footnote
In his article “The Human Tide: Hydraulic Engineering and the Aesthetic of Corporeal Infrastructure in Socialist China,” published in Radical History Review (2023), Yuan Gao has written about the aesthetics used when depicting and imagining infrastructures such as dams. While the US renders dams themselves as structures that command a sense of awe and subliminality, Chinese socialist modernism deploys the sublime to emphasize the emotionally energetic movement of the masses who built dams with their own corporeal strength.
Sixty six years prior, the first science fiction film in socialist China was also the first film of a hydroelectric dam and a reservoir — the Ming Tombs Reservoir located in northern Beijing. Completed in record time in 1958, this landmark construction project involved the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people who labored around the clock. The film ends with a thirty-minute postscript depicting a modern communist world twenty years after the reservoir’s completion. Through the screen of a future television, a documented tomorrow was depicted.
