Notes
Preface and Acknowledgments
Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 4.
Anderson.
Introduction
Yule xinwen [Entertainment news], “Jia Zhangke: wo kan Chen Kaige leiliu-manmian” [Jia Zhangke: I watched Chen Kaige and tears streamed down my face], November 30, 2008, http://news.yule.com.cn/html/200811/27204.html. Jia has described this encounter in numerous interviews. For an account translated into English, see “Jia Zhangke: Capturing a Transforming Reality,” in Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 184–85.
Jia Zhangke, Jia xiang 1996–2008: Jia Zhangke dianying shouji [Jia thinks 1996–2008: Jia Zhangke’s film notebooks] (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2009), 50.
Jia.
Yule xinwen, “Jia Zhangke.”
My language here may evoke Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Real, but it is not my intention to fit my argument into his system. I do, however, see a homology between his distinction between reality and the real and those of other modern thinkers—for example, Alain Badiou’s contrast between knowledge and truth—and I consider such distinctions, like cinema itself, to be characteristic of modernity, with its urge to assimilate all into a reasoned totality, on one hand, and its acknowledgment of the contingency of knowledge and the limits of knowability, on the other.
Walter Goodman, “China’s ‘Yellow Earth,’” New York Times, April 11, 1986. For one example of Jia’s later criticism of Chen Kaige and his generation of filmmakers, see Berry, Speaking in Images, 192.
Li Tuo, “Huang tudi gei women dailaile shenme?” [What has The Yellow Earth brought us?], Dangdai dianying [Contemporary cinema], no. 2 (March 1985): 48–51. The paragraph with the “stranger at a party” analogy is excerpted and translated into English in Geremie Barmé and John Minford, eds., Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 253.
“Fifth Generation” refers to the first group of filmmakers to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy after it reopened following the Cultural Revolution.
See chapter 6 for a more detailed consideration of Yellow Earth. On a personal note, it was the shock of viewing this film in an undergraduate course taught by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang in the early 1990s that, as much as any other single event (though Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 侯孝贤 Dust in the Wind [Lianlian fengchen 恋恋风尘, 1986] from the same course also comes to mind), instilled in me a lasting fascination with Chinese cinema.
For reasons that will become apparent, I favor the term xieshizhuyi 写实主义 as a generic translation for realism. In fact, the more official forms of modern Chinese realism, particularly those associated with Communist aesthetics, tended to use the alternative term for realism xianshizhuyi 现实主义, a modern neologism imported from Japan. More recently, jishizhuyi 纪实主义 (“recording the real-ism” or “on-the-spot realism”) often has been used to indicate a documentary-style cinematic realism. Xieshi 写实 (inscribing the real) itself dates at least to Liu Xie 刘勰 (aka Yanhe 彦和), a fifth-century literary aesthetician, but it was not revived as a key term until the modern era.
For an explanation of these distinctions in painting, see Eugene Y. Wang, “Sketch Conceptualism as Modernist Contingency,” in Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, ed. Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith, 102–61 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001).
As Vera Schwarcz puts it, in the Daoist tradition, zhen “is used as a synonym for authenticity, or more accurately for the person who strives to align his gaze in a way that the inner and outer correspond to each other.” Schwarcz, Colors of Veracity: A Quest for Truth in China, and Beyond (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 27.
The character also had spiritual connotations; for example, a description of Buddhist practitioners in the popular Ming dynasty vernacular novel Journey to the West includes the line 习静归真 xi jing gui zhen, which the authoritative English translation renders as “They practice silence to return to the Real.” Wu Ch’eng-en, The Journey to the West, vol. 1, trans. Anthony C. Yu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 182.
Awareness of the potential gap between reality and description is hardly a new issue in Chinese thought. Debates about the relationship between 实 (reality) and 名 (name) go back well over two thousand years, to the pre-Qin and Han eras. For a discussion of 实 in ancient philosophy, see Alexus McLeod, “Pluralism about Truth in Early Chinese Philosophy: A Reflection on Wang Chong’s Approach,” Comparative Philosophy 2, no. 1 (2011): 38–60.
Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 22.
Jakobson, 22–23.
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
Jakobson, Language in Literature, 23–24.
Jakobson, 24.
I limit this book to fiction film on the rationale that documentary presents a distinct (though obviously related) set of issues. With an already dauntingly broad scope in considering the history of feature-length fiction film in mainland China, I leave to others the consideration of Chinese documentary cinema (which lately has been getting much scholarly attention) as well as Chinese short and avant-garde films (which largely have not). Likewise, the current work does not attempt to cover the related yet distinct cases of Sinophone cinema in Hong Kong or Taiwan.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781; repr., New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
The evidence simply does not support such a view of pictorial representation in general. As Paul Messaris has put it, “unlike the conventions of written language or, for that matter, speech, pictorial conventions for the representation of objects and events are based on information-processing skills that a viewer can be assumed to possess even in the absence of any previous experience with pictures.” Conducting a comprehensive review of cross-cultural psychological and anthropological studies of human (and even animal) perceptions of optical illusions and pictures, J. B. Deregowski concluded that, although many aspects of pictorial comprehension are learned, “pictures are clearly not arbitrary conventional signs” but rather have a great deal of cross-cultural transferability. If pictorial representation in general is not purely arbitrary and culturally contingent, even less purely conventional would be a moving image resulting from live-action photography. Paul Messaris, Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), 4; J. B. Deregowski, Illusions, Patterns and Pictures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (London: Academic Press, 1980), 123.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 34–35.
Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (London: Routledge, 2005), 10.
Quoted from a 1974 lecture by Jacques Lacan in Bruce Fink, Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 93.
André Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, 3–12 (Montreal: Caboose, 2009). In this book, I quote this translation from the French by Timothy Barnard rather than the looser one by Hugh Gray that is more readily available in the United States in Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1:9–16. However, in the notes, I give page references for both translations for the convenience of readers who have access only to the latter (here cited simply as “Gray” after the first mention). For more on the question of the “indexicality” of film, see the special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18, no. 1 (2007), edited by Mary Ann Doane, which is devoted to the topic.
Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 8. (Gray, 14.)
Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981); Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006); D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
As Stephen Prince puts it in his Digital Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012), through careful design of visual cues, a moving image can be “perceptually realistic” even while being entirely “referentially false” (32). Prince proposes the term perceptual realism in his earlier article “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,” Film Quarterly 49, no. 3 (1996): 27–37.
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 821.
Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” in The Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments, ed. Marc Furstenau, 255–69 (New York: Routledge, 2010).
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 30.
André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, 17, 15. (Gray translates it as “integral realism” rather than “complete realism.” Gray, 1:21, 20.)
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 177.
The most comprehensive account of “classical” cinema remains David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). See also the chapter “Classical Narration: The Hollywood Example” in David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 156–204 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
The convention of human flight in martial arts films goes back to the 1920s. See the chapter “The Anarchic Body Language of the Martial Arts Film” in Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937, 199–243 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
This is equivalent to what Roland Barthes called the “reality effect” of realist fiction. Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, 141–48 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
V. F. Perkins, “Where Is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction,” in Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2005), 26.
Perkins, 24.
Perkins, 17, 31.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 159.
Perkins, “Where Is the World?,” 38.
Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54 (2000): 10–22.
Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 90.
Eco, 18.
Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (St. Louis, Mo.: Telos Press, 1973), 105. Marx explicitly singled out Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell in his praise.
Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 125.
Eco, Open Work, 7–9.
Perkins, “Where Is the World?,” 23, 20.
Francesco Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 46.
For a discussion of apophasis as a mode of discourse and its relevance to modern thought and art, see the preface and introduction to William Franke, ed., On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, vol. 2, Modern and Contemporary Transformations (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 1–49.
Franke, 3–4.
See the two volumes of Franke for a rich sample of the Western lineage. As for apophatic thought in the Chinese tradition, emptiness plays a central role in many schools of Buddhist thought, as expressed, for example, in the Heart Sutra, which insists on the inseparability of emptiness (kong 空) and form (se 色). Within Daoism, the famous opening lines of the Dao De Jing, “The way [dao] that can be spoken of is not the abiding way / The name that can be named is not the abiding name” (道可道非常道，名可名非常名), offer, in just twelve syllables/characters, perhaps the most concise expression of apophatic philosophy in any tradition.
