József Böröcz: We Were China's Guests: Intimate Internationalism and Histories of the Socialist Self

The Performing Arts Ensemble of the Hungarian People's Army—an emblematic official cultural institution of late-Stalinist Hungary—left Budapest on 7 September, 1956, for a much-publicised, three-and-a-half-month tour of the People's Republic of China. The travelling party consisted of a symphonic orchestra, a men's choir and a folk-dance group (the latter including its own band), a number of vocal and instrumental soloists, and it also included a few journalists, a graphic artist, a group of young Sinology and Hungarian Studies students from the two countries acting as interpreters, a laryngologist, and a few political officers. Covering the trip was a small group of Hungarian cinematographers led by Jancsó Miklós, a promising film maker—on the staff of the People's Army Film Studio—at the time who would embark on a much decorated, international career as a director of art cinema in the year after the group's return to Hungary.

In this project I use the trip as a historical archive from which one could begin to apprehend histories of the ways in which societies imagine alternative futures. As part of the workshop, I will screen one of the four short films Jancsó released from the footage shot during the trip—We Were China's Guests (1957)—as a text with which to think through some, rather fundamental questions regarding state socialism, the place of politics and art in social life, the possibility of intimate dimensions to "socialist internationalism," uses of the "popular / folkloric" element in the construction of modern, urban identities, and the applicability of the binary contrast of "the west" vs. "the east" under conditions of an alternative, in some significant respects non-capitalist, modernity.

On author