The Dissemination And Recognition Of Rural Film Images

China is a country with a rural population being over 50% of the total, "Rural film image" covering current "rural films", is a special movie term with Chinese characteristics possessing a certain cultural identity because they mostly tell stories of villages and peasants, and occupy an important place in the history of Chinese movies. Taking dissemination and recognition of rural film images as a research subject, this dissertation, adopting the theory and methodology of communication and film discipline, conducts a comparative study of the dissemination of rural film images in different stages and analyses its actual role in Chinese society as well as its future development.The stages chosen for study include the 30s in the 20th century, "17 years" of New China and early 80s in the 20th century when the rural film images flourished. Also, the marginalized trend of rural film images since "the new era" is embraced into this study. This paper holds that prosperous stages of rural film images exactly correspond the key transitional periods of the rural society, with such different goals of dissemination as "social enlightenment", "political mobilization" and "cultural reflection" in different periods. But the social value of the rural film images is not in right proportion to the extent of viewers'recognition, because the approval of a film is based on both ideological and recreational dimensions, which feature the viewers' acceptance of rural film images.Periodically, rural film images in the 30s of the 20th Century were products by left-wing filmmakers with a definite aim of social enlightenment at the time of national crisis. New realistic information was injected into popular melodrama to represent rural film images, and public opinion shaped by film critics who tried to enlighten the audience on the collapse of the countryside. But audience liked progressive films more than radical films, and the representative works of "correct consciousness" in left-wing reviews were not their favorites, which represented the habits of acceptance and cultural position of the urban audience.In the "17 years" of New China, rural films described spectacles of the agricultural socialism, with the films being spread around villages by power of the nation. The film had the function of ideological propaganda and political mobilization serving the will of the new state power. But the rural audience showed little interest in the rural films with too much preaching and insipid stories. This situation was improved in the later "17 years" with the emergence of popular rural films composed of comedy,opera,drama of struggle and some individual "new peasants" integrating propaganda smoothly with entertainment against a political background of communication.In early 80s of the 20th century, rural films once aroused great sympathy because they accurately described rural social changes by individual and family narrative in the upsurge of rural reforms. With the centre of modernization shifted from the country to the city and the spread of television in families in China, rural film images were marginalized in waves of the consumer culture, and retreated from business sector. Taking an elite stand, rural film images become the text of cultural reflection and received attention from both intellectual circles and transnational communication. In order to safeguard the cultural rights of peasant group, the administrators of state formulated the policy to support the production of "rural films" and started the project of rural digital movies presentation, but they are regrettably facing an embarrassing situation of the unbalance between the supply and the demand.Rural communities will exist for a long time in China, and rural film images still have an important role to play in representing the voice of the peasant group, therefore, how to use the cultural character of the images to promote the recognition of their rural identity is still an issue calling for our further attention..