Edgar Morin, The Cinema; or, The Imaginary Man (1956; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 8.
André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Gray, 2:66. (This essay is not available in the newer collection translated by Barnard.)
For precise definitions of these terms, see David Bordwell, “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 18.
Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” collected in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 130–42; Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 142.
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, “Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu,” Screen 17, no. 2 (1976): 41–73.
Of course, any claims for a distinctively “Chinese” style of cinema must be approached with great caution, and Fei Mu should be appreciated more for his unique vision than for some ethnically essentialist aesthetic his films supposedly embody. See James Udden, “In Search of Chinese Film Style(s) and Technique(s),” in A Companion to Chinese Cinema, ed. Yingjin Zhang, 256–83 (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
For example, a study that included forms of avant-garde cinema displaying, say, abstract plays of light and shadow on the screen or scratches made directly on the emulsion of a filmstrip might invoke a category like material realism, in which realism means, as Linda Nochlin has put it, “truth to the nature of the material,” “which is indeed one of the, if not the chief, foundation stones of Modernism.” Nochlin, Realism (London: Penguin, 1971), 230. One could also distinguish a category of transmedial realism(s), involving the mimetic remediation of one medium in another; for example, in his own typology of cinematic realisms, Berys Gaut uses the term photorealism to name CGI techniques that are designed to cause a computer-generated image to resemble not so much a real object as, more specifically, that object as photographed in traditional cinematography—including artifacts like imitated motion blur, film grain, or lens flares. Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 66–67.
Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 10. Gray’s translation renders the sentence as “On the other hand, of course, the cinema is also a language” (16).
Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 120ff. For closely related arguments, see Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), and Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). For convincing arguments that Bazin’s claims for the ontology of the photographic image cannot be adequately explained using the “index argument,” see Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs,” Nordicom Review 25, no. 1–2 (2004): 39–49, and Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 443–81.
Thomas Elsaesser, “A Bazinian Half-Century,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10.
Quoted in Elsaesser, 10. Barnard renders the passage as “In art, realism can obviously be created only out of artifice,” while Gray translates it as “But realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice.” Bazin, “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation,” 227. (Gray, 26.)
Cavell, World Viewed, 23; Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 7. (Gray, 13.)
Cavell, xiii, 105.
Cavell, 104–5.
Cavell, 104.
Cavell, 105.
Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 42.
Cavell, World Viewed, 7.
Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 42, 43.
Rodowick, 43.
The limitations of the language metaphor are evident from film theory’s dalliance with and then retreat from a linguistics-based film semiotics during the 1960s–70s, exemplified by Wollen’s chapter “The Semiology of the Cinema” in Signs and Meanings, and Christian Metz’s Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Even Wollen sought to use a broader semiotics to distance cinema from the “exaggerated” analogy with verbal language (140).
Jörg Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype: A Challenge for Cinema and Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 22.
Schweinitz, 33, xiv.
Schweinitz, 50.
Schweinitz, 35.
John Hill makes a very similar point about British realist cinema: “Films which were accepted as ‘realistic’ by one generation often appear ‘false’ or ‘dated’ to the next. Thus, the working-class films of the British ‘new wave,’ which initially appeared so striking in their ‘realism,’ now appear ‘melodramatic’ and ‘even hysterical’ to at least one modern critic.” Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 58. The same could be said for some of the more noted 1950s Hollywood films featuring realist “method actors” (On the Waterfront, Rebel without a Cause, etc.): they may have seemed strikingly real to their initial audiences, but later generations may even be tempted to giggle at performances and situations that now appear artificial.
Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype, 38–39.
Schweinitz, 40.
Andrew quotes Serge Daney: “The Cahiers axiom is this: that the cinema has a fundamental rapport with reality and that the real is not what is represented—and that’s final.” Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 5.
1. Acting Real in Chinese Silent Cinema
John Yu Zou, “Travel and Translation: An Aspect of China’s Cultural Modernity, 1862–1926,” in China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 140.
Zou, 141.
Zou, 142.
Zou.
Zou, 139.
For a discussion of these multinational claims for cinema as a universal language, including citations of a variety of relevant sources, see Mattias Frey, “Cultural Problems of Classical Film Theory: Béla Balázs, ‘Universal Language’ and the Birth of National Cinema,” Screen 51, no. 4 (2010): 324–40, esp. 324–25. See also Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76–80.
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), 286–87, 298, 309.
Béla Balázs, Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, trans. Rodney Livingstone (1924; repr., New York: Berghan Books, 2010), 14. Emphasis original.
Balázs, 14–15.
Mattias Frey, “Cultural Problems of Classical Film Theory,” 335.
The actual photo was by Yao Guorong 姚国荣 of the C. H. Wang Photo Studio 王开照相馆, which specialized in publicity stills for established and aspiring actors, among other things. According to his granddaughter, Yao selected and enlarged the photo himself when an unnamed person involved with organizing the funeral requested an image of the star for that purpose. See Zhang Yi, “Wang Kai zhaoxiangguan sheyingshi Yao Guorong houren tan lao zhaopian beihou de gushi” [C. H. Wang Photo Studio photographer Yao Guorong’s descendant tells the stories behind old photos], Xinmin wanbao [Xinmin evening newspaper], January 19, 2007.
In fact, the character Wei Ming was loosely based on a real woman who committed suicide, the screenwriter and film actor Ai Xia 艾霞, adding to the uncanny hall-of-mirrors effect: actor Maggie Cheung plays the actor Ruan Lingyu, whose actual suicide echoed the screen suicide of her character Wei Ming, whose fictional suicide was based on that of the actual person Ai Xia, herself an actor and writer of fiction.
See Kristine Harris, “The New Woman Incident: Cinema, Scandal, and Spectacle in 1935 Shanghai,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, 277–302 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997); Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 113–37; Guo-Juin Hong, “Framing Time: New Women and the Cinematic Representation of Colonial Modernity in 1930s Shanghai,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 15, no. 3 (2007): 553–79; and Katherine Hui-ling Chou, “New Woman, The Art and Life of Ruan Lingyu,” in “Staging Revolution: Actresses, Realism and the New Woman Movement in Chinese Spoken Drama and Film, 1919–1949,” PhD diss., New York University, 1997. The latter is also available in revised, Chinese form in Zhou Huiling, Biaoyan Zhongguo: Nü mingxing, biaoyan wenhua, shijue zhengzhi, 1910–1945 [Performing China: Actresses, performance culture, visual politics, 1910–1945] (Taipei: Maitian chuban, 2004). See also Richard J. Meyer’s mini-biography Ruan Ling-Yu: The Goddess of Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005).
New Women uses a separately recorded soundtrack with sound effects, music, and some dialogue, but the film as a whole still plays mostly as a silent film, with intertitles.
Jay Leyda, Dianying: Electric Shadows, an Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972), 87.
Michael G. Chang, “The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, 1920s–1930s,” in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 132.
Chang.
John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge, 1982), 91.
Ellis, 58.
During her prime years at the Lianhua film studio from 1930 to 1934, Ruan Lingyu appeared in an average of 3.4 films per year.
Ellis, Visible Fictions, 99.
Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 37. This famous Godard quote is often cited, but, it seems, never with the original source documented, including by Perez.
Robert Warshow, quoted in Perez, 29.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–38 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 117.
Perez, Material Ghost, 33.
Miriam Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’” New German Critique, no. 40 (Winter 1987): 179–224; Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 236–75.
Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 9. (Gray, 15.) As in the introduction, where available, I use Barnard’s translations of Bazin rather than the looser ones by Hugh Gray that are more readily available in the United States, but I cite Gray’s translations of the same passages in parentheses in the notes.
For a fuller discussion of the film and the intervention it makes into broader debates on society and culture, see Kristine Harris, “The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai,” in Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris Berry, 128–36 (London: British Film Institute, 2008).
Ellis, Visible Fictions, 98.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.
