reform period that began in 1979 made the journal a forum for rebuilding — for the editorials on systemic reform around 1980, for the absorption of Western theory in the 1980s, and for the criticism that accompanied the rise of new generations of Chinese directors. The mature period, from the 1990s to the present, has been that of an established academic journal in a commercialising industry. A comprehensive film-history study of the magazine takes the sixty-three years from 1956 to 2019 as its frame, an indication of how completely the journal's periods map onto the periods of Chinese cinema itself.

Continuity into the present

Film Art has continued publication into the twenty-first century as one of the most important theoretical journals in today's Chinese film academia. Its survival contrasts with the fate of most popular film magazines, whose circulations collapsed with the arrival of television and the internet; a scholarly journal anchored in universities, research institutes and the profession proved more durable. The problems it addresses have changed — from Soviet theory and studio practice in the 1950s to digital cinema, industrial policy and global film markets today — but the form remains recognisable: a Beijing-based, Chinese-language journal of film history, theory and criticism. For readers of WorldNM's magazine directory, Film Art represents the scholarly pole of Chinese film culture, and its complete run, from Chinese Film in 1956 through the suspension and revival to the present, is among the most valuable periodical archives in Chinese cinema studies.