Ling Zhang — Norman Bethune in China: Medical Internationalism and Embodied Realism in Dr. Bethune (1965)
A still from Dr. Bethune (Zhang Junxiang, 1965)
The global COVID pandemic again draws our attention to severe medical inequalities among different social classes and nations. The pandemic has also lent new urgency to Marxist internationalism and the critique of capitalism across the globe, popularizing ideas like socialized medicine. How might the possibility of medical internationalism defy unjust social structures and transcend narrow visions of nationalism? How might film portrayals of recent efforts at medical internationalism serve as a reference point for viewers? This paper focuses on the Chinese film Dr. Bethune (1965), which was based on the life of the Canadian Communist surgeon Norman Bethune (1890–1939), who became a symbol of medical internationalism. It explores how the film attempts to convey this internationalism by “reliving” his life, constructing a sense of embodied revolutionary realism.
Bethune, an accomplished surgeon and advocate of socialized medicine, supported Republicans’ efforts in the Spanish Civil War. His strong commitment to medical internationalism and anti-fascist struggles led him to China in 1938, where he aided Chinese soldiers and villagers in their war of resistance against Japanese invasion. In late 1939, Bethune died of sepsis due to a lack of proper medicine. Mao Zedong’s eulogy for him, “In Memory of Norman Bethune” (1939), praised his spirit of “internationalism and communism.” Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens first suggested making a film about Bethune in 1958, yet Dr. Bethune (dir. Zhang Junxiang) only materialized in 1965, with American actor Gerald Tannebaum (1917–2001) portraying Bethune. The film crew, like devoted ethnographers, traced Bethune’s footsteps and interviewed people who had worked with him. The film’s actors moreover learned to perform basic medical tasks and attempted to re-experience the late 1930s wartime environment. This “embodied realism” was closely related to the socialist film practice of going “deep into life and deep into the people” in order to communicate with the masses. Seemingly mainstream, it functioned as a radical move away from seeing film as sheer entertainment and for profit in the capitalist system.
BIO
Ling Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase College completing her book manuscript, Unruly Sounds: Chinese Cinema and Transnational Acoustic Culture, 1929-1949. Zhang received her PhD from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and specializes in film sound, Chinese-language cinema and opera, documentary, women and cinema, Third World cultural exchange, and the cultural Cold War. Her writings have been published or are forthcoming in both English and Chinese in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly, Comparative Cinema, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Popular Culture, Chinese Journal of Women Studies, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, The New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, and Asian Cinema, among others. Zhang is currently co-editing (together with Pao-chen Tang and Yuqian Yan) an anthology entitled Medical Culture in East Asian Cinema and Media, which will be published in 2023 by Hong Kong University Press.