Yingjin Zhang makes this argument about The Goddess, which is seen as an essentially sadistic narrative that enacts the removal of the threat of women’s sexuality as represented in the figure of the prostitute. Kristine Harris in part counters this view through an analysis of the film’s visual rhetoric and the director’s stated motivations for making the film. See Yingjin Zhang, “Prostitution and the Urban Imagination: Negotiating the Public and the Private in Chinese Films of the 1930s,” in Zhang, Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 160–80, and Harris, “The Goddess.”
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, 56–62 (London: British Film Institute, 1990).
Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience,” 181.
In general, I find the Greta Garbo comparison to be a stretch. Ruan seems to have more in common with Hollywood silent stars like Lillian Gish and Janet Gaynor—her acting tending toward understatement and her sexuality wrapped up with a sort of vulnerable innocence—than with the flamboyant performance style and take-charge eroticism of Garbo.
Yingjin Zhang has a similar reading of a slightly later scene, in which Ruan’s smiling visage is superimposed on an extreme long shot of the neon cityscape at night. Zhang observes that here, “Shanghai is fantasized as an alluring prostitute smiling directly at the audience against a background of skyscrapers and flashing neon lights.” However, because the shot in question clearly is set up as a point-of-view shot from the perspective of Ruan’s future pimp, representing his fantasy and the beginning of his designs on the protagonist, in my view, the audience is more likely to experience dread than erotic pleasure in viewing it, having already been cued to sympathize with the heroine and to despise the thug. Zhang, “Prostitution and the Urban Imagination,” 169.
Gu Kenfu, “Yingxi zazhi fakanci” [Introducing Shadowplay Magazine], in 20 Shiji Zhongguo dianying lilun wenxuan [Selected works of twentieth-century Chinese film theory], ed. Luo Yijun (1921; repr., Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2003), 1:4–5. Hongwei Thorn Chen has completed a draft translation of the essay, and I largely borrow his English renditions in this chapter. Victor Fan points out that a more literal translation of bizhen would be “approaching reality,” which introduces a set of complications not unlike those I find in “inscribing the real” (xieshi 写实) in the introduction. See Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Gu, “Yingxi zazhi fakanci,” 6.
Gu.
Balázs, Béla Balázs, 14. Emphasis original.
Gu, “Yingxi zazhi fakanci,” 6.
Gu, 5–6.
Xinyu Dong notes that by the early 1920s, Harold Lloyd’s fame in China “was on a par with [Charlie] Chaplin,” and she documents in detail how Lloyd’s trademark horned-rim glasses became an iconic modern fashion accessory in Shanghai. Dong, “The Laborer at Play: Laborer’s Love, the Operational Aesthetic, and the Comedy of Inventions,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, no. 2 (2008): 25. Gu Kenfu himself wears Harold Lloyd–style glasses in most surviving photographs of him from the 1920s.
Yu Handong, ed., Zhongguo xiqu biaoyan yishu cidian [Chinese opera performance art dictionary] (Taipei: Guojia, 2001).
For an analysis of mimesis and semiosis as intertwined aspects of literary realism, see Armine Kotin Mortimer, Writing Realism: Representations in French Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). The question of the status of mimesis in traditional Chinese aesthetics is a thorny one, and the answer depends largely on how one defines the term, as well as whether it is considered to be the function of art or simply one aspect of artistic representation. In a study of Chinese literary thought, for example, Ming Dong Gu argues that “expressionism” was “the mainstream,” but that “mimetic representation” nonetheless was long present as “an undercurrent.” Gu points out that in addition to “primary imitation”—or art directly imitating nature or “reality”—traditional Chinese aesthetics certainly put a high value on “secondary imitation,” in which previous works of art, rather than reality itself, are imitated. Indeed, such a conception of mimesis would collapse “convention” into “realism” insofar as conventions themselves can be the object of mimesis. Gu, “Is Mimetic Theory in Literature and Art Universal?,” Poetics Today 26, no. 3 (2005): 475, 477.
Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 146–47. I thus disagree, as argued in the introduction, with any view that entirely discounts the claims of the ontological realism of film and argues instead that in cinema, the effect of mimesis is produced solely through semiosis, as Mortimer has argued is the case in realist literary fiction (see the previous note).
The one notable exception was the 1913 film Zhuangzi Tests His Wife (Zhuangzi shi qi 莊子試妻), in which director Li Minwei 黎民偉 had his own wife, Yan Shanshan 嚴珊珊, play the minor role of a maid—though the main female role, that of Zhuangzi’s wife, was still played by a male actor.
Quoted in Chang, “The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful,” 128–29.
For a more thorough discussion of these developments, see Chou, “Staging Revolution.”
Zheng Zhengqiu, “Xinjujia bu neng yanxi ma?” [Can xinju actors not act in film?], in Zhongguo wusheng dianying [Chinese silent film], ed. Dai Xiaolan (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996), 906–7 (including following quotations in this paragraph). My translations are adapted from a draft translation by Jessica Ka Yee Chan.
Feng Xizui, “Tan neixin biaoyan” [On interior performance], originally published in Mingxing gongsi tekan “Feng da xiaoye” [Mingxing company special issue on “Master Fung”] (1925); reprinted in Chinese Silent Film, 914–15.
Wan Laitian, “Tan neixin biaoyan” [On interior performance], originally published in Mingxing gongsi tekan “Feng da xiaoye”; reprinted in Chinese Silent Film, 916.
Zheng Junli, “Zai lun yanji” [Another discussion about acting], originally published in Lianhua huabao [Lianhua pictorial] 5, no. 9–6, no. 5 (1935); reprinted in Selected Works of Twentieth-Century Chinese Film Theory, 1:181.
For an English translation, see Li-li Ch’en, Master Tung’s Western Chamber Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 14–19.
Even this detail is well within the norms of classical Hollywood continuity. For example, in To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944), an early shot/reverse-shot exchange between the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall characters is mediated by an inserted shot of the club owner Frenchy, who stands in the doorway between them and amusingly traces with his own gaze their smoldering first looks.
The first quote comes from his Visible Man (1924) and the second from The Spirit of Film (1930), both of which are in Béla Balázs, 38, 109.
Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 117.
Balázs, Béla Balázs, 33–37. The section ends with a contrast between theater, in which “even the most important face is never more than one element in the play,” and film, in which “face becomes ‘the whole thing’ that contains the entire drama for minutes on end” (37).
Johannes Riis, “Naturalist and Classical Styles in Early Sound Film Acting,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 3 (2004): 3–17.
Roberta A. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
By the 1920s–30s, many film critics in both China and the West were crediting Griffith with having “invented” the close-up. This clearly is not accurate, because filmmakers like George Albert Smith had begun experimenting with the technique as early as the end of the 1890s. Nonetheless, Griffith’s reliance on closer shots of actors during his Biograph years, and in particular the correspondence between shot distance and performance—with closer shots employed to capture significant emotions—was unprecedented and became a building block of the classical Hollywood style.
Pearson, Eloquent Gestures, 92–95.
Zheng Junli, “Ruan Lingyu he ta de biaoyan yishu” [Ruan Lingyu and her performing art], originally published in Zhongguo dianying [Chinese film], no. 2 (1957); reprinted in He Keren, Ruan Lingyu zhi si [The death of Ruan Lingyu] (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1986), 160.
Balázs, Béla Balázs, 35. James Naremore also has analyzed in detail Gish’s ability to convey a rapid series of mixed emotions using examples from True Heart Susie (D. W. Griffith, 1919), in Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 99–113.
Balázs, Béla Balázs, 104. Emphasis original.
Gish set the template for any female character in silent film who wishes to convey forced cheerfulness in the face of patriarchal oppression. One of her most famous moments, remembered simply as “the smile,” occurs in Broken Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919), when her character’s overbearing father orders her to smile despite her inner sadness. She consequently pushes the corners of her mouth up with her fingers to manufacture a fake grin for her father’s benefit. The fake smile also was a key theme in the Li Lili star vehicle Daybreak (Tianming 天明; Sun Yu 孙瑜, 1933). Li’s character, Ling Ling, upon arriving in Shanghai from the countryside, disapprovingly remarks to her friends about her puzzlement over the smiles of some streetwalking prostitutes she sees: how can such defiled women act so happy? Much later, after Ling Ling has met with catastrophe and been forced into prostitution herself, she learns firsthand that the smiles are merely coerced performances of cheerfulness. By the over-the-top ending, in which Ling Ling smiles sweetly in the face of a firing squad about to execute her for aiding a revolutionary, the full irony of her performance is clear.
