When Taylorism Met Revolutionary Romanticism: Documentary Cinema in China’s Great Leap Forward

Abstract

This essay traces documentary cinema’s entanglement in material productions in industry, agriculture, and infrastructure during China’s Great Leap Forward (1957–1961) and uses documentary as a prism to investigate the intertwined histories of media practice and social transformation. I argue that as the fastest growing mode of filmmaking, documentary inculcated a complex temporal aesthetic in this period and propelled the Great Leap Forward as a productive force. Taylorist images provided sensorial training for a rapidly expanding labor force, instilling in new workers the rhythm and speed of optimal industrial movement. Meanwhile, a new mode of artistic documentary blurred the distinction between documentary and fiction, with a practice of documenting tomorrow that shunned uncertainty and brought the future into palpable proximity. Rapidly made to approximate the simultaneous time of television, but delivered manually by mobile projectionists to sites of mass labor all over the country, documentary films accompanied sleepless mass labor on a 24/7 schedule and played pivotal roles in disseminating age-old vernacular technologies, such as the backyard furnaces, to grave consequences. What was the Chinese revolution? How do we grasp its energies and entropies, and account for its failures? Understanding documentary as a critical media that articulated and supported the radical temporality and epistemology of the Great Leap Forward, this essay argues for the important role of media and mediation in delimiting the epistemological, political, and aesthetic possibilities that shaped the paths of the revolution’s actualization.

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