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Articles

My People, My Country: A Chinese ‘main-melody’ omnibus film and its spectatorship

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Pages 329-341 | Published online: 26 Aug 2022
 

Abstract

My People, My Country (2019) is a Chinese multidirector omnibus film made to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. It has served as a winning model, emulated by two sequels: My People, My Homeland (2020) and My Country, My Parents (2021), constituting a ‘national day’ trilogy. This article takes the film as a case study to explore the spectatorship of the new type of Chinese ‘main-melody’ films, based on omnibus film theories and the auteur approach. It examines the focal film’s spectatorship from two dimensions: horizontal connections (i.e. how one episode connects with another) and vertical connections (i.e. how each episode is distinguished from the others), both of which are firmly based on the film’s omnibus structure. It argues that, as processes of discovery and establishing links that would otherwise remain unnoticed, the two types of connections constitute a source of pleasure for the audience. As a ‘main-melody’ film, political ideologies may infiltrate the audience while it is engaged in entertainment, particularly by the increasing number of cinephile audiences in contemporary China.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the General Editor, Yomi Braester, and the Reviewer for their insightful comments and suggestions on the essay. I thank my colleagues and friends in the College of Humanities and Development Studies at China Agricultural University for their support. Special thanks also go to Julian Ward, Stephanie Donald, Yi Zheng, Ayxem Eli, and Qixuan Yang.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Film reviews on Douban include two categories: short comments and long reviews. This essay cites statistics on short comments for convenience. There were 290,200 short comments on the date (26 February 2022) the data was accessed. The ranking of the ‘hottest’ short comments provided by the website is mainly based on the number of ‘likes’ (dianzan), the credits of the users, and the number of follow-up comments. Some reviewers make comments on more than one issue listed here, and thus the proportions add up to more than 100%. The Douban short comments cited in the rest of the essay are among the top 100 ‘hottest’ ones (unless indicated otherwise), suggesting that they represent a certain degree of consensus.

2 In the 1990s, Guan Hu’s debut feature Toufa luanle/Dirt suffered from severe censorship, and so did Ning Hao’s Wuren qu/No Man’s Land, which was completed in 2009 but banned for four years before its final release.

3 A complete analysis of all episodes can be provided upon request.

4 The English translations of MPMC reference the film’s original bilingual subtitles, with minor revisions. The translations from other films and the translation of cinephilia comments are all the author’s own.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhenhui Yan

Zhenhui Yan is a senior lecturer at China Agricultural University, specialised in Chinese cinema, films about children, and ethnic minority film. She is the author of Ethnic Minority Children in Post-Socialist Chinese Cinema (Routledge, 2020).

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