Wu Yonggang, “Ruan Lingyu Remembered,” Griffithiana 60/61 (October 1997): 141. Originally published in Wu Yonggang, Wode tansuo he zhuiqiu [My quest and search] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1986).
Chou, “Staging Revolution,” 194–95.
Anne-Britt Gran, “The Fall of Theatricality in the Age of Modernity,” SubStance 31, no. 2–3 (2002): 252–53.
Gran, 251.
For definitive book-length studies of realism in modern Chinese literature, see Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). For examples of explorations of possible Chinese literary modernities other than realism, see Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), and David Der-Wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).
Jin Ping Mei, literally “gold vase plum,” a detailed and complex novel by an anonymous author centering on the household of a merchant, circulated in manuscript form in the late 1500s and was first published in 1610. The authoritative five-volume translation by David Tod Roy renders the title as The Plum in the Golden Vase (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997–2015).
For translations of many of the primary documents in these movements, from the late Qing through the May Fourth Movement and beyond, see Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Eugene Y. Wang, “Sketch Conceptualism as Modernist Contingency,” in Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, ed. Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 133. In this indispensable essay, Wang notes the irony that Xu Beihong was most vociferously advocating Western-style realism as the path to modernity in Chinese art at precisely the time when cutting-edge European art was abandoning “mimetic illusionism” during the height of the 1920s modernist avant-garde (103).
David Der-wei Wang, “In the Name of the Real,” in Hearn and Smith, Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, 29–30.
“Sketch conceptualism” is Wang’s translation of xieyi in “Sketch Conceptualism as Modernist Contingency.” Here I favor the more general translations as just “conceptualism” or “expressionism” mainly to extend the concept from drawing and painting to performance aesthetics, making a parallel between the dichotomy of xieshi/xieyi (realism/expressionism) and that of mimesis/semiosis.
Wang, “In the Name of the Real,” 34.
Xin qingnian [New youth] 5, no. 4 (1918).
The most famous of the latter is of course Beijing opera, but it should be noted, first, that Beijing opera was in fact a relatively modern development in the history of Chinese drama (having emerged only in the eighteenth century and become widespread only in the nineteenth) and, second, that it only was elevated to the status of a “national” art form in the twentieth century, before which it was just one regional style among many—though one with growing popularity.
Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, Wutai shenghuo sishi nian [Forty years of stage life] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1987), 149–55.
Li Yu, “From Li Liweng on Theater,” in Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance, ed. and trans. Faye Chunfang Fei (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 83.
Ji Yun, “Actor and Character,” in Fei, Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance, 89–90.
Ji, 90.
It should be noted that China did have relevant precursors to the new model of scientific objectivity in its own intellectual history, most notably in the kaozheng 考证 or “evidential” school of textual scholarship that had been ascendant at the height of the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 85.
Shih. Emphasis original.
See Wang Hui, “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Spring 1995, 1–68, and Wang, “Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein, 80–120 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).
Chen Duxiu, “Jinri zhi jiaoyu fangzhen” [Today’s educational policy], Xin qingnian [New youth] 1, no. 2 (1915): 4.
Chen, 3.
Wang, “Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China,” 33.
Wang, 38.
Wang, “Discursive Community,” 106.
Gu, “Yingxi zazhi fakanci,” 6–7. What I have translated here as “show” is actually xiechulai 写出来, or literally “to write out”—using the same character for “write” or “inscribe” as in the term for realism, “inscribing the real,” mentioned earlier.
Gu, 5.
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
Daston and Galison, 60.
Daston and Galison, 63. Daston and Galison present, for example, the case of Arthur Worthington, who, for two decades, attempted to sketch the exact geometrical patterns made by the splashes of droplets hitting a liquid surface by observing the phenomenon with a quick flash of light and then drawing what he thought he had seen—beautiful, perfectly symmetrical splash shapes. Only when he finally photographed the same phenomenon in 1894 did he discover to his horror that the “real” splashes captured by the camera looked nothing like his drawings but were instead always significantly marred by unpredictable asymmetries and irregularities (11–16, 154–63).
Daston and Galison, 130–31.
Daston and Galison, 187.
Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image”; Cavell, World Viewed; Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film. See my discussion of these ideas in the introduction.
Dai Vaughan, “Let There Be Lumière,” in Elsaesser, Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, 65.
Vaughan, 65, 66.
Vaughan, 66–67.
Vaughan, 65.
Gu, “Yingxi zazhi fakanci,” 7.
See Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” in The Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments, ed. Marc Furstenau, 255–69 (New York: Routledge, 2010). On the distinction between ontological and perceptual realism, see the introduction.
Gu, “Yingxi zazhi fakanci,” 4–5.
Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Films as Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2000): 10.
Chou, “Staging Revolution,” 175.
Chou, 78.
Quoted in Chou, 79.
Chou, 85–86.
2. Shanghaiing Hollywood in the 1930s
“Zhongguo dianying bainian: lao Shanghai de huangjin shidai” [One hundred years of Chinese cinema: Old Shanghai’s golden age], Ouzhou shibao [European times], June 6, 2014, http://www.oushinet.com/news/europe/britain/20140606/134418.html.
“Ping Chulu (Gentlemen Are Born)” [Review of Gentlemen Are Born], Diansheng 4, no. 24 (1935): 486–87.
Cavell, World Viewed, 104; Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 42–43.
For insightful discussions of the hard film versus soft film debate of the early to mid-1930s, see Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 244–97, and Victor Fan, “The Cinema of Sun Yu: Ice Cream for the Eye . . . but with a Homo Sacer,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, no. 3 (2011): 219–51.
Jakobson, Language in Literature, 22–23. See the introduction for a fuller discussion of Jakobson.
Miriam Bratu Hansen first proposed this idea in her essay “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 332–50 (London: Arnold, 2000). She applied it specifically to Shanghai cinema of the 1930s in “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54 (2000): 10–22; and she revisited it a decade later with a longer discussion of both Chinese and Japanese cinema in “Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Nataša Durovicová and Kathleen Newman, 287–315 (New York: Routledge, 2010).
Michael Raine, “Adaptation as ‘Transcultural Mimesis’ in Japanese Cinema,” in The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema, ed. Daisuke Miyao (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 102.
See Xinyu Dong, “The Laborer at Play: Laborer’s Love, the Operational Aesthetic, and the Comedy of Inventions,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20, no. 2 (2008): 1–39.
My thanks to Jonah Horwitz and (indirectly) Ben Singer for directing me to this earlier precedent.
See Yiman Wang’s chapter “The Goddess: Tracking the ‘Unknown Woman’ from Hollywood through Shanghai to Hong Kong” in her Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood, 18–47 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). For a classic essay on the maternal melodrama genre that focuses on the 1937 remake of Stella Dallas by King Vidor, see Linda Williams, “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill, 299–325 (London: British Film Institute, 1987).
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to address the broader issues raised by applying the term melodrama to the Chinese context, but it raises fascinating questions concerning translingual practice and the transcultural application of theoretical concepts to categorize works of art. The distinction between melodrama as a historical film genre and a transhistorical narrative mode is meant partly to address such questions. See, for example, Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre,” in Gledhill and Williams, Reinventing Film Studies, 221–43. For a view of melodrama as both an indigenous and a translated aesthetic in Chinese Republican-era cinema, see Zhang Zhen, “Transplanting Melodrama: Observations on the Emergence of Early Chinese Narrative Film,” in A Companion to Chinese Cinema, ed. Yingjin Zhang, 25–41 (West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). For a discussion that chooses to avoid the term melodrama altogether in favor of its ostensible Chinese equivalent, see Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, “A Small History of Wenyi,” in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, ed. Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-Yin Chow, 223–49 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For a general discussion of melodrama in Chinese cinemas, see Stephen Teo, “Chinese Melodrama: The Wenyi Genre,” in Traditions in World Cinema, ed. Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer, and Steven Jay Schneider, 203–13 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and Zhen Zhang, “Transnational Melodrama, Wenyi, and the Orphan Imagination,” in Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 83–97 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
This film adaptation played at the Carlton Theatre in Shanghai and received a short notice in Shenbao 申报 on October 26, 1923.
