Affect, blankness, theatrics: Rurality and faciality in three Chinese instances

The face and the close-up have been central to film theory since its early days. If modern theories of the face arose in Europe amid urbanization and imperial encounter, in China, the political aesthetics of faciality became central to Maoist mass mobilizations of the countryside, in part through collective village film screenings. Bringing together themes of faciality, rurality, and anxieties of global encounter, this paper considers how the rural has been staged through genres of the face in Chinese cinema and television. Through close readings of the Maoist-era The Youth of Our Village, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, and Zhao Benshan Media’s series Rural Love Story, I consider three distinct deployments of the face in depictions of rural transformation. Thinking with while also departing from Deleuze’s formulations in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, the paper traces an emotively intense face reminiscent of the affection-image, a blank face that operates in part as a time-image, and a performative face of what might be called a theatrics-image. Across its readings as a site of affective immediacy, despotic inscription, moral character, and social-political maneuvering, the face offers a multivalent site for political, aesthetic, and affective mediation, on and off screen.