Summary/Abstract |
This article argues that the advent of the technological system of CinemaScope in socialist China should be understood as a historical product of the specific material, cultural, and political conditions and configuration of the Cold War. On the one hand, it is the cultural network of the communist bloc that enabled China to obtain this new technology of media infrastructure. On the other hand, the social discourse of CinemaScope embodies the Manichaean Cold War narrative that worked to justify the political-ideological supremacy of communism by articulating a technological modernisation superior to the capitalist model. What is more, CinemaScope also bespeaks the logistics of perception that effectively turns people’s perceptual experience into a political battlefield of the Cold War.
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