Cheng Jihua, ed., History of the Development of Chinese Film [Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi] (1963; repr., Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1997).
Chris Berry, “Chinese Left Cinema in the 1930s: Poisonous Weeds or National Treasures,” Jump Cut, no. 34 (March 1989): 87–94.
Paul Pickowicz, “Melodramatic Representation and the ‘May Fourth’ Tradition of Chinese Cinema,” in From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China, ed. Ellen Widmer and David Wang, 295–326 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Zhang, Amorous History.
Zhiwei Xiao, “The Myth about Chinese Leftist Cinema,” in Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present, ed. James A. Cook, Joshua Goldstein, Matthew D. Johnson, and Sigrid Schmalzer, 145–64 (New York: Lexington Books, 2014).
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (1993): 436.
Zhang, Amorous History, 35.
Cheng, History of the Development of Chinese Film, 439–42.
Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 80.
A similar plot twist—the arranged marriage partner turns out to have been the actual love interest all along—occurs in the 1927 Soviet film Women of Ryazan (Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ivan Pravov).
A 1962 interview with Fejos, reprinted in the booklet accompanying the Criterion Collection Blu-ray release of the film, includes this quote: “There was, by the way, the O. Henry twist in Lonesome, that at the very end, it was found out that the boy and girl lived side by side in the same rooming house, but they never knew about each other. It sounds corny, but let’s say that it was high corn.”
Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism,” 291. Paul Fonoroff also cites Lonesome as a Hollywood precedent for the plot of Crossroads in his review of the DVD release of the latter in the South China Morning Post, April 11, 2010, http://www.scmp.com/article/711066/film-1937.
Shen goes on to say that he preferred to turn the characters into “a pure and naïve young couple.” Shen Xiling, “Zenyang zhizuo Shizi jietou” [How did I make Crossroads?], originally published in Mingxing banyuekan [Mingxing bimonthly] 8, no. 3 (1937); reprinted in Chen Bo, ed., Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong [The Chinese left-wing film movement], 395–97 (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1993). Translation drafted by Jessica Ka Yee Chan.
A French version (À moi le jour, à toi la nuit) by the same director and featuring the same female lead actor (Käthe von Nagy) was released at the same time, still set in Paris but with all dialogue in French. See Nataša Durovicová, “Vector, Flow, Zone: Towards a History of Cinematic Translatio,” in Durovicová and Newman, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, 99. I have not been able to determine which version was more likely to have been seen by either Shen Xiling or his friend who suggested the plot idea.
For the fascinating story of La dame aux camélias in China, see Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 67–105. For a discussion of how the story helped to constitute a new, individualist ideology of romantic love as part of an “enlightenment structure of feeling” in early twentieth-century China, see Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 97–105.
Cheng, History of the Development of Chinese Film, 441.
Zhao Dan, the actor who played Lao Zhao, stated that he borrowed an acting technique for a specific scene in Crossroads from Greta Garbo in Cukor’s Camille. See Ni Zhenliang, Zhao Dan zhuan [Zhao Dan biography] (Beijing: Chuanjie chubanshe, 2007), 79. Another possibly key cinematic precedent was a French adaptation of La dame aux camélias directed by Fernand Rivers and Abel Gance in 1934 and starring Yvonne Printemps. The film appears to be no longer extant, and I have not been able to determine exactly when or if it was screened in Shanghai, but stills and movie posters from the film show Printemps wearing a black dress that is similar to the one Zhiying wears in her dream, suggesting that it could also have been a source for Shen Xiling’s imagination and an object of his parody. The Chinese adaptations included two called New Camellia (Xin chahua 新茶花; Zhang Shichuan 张石川, 1913 and Li Pingqian 李萍倩, 1927) and one titled Women of Easy Virtue (Yecao xianhua 野草闲花; Sun Yu, 1930).
See Panpan Yang, “Repositioning Excess: Romantic Melodrama’s Journey from Hollywood to China,” in Gledhill and Williams, Melodrama Unbound, 225–26.
In this sense, the satire in this scene resembles the kuso aesthetic of parody videos in contemporary Taiwan and mainland China. As Nishant Shah has shown in the case of the BackDorm Boys videos, the objects of humor in the videos are not so much the “original” Backstreet Boys or the “real” Chinese college boys as “the projected selves or desired selves that they are expected to either appropriate or aspire to. The kuso exaggerates the differences between these two, celebrates the obvious flaws in them and makes them available as a public spectacle.” Shah, “Now Streaming on Your Nearest Screen: Contextualizing New Digital Cinema through Kuso,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, no. 1 (2009): 26.
For a much more comprehensive discussion of Love and Duty, see Kristine Harris, “Ombres Chinoises: Split Screens and Parallel Lives in Love and Duty,” in Rojas and Chow, Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, 39–61.
For a discussion of this, see Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 25–26.
Lu Xun, “Yizhe fuji” [Translator’s notes], Mengya yuekan [Sprout monthly] 1, no. 3 (1930): 27–33.
Xi Naifang [Zheng Boqi], “Meiguo pian de yingxiang” [The influence of American film], originally published in Chenbao, September 6, 1932, reprinted in Zhongguo wusheng dianying [Chinese silent cinema], ed. Dai Xiaolan, 1207–8 (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1996).
Xia Yan, “Ruanxing de ying lun!” [A hard critique of softness!], in Xia Yan dianying wenji [Xia Yan collected writings on cinema] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2000), 1:28.
Xi Naifang [Zheng Boqi], “Dianying zuiyan—bianxiang de dianying shi ping” [A critique of cinema—or, a criticism of contemporary cinema, 1933], Mingxing 1, no. 1 (1933): 1–4.
Xia Yan, “Zai Shizi jietou zuotanhui shang de fayan” [Talk at the forum on Crossroads], in Xia Yan dianying wenji, 1:88.
Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype, 22.
Schweinitz, 30.
Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 79–80, 152–53.
Plantinga, 96–97.
Plantinga, 96.
Another Hollywood precedent for the shot is Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (codirected by Edward Sedgwick, 1928), which had used a similar technique, though with fewer floors than 7th Heaven.
Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 137.
Yeh, 150, 250n35.
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 159.
David R. Shumway, “Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage,” in Film Genre Reader III, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 399, 400.
It might be argued that the ending of Yuan Muzhi’s Street Angel in fact fits one of the templates of classical Hollywood, namely, what Linda Williams categorizes as “sad-ending melodramas,” which include the “‘social problem’ films without optimistic endings.” However, such a convention more accurately describes, for example, the melodrama Spring River Flows East (Yi jiang chun shui xiang dong liu 一江春水向东流; Cai Chusheng 蔡楚生 and Zheng Junli, 1947), discussed in the next chapter, which ends with the suicide of its main protagonist. Street Angel is much odder, in that much of it is not a melodrama at all but a romantic comedy, and the ending features not the tragic finality of the death of its main character but rather the seemingly random death of a side character with no resolution of the fates of the main protagonists. Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 59.
See Xinyu Dong’s forthcoming book The Comic Avant-Garde: A Forgotten History of Chinese Cinema and Transnational Modernism for a thorough study of this film and its avant-garde intervention in the comedy genre. Another detailed discussion is in Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), esp. 233–60. The literal question mark at the end of the film would be used again in Eight Thousand Li of Clouds and Moon (Baqian li lu yun he yue 八千里路云和月; Shi Dongshan 史东山, 1947) and in Bitter Love (Ku lian 苦恋; Peng Ning 彭宁, 1980).
This particular film trope—the rising of the dead, sometimes through double exposure—itself has several precedents in Western cinema, including The Three Musketeers, J’accuse (Abel Gance, 1919), and Der müde Tod (Destiny; Fritz Lang, 1921).
Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, 54–55.
Hill, 55.
Hill.
Hill.
Hill, 55–56.
