Metabolic Cinema: From Hollywood to Socialist China

Drawing on Karl Marx’s ecological concepts of the “metabolic rift” and the “emancipation of senses”, this paper explores an alternative ecocinema that integrates the ecological with the social and the economic. Early Hollywood films, such as Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and The Good Earth (1937), represent the metabolic rift in human relationships as a byproduct of the metabolic rift with nature created in the process of urbanization; hence, they can be regarded as precursors to an alternative ecocinema, which I refer to as “metabolic cinema”. The Story of the Golden Bell (Jinling Zhuan), a comedy film produced during the Chinese Great Leap Forward in 1958, offers an intriguing case for socialist metabolic cinema as a multisensory medianature that participates in and facilitates the metabolic process between humans and nature, as well as the social metabolism among humans, despite the period’s notorious ecological record. The film not only consciously moves away from the visual-centric model associated with capitalist consumerism by using the aural to rectify the once-aberrant visual but also demonstrates how romantic love, as one of the human senses, must be emancipated along with other senses through denouncing utilitarianism and commercialism and, subsequently, returning to need-based labor as the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between humans and nature.