ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how prostitute reform, women’s liberation, vocal practice, and urban transformation have entwined in two 1950s Chinese films, the “artistic documentary” A Record of Prostitutes’ Liberation (1950, Tang Mo and Yu Lan) and the fiction film Sisters, Stand Up (1951, Chen Xihe). The films present these victimized women’s strong desires to become “new women in the new society” by proclaiming their “new lives” as dignified social subjects with “new voice” through “speaking bitterness,” renouncing their exploiters, and collective singing. In analyzing these films in relation to prostitute reform, urban transformation, and the socialist public sphere, this chapter first delineates how the films engage these themes by addressing how the transformation of former prostitutes was intertwined with that of the urban space of Beijing – that is, from a “city of consumption” to one of “production” and socialist hygiene. The chapter then examines how these films emphasize women’s vocal expression to assert their subjectivity and place within the new city through audiovisual techniques such as female voiceover narration, point of audition and diegetic, and extradiegetic collective singing. The new birth of the PRC and its film industry in the early 1950s also motivated film workers to develop the new, experimental film mode of “artistic documentary,” in order to more effectively interact with their new environment. Both films participated in the social campaign of abolishing prostitution by arousing sentiment and consciousness in both former prostitutes and urban residents, contributing to an inclusive socialist public sphere premised in class and gender equality.