Examples of these include Twin Sisters (Zimeihua 姊妹花; Zheng Zhengqiu 郑正秋, 1933) and, to some extent, The Goddess. See also Laikwan Pang’s discussion of the “bright tail” ending in Shanghai left-wing films. I should note that she includes in her list of “bright tail” endings some films that I on the contrary am labeling as lacking resolution. My rationales are that some of those, such as The Big Road (or The Highway as she translates it) and Crossroads, hardly have endings that could be described as “blissful,” even if they do encourage persistence in struggle, and that Pang herself argues that the “bright tail” does not provide unity through closure but rather gives the narrative “a new beginning” at its end. Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932–37 (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 207–8.
Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 63.
Hugo Münsterberg, “From The Film: A Psychological Study—the Means of the Photoplay,” in Braudy and Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism, 407.
Bordwell et al., Classical Hollywood Cinema, 29.
Xia, “Zai Shizi jietou zuotanhui shang de fayan,” 87–91. (Zheng Boqi’s remarks are included in the same source.)
Pang, Building a New China in Cinema, 205–6.
Pang, 206.
Andrew H. Plaks, “Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative,” in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 341.
Plaks.
Plaks, 343.
Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction (yuanyang-hudie xiaoshuo 鸳鸯 蝴蝶小说) refers to popular middle-brow entertainment fiction of the 1910s–20s that drew on both the Chinese cultural tradition and Western sources and was embraced by contemporary “petty urbanite” readers but scorned by intellectuals of the New Culture Movement that began around 1915. For a brief introduction to the genre, see Jianhua Chen, “Zhou Shoujuan’s Love Stories and Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction,” in The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Kirk A. Denton, 111–20 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). For a book-length study, see E. Perry Link Jr., Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
Jessica Ka Yee Chan, “Translating ‘Montage’: The Discreet Attractions of Soviet Montage for Chinese Revolutionary Cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 5, no. 3 (2011): 203–4.
Eisenstein also emphasized that he thought montage was a tool of realistic narration, but in a different sense than I ultimately will take it here, as he referred not to the ability of montage to create fissures but to its capacity for helping to present a unified theme. See Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 10–11. My thanks to Tara Coleman for pointing out this connection.
For information on the “singing hostess” phenomenon in Shanghai of this period, see Andrew D. Field, “Selling Souls in Sin City: Shanghai Singing and Dancing Hostesses in Print, Film, and Politics, 1920–49,” in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang, 99–127 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
On the similar newsreel documentary-style inserts during a song sequence in Big Road, see Chris Berry, “The Sublimative Text: Sex and Revolution in Big Road (The Highway),” East-West Film Journal 2, no. 2 (June): 66–86.
Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 51.
Eco, Open Work.
The fissures in these films thus recall the Brechtian technique of “interruption” analyzed by Walter Benjamin, a method of narration that “works against creating an illusion among the audience” and “compels the spectator to take up a position towards the action.” Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1998), 99–100.
Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 18–19.
Fan, “Cinema of Sun Yu,” 221.
Hansen, “Mass Production of the Senses,” 335, 340.
Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars,” and Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism.”
Daniel Morgan, “‘Play with Danger’: Vernacular Modernism and the Problem of Criticism,” New German Critique, no. 122 (Summer 2014): 70.
Morgan, 69.
Hansen, “Vernacular Modernism,” 301.
Hansen, 295.
Hansen, 305, 301.
Hansen, 301.
3. Realism and Event in Postwar Chinese Cinema
Yao Zhuobo, “You Yi jiang chun shui xiang dong liu, Songhua Jiang shang kan yishu de zhenshi” [Seeing art’s truth through Spring River Flows East and Along the Sungari River], Wen tan [Literary field] 8, no. 4 (1948): 1.
Yao, 4.
Paul G. Pickowicz, China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation, and Controversy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 150, 154.
Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 202.
Thompson.
Cheng Jihua, ed., Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi [History of the development of Chinese film] (1963; repr., Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 1997).
Pickowicz, China on Film, 80.
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 205, 206.
Pickowicz, China on Film, 150–51.
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).
Panpan Yang, “Repositioning Excess: Romantic Melodrama’s Journey from Hollywood to China,” in Gledhill and Williams, Melodrama Unbound, 234.
Yang.
Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 58, 62.
Williams, 65.
Williams, 58.
Williams, 59.
The one exception is an interlude of slightly over twenty seconds in which Sufen is briefly waylaid by a police officer when she flees home from the mansion after curfew.
In the Guangzhou periodical’s essay on the film cited at the beginning of this chapter, for example, the author complains that Sufen’s death would only have been necessary in pre–May Fourth China and that in the post–May Fourth reality, permanently breaking off with her husband and soldiering on with her life as a single mother should have been the option pursued rather than suicide. Yao, “You Yi jiang chun shui xiang dong liu, Songhua Jiang shang kan yishu de zhenshi,” 4.
Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 69.
Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 16.
Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears,” Screen 27, no. 6 (1986): 8, 22.
Jane M. Gaines, “Even More Tears: The Historical Time Theory of Melodrama,” in Gledhill and Williams, Melodrama Unbound, 333.
Pickowicz, China on Film, 86–87.
Pickowicz, 78.
Gilberto Perez, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 203.
Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 67.
John Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 155.
For more on its reception and citations of typical reviews at the time, see Carolyn Fitzgerald, Fragmenting Modernisms: Chinese Wartime Literature, Art, and Film, 1937–1949 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 172–73.
See esp. Zhang, “Transplanting Melodrama”; Yeh, “A Small History of Wenyi”; Teo, “Chinese Melodrama”; and Zhang, “Transnational Melodrama.”
James Udden, “Poetics of Two Springs: Fei Mu versus Tian Zhuangzhuang,” in The Poetics of Chinese Cinema, ed. Gary Bettinson and James Udden (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 80, 94. Emphasis original.
David Bordwell, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Observations on Film Art: David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), April 10, 2010, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2010/04/10/the-omnivoyeurs-dilemma.
In the English scholarship, see esp. Susan Daruvala, “The Aesthetics and Moral Politics of Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, no. 3 (2007): 171–88; Carolyn Fitzgerald, “Spring in a Small Town: Gazing at Ruins,” in Chinese Films in Focus II, ed. Chris Berry, 205–11 (London: Palgrave, 2008); a greatly expanded version of the latter as a chapter in Fitzgerald, Fragmenting Modernisms, 169–216; David Der-wei Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 271–310; and Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 109–52.
Ba Jin, Cold Nights (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978). For a thorough analysis of how tuberculosis serves to structure Wang Wenxuan’s identity in the novel, see Xiaobing Tang’s chapter “The Last Tubercular in Modern Chinese Literature: On Ba Jin’s Cold Nights,” in Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian, 131–60 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
The former is used in the British Film Institute DVD edition published in 2015 and the latter in the Cinema Epoch DVD edition published in 2007.
Technically, one might say that ellipses cannot occur within a scene because temporal continuity is one of the defining characteristics of a scene (as opposed to a sequence). However, that is precisely what makes these ellipses so remarkable: that they happen as if within an otherwise continuous scene (though not necessarily within a continuous shot, as would be the case with a briefer jump cut).
Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), esp. 33–53.
The only exceptions would be those few experimental feature films that unfold in “real time,” for example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Mike Figgis’s Timecode (2000), or Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002).
This would be the sort of “striptease” argument made, for example, by Slavoj Žižek: the idea that sex is most powerful in cinema when suggested or indicated indirectly in various ways, whereas when shown explicitly, it becomes merely a mechanical, prosaic, or ugly display that fails to capture the desiring subject’s jouissance. Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 171–91.
David Der-wei Wang also associates the ellipses within this scene with uncertainty, observing that they function “to intimate the passage of time and the pressure of prolonged uncertainty of the conversation.” Wang, Lyrical in Epic Time, 294.
Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 95.
Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), 94.
Lee, Revolution of the Heart, 138.
Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), “Sealed Off,” in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt, 188–97 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
Fitzgerald, Fragmenting Modernisms, 169, 210–16.
The Zhang Ailing essay in question has been translated by Wendy Larson as “My Writing” in Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, 436–42 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), and by Andrew F. Jones as “Writing of One’s Own” in Eileen Chang, ed., Written on Water, 15–22 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). The former uses the translation “uneven contrasts,” whereas the latter uses “equivocal contrasts.” The original Chinese essay, “Ziji de wenzhang” 自己的文章, can be found at https://www.douban.com/group/topic/10694390.
Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 134.
Zhang, “My Writing,” 439.
Fitzgerald, Fragmenting Modernisms, 174–214.
This fact is driven home by a comparison of the film with its 2002 remake by Tian Zhuangzhuang (which has the same Chinese title but is usually cited in English as Springtime in a Small Town), which largely repeats the plot of the original but drops Yuwen’s voice-over narration, resulting in her character coming much closer to the stereotype of a villainous femme fatale.
In Obsession, there is an equivalent scene in which the adulterous couple have this conversation: “I’ll stay here. I’ll put up with it [pause] until [pause].” “Until what?” “Until I don’t know when.” The fantasizing of the husband’s death in The Postman Always Rings Twice is more blunt. Frank vocalizes a wish that Cora’s husband would die in a car crash, and she replies, “You didn’t mean that. You were joking!” In Double Indemnity, when Walter Neff, insurance salesman and soon-to-be lover of femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, teases her about anticipating—or possibly planning—her husband’s death when she asks about taking out a life insurance policy for him, she protests with “Please don’t talk like that,” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” “Are you crazy?” and “That’s a horrible thing to say.” Later, of course, they carry out the murder together.
Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 6.
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 265.
André Bazin, Jean Renoir (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 38, 30.
See esp. André Bazin’s essays “Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation” and “The Evolution of Film Language” in Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 87–106, 215–49. (Hugh Gray translates the essays as Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 1:23–40, and “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neorealism,” 2:16–40.)
ASL figures for these and many other films are available at the Cinemetrics Database, http://www.cinemetrics.lv/database.php.
Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 2:66. (This essay is not available in the newer collection translated by Timothy Barnard.)
Andrew, Mists of Regret, 198.
Eco, Open Work.
See, e.g., Ying Xiong, “Xiaocheng zhi chun yu ‘donfang dianying’” [Spring in a Small Town and “Eastern cinema”], Dianying yishu, no. 1 (1993): 11–18 and no. 2 (1993): 46–51.
Jing Yingrui, “Wo kan Xiao cheng zhi chun” [My view of Spring in a Small Town], in Xiao cheng zhi chun de dianying meixue: xiang Fei Mu zhi jing [The cinematic aesthetics of Spring in a Small Town: An homage to Fei Mu] (Taipei: Taiwan Film Institute, 1996), 12.
Daruvala, “Aesthetics and Moral Politics,” 175.
Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality, 111.
The ambiguous status of Yuwen’s voice-over narration is discussed by both Daruvala, “Aesthetics and Moral Politics,” 176, and Fitzgerald, Fragmenting Modernisms, 192–96.
Pickowicz, China on Film, 192.
Chen Baichen 陈白尘 was the lead writer, though the film’s opening credits list five more cowriters, including the director Zheng Junli and the actor Zhao Dan. See Cheng, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, 244.
Cheng, 243.
Leo Ou-fan Lee, “The Tradition of Modern Chinese Cinema: Some Preliminary Explorations and Hypotheses,” in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, ed. Chris Berry (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 7–8.
Yiman Wang, “Crows and Sparrows: Allegory on a Historical Threshold,” in Berry, Chinese Films in Focus II, 83.
The film never directly mentions Xu’s status as a concubine rather than Hou’s first wife, but it makes clear that his main residence and family are in Nanjing.
Wang, “Crows and Sparrows,” 83.
Zhou Yang, “Thoughts on Realism,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 342.
Georg Lukács, “Art and Objective Truth,” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays (Lincoln, Neb.: iUniverse, 2005), 35.
Lukács, 38.
Lukács.
Wang, “Crows and Sparrows,” 86.
Cheng acknowledges that the film includes “acidic political satire,” and Wang describes the sequence introducing Hou Yibo as “couched in satiric terms.” Cheng, Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi, 248; Wang, “Crows and Sparrows,” 86.
Leyda, Dianying, 165, 177; Lee, “Tradition of Modern Chinese Cinema,” 11.
Leyda, Dianying, 174.
Bordwell et al., Classical Hollywood Cinema, 61.
Bordwell et al., 45.
Bordwell et al.
Bordwell et al., 29.
Bordwell et al.
Bordwell et al., 57.
Bordwell et al., 58.
George V. Kachkovski, Daniil Vasilyev, Michael Kuk, Alan Kingstone, and Chris N. H. Street, “Exploring the Effects of Violating the 180-Degree Rule on Film Viewing Preferences,” Communication Research 46, no. 7 (2019): 948–64.
Barbara Foley, “The Politics of Poetics: Ideology and Narrative Form in An American Tragedy and Native Son,” in Narrative Poetics: Innovation, Limits, Challenges, ed. James Phelan, 55–67 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987).
4. Prescriptive Realism in Revolutionary Cinema of the Seventeen Years
Barbara Foley, “The Politics of Poetics: Ideology and Narrative Form in An American Tragedy and Native Son,” in Narrative Poetics: Innovation, Limits, Challenges, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 66.
Gilberto Perez, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 29.
Ban Wang, “Desire and Pleasure in Revolutionary Cinema,” in The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 124, 126; Jessica Ka Yee Chan, Chinese Revolutionary Cinema: Propaganda, Aesthetics and Internationalism, 1949–1966 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019), 2–4.
I by no means intend to say that Hollywood films are unsaturated with political and ideological messages, only that Mao-era revolutionary films are much more up front about the political arguments they are making.
While I independently employed the label “prescriptive” in classifying different sorts of claims to cinematic realism as explained in the introduction, in the course of my research, I found that at least two scholars much earlier already had applied the label specifically to drama of the Cultural Revolution (a discussion for the next chapter). See Hua-yuan Li Mowry, Yang-pan hsi: New Theater in China, Studies in Chinese Communist Terminology 15 (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, University of California, 1973), and Ellen R. Judd, “Prescriptive Dramatic Theory of the Cultural Revolution,” in Drama in the People’s Republic of China, ed. Constantine Tung and Colin MacKerras, 94–118 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987).
Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings (St. Louis, Mo.: Telos Press, 1973), 105.
Mao Zedong, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 459–60.
Mao.
Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 4.
Chris Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004), 65–66.
Berry, 28.
Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 124.
Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype, 22.
Schweinitz, 33, xiv.
Originally quoted in print in 1925; archived at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/jan/17.htm.
Daniel Vukovich, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (London: Routledge, 2012).
Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype, 194.
Schweinitz.
Schweinitz, 262–76. Schweinitz analyzes Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance in The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen, 1994) as such a citation.
Qu Qiubai, “The Question of Popular Literature and Art,” trans. Paul G. Pickowicz, in Revolutionary Literature in China: An Anthology, ed. John Berninghausen and T. D. Huters (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1976), 48.
Qu, 49.
Mao, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum,” 469.
Zhou Yang, “Thoughts on Realism,” in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, 338.
Zhou, 337. Zhou Yang’s formulations serve as an example of how aesthetic debates among Chinese Marxists were connected with those among Western Marxists. His warning regarding penetrating reality’s outer layer is similar to Georg Lukács’s exhortation just two years later that a genuine realism should grasp objective reality “as it truly is,” rather than merely confining “itself to reproducing whatever manifests itself immediately and on the surface.” Lukács, “Realism in the Balance,” in Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), 33.
Zhou, “Thoughts on Realism,” 339.
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 62.
Donald.
Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 14.
Zhou Qiying [aka Zhou Yang], “Guanyu ‘shehuizhuyi de xianshizhuyi yu geming de langmanzhuyi’” [On “socialist realism and revolutionary romanticism”], Xiandai [Les contemporains] 4, no. 1 (1933): 21–31.
Andrei Zhdanov, “Speech to the Congress of Soviet Writers,” in The Soviet Writers Congress, 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, ed. H. G. Scott (London: Laurence and Wishart, 1977), 428.
Quoted in Robert H. Stacy, Russian Literary Criticism: A Short History (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1974), 188.
Yizhong Gu, “The Myth of Voluntary Death: The Representation of Sacrifice and Martyrdom in the Maoist Films (1949–1976),” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2017, 60.
Zhou, “Thoughts on Realism,” 336.
Zhou, 343.
Mao, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum,” 470.
Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 2.
Brooks, 5.
Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero,” in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, 27–50 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). In the Soviet literature examined by Clark, the protagonist/apprentice is usually a young man, but in the Chinese films we will consider, it is more often a woman.
Berry, Postsocialist Cinema, 56–57.
Berry, 61.
Berry, 29.
Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 96–97.
Plantinga, 96.
Chan, Chinese Revolutionary Cinema, 143.
Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces, 59–60.
Berry, Postsocialist Cinema, 56.
The nondiegetic quality of the flag is eased somewhat by a cut to a close-ups of waving red flags that begins the following scene—and the film’s final sequence—but they clearly are different flags that lack the hammer-and-sickle icon of the flag shown in the previous scene’s cutaway.
Slavoj Žižek, “The Fetish of the Party,” in Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics, ed. Willy Apollon and Richard Feldstein, 3–29 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).
Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces, 62, 59.
Berry, “Sublimative Text,” 79.
Wang, Sublime Figure of History, 123.
Wang, 124, 127.
The contrast between Daojing’s desolate individualism at the beginning of the film and her fulfillment through collective belonging at the end was first analyzed by Dai Jinhua and discussed further by Ban Wang. See Dai Jinhua, Dianying lilun yu piping shouce [A manual of film theory and criticism] (Beijing: Kexue jishu chubanshe, 1993), 175–76, and Wang, Sublime Figure of History, 136.
Available in English as Yang Mo, Song of Youth (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978).
This exact romantic scenario—a couple in a rowboat surrounded by weeping willows—can be found, for example, in Bardleys the Magnificent, a John Gilbert vehicle directed by King Vidor in 1926, and the more general trope of young lovers meeting in a park is deployed in classics of 1930s Shanghai cinema, such as Love and Duty, Spring in the South (Nanguo zhi chun 南國之春; Cai Chusheng 蔡楚生, 1932), and Crossroads.
I have personally tested this in classes in which I show the scene out of context without English subtitles and ask random non-Chinese-speaking students to guess what happened.
John Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 157.
See, e.g., Stephanie Hemelryk Donald’s analysis of the way Yellow Earth subverts the “socialist realist gaze” in Public Secrets, Public Spaces, 60–62.
Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 84.
Williams, Screening Sex, esp. 33–53.
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 29.
Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 54.
Such a display occurs in The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915), The Loves of Carmen (Raoul Walsh, 1927), Wild Girl (Raoul Walsh, 1932), Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935), Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949), and Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954), to name only a few examples by leading directors covering five decades before Red Detachment of Women was made.
Yizhong Gu counts no fewer than seventy “films representing onscreen martyrdom in a direct and orthodox way” among a sample of more than three hundred Mao-era films. Gu, “Myth of Voluntary Death,” 43.
At the time of this writing, the scene in question can be accessed as “Sands of Iwo Jima Flag Raising” at https://youtu.be/-2Ym1rmWr3s.
Emily Wilcox has made a similar, perhaps on first glance surprising comparison between Chinese comic dance performances of the Seventeen Years and American television of the 1950s, both of which are instances of “a broader pattern of international post-WWII mass entertainment culture” that “reinforced the basic stories—typically fantasies—upon which an idealized form of national identity was constructed.” Emily Wilcox, “Joking after Rebellion: Performing Tibetan-Han Relations in the Chinese Military Dance ‘Laundry Song’ (1964),” in Maoist Laughter, ed. Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019), 57.
Chenshu Zhou, Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021).
Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image, 172, 173. Emphasis original.
5. Socialist Formalism and the End(s) of Revolutionary Cinema
For the political and conceptual context of Mao’s thinking at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, see Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World: A Concise History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 117–38; Nick Knight, Rethinking Mao: Explorations in Mao Zedong’s Thought (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007), 236–40; and Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1999), 291–311.
This, for example, is the explanation promulgated by the best-selling but widely discredited biography Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Holliday (New York: Random House, 2005).
For details on Mao’s lack of control of the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, see Knight, Rethinking Mao, 249–50; Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 315–33; and Yiching Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1–189.
Knight, Rethinking Mao, 249–65.
Zhang Chunqiao 张春桥, Yao Wenyuan 姚文元, and Wang Hongwen 王洪文.
In what is widely considered the founding work of “scar” fiction, the short story “Class Counsellor” (“Ban zhuren” 班主任 by Liu Xinwu 刘心武, 1977), for example, a conscientious educator tries to “save the children who suffered at the hands of the Gang of Four” (167). The story refers to Jiang Qing as the “white-boned demon” (157), a villain from the Ming dynasty classic novel Journey to the West (Xiyouji 西游记). The story appears in the English anthology The Wounded: New Stories of the Cultural Revolution, 77–78, trans. Geremie Barmé and Bennett Lee, 147–78 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1979).
As chapter 4 details, the socialist realist gaze was coined by Donald in her book Public Secrets, Public Spaces.
See the introduction for discussions of these categories of cinematic realism.
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2.
Landsberg.
Landsberg.
Landsberg, 17.
Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 172.
Rosen, 19.
Rosen, 172.
Rosen, 170.
Rosen, 182.
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 151, 154, 263.
Rosen, Change Mummified, 183.
Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index,” 33.
For an account of this practice in early Chinese newspapers, see Rudolf G. Wagner, “Joining the Global Imaginaire: The Shanghai Illustrated Newspaper Dianshizhai Huabao,” in Joining the Global Public: Word, Image, and City in Early Chinese Newspapers, 1870–1910, ed. Rudolf G. Wagner (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 106.
The former of these is discussed in David Bordwell, “Ninotchka’s Mistake: Inside Stalin’s Film Industry,” Observations on Film Art: David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (blog), January 22, 2018, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2018/01/22/ninotchkas-mistake-inside-stalins-film-industry; the latter appears in Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 271.
Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype, 40.
Schweinitz, 51.
Krista Van Fleit Hang, Literature the People Love: Reading Chinese Texts from the Early Maoist Period (1949–1966) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 47–48.
Xiaoning Lu, “Villain Stardom in Socialist China: Chen Qiang and the Cultural Politics of Affect,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 9, no. 3 (2015): 223–38.
Rosemary A. Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre: The Semiotics of Gender and Sexuality in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 238, 240–41.
Zou Rong, who published a call to arms titled The Revolutionary Army (Geming jun 革命军) in 1903, died in prison at age twenty in 1905. Two years later, pioneering feminist and revolutionary Qiu Jin was arrested and beheaded in her hometown for her writings and for helping to plot an uprising. Accounts of those cultural icons as well as Perovskaya’s influence in China can be found in Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895–1980 (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 77–93.
The Daybreak scene was in part a remake of Greta Garbo’s execution scene in Dishonoured (Josef von Sternberg, 1931), as is detailed in Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2000): 19.
The previous chapter provided a list of examples in its “Sublimation: Genre, Sex, and Death” section. Yizhong Gu counts no fewer than seventy “films representing onscreen martyrdom in a direct and orthodox way” among a sample of more than three hundred Mao-era films. Gu, “The Myth of Voluntary Death: The Representation of Sacrifice and Martyrdom in the Maoist Films (1949–1976),” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2017, 43.
Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 69.
Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 30.
Rosen, Change Mummified, 185.
The 1974 color remake is available on DVD with English subtitles under the alternative title Guerrillas Sweep the Plain.
The term suppositional (jiading 假定) tends to be used to describe the mise-en-scène of the play as a whole, whereas subjunctive (xuni 虚拟) tends to refer to the type of gestural pantomime used by the performers. For a fuller discussion of suppositionality, see Jason McGrath, “Suppositionality, Virtuality, and Chinese Cinema,” Boundary 2 49, no. 1 (2022): 263–92.
Such an aesthetic of suppositionality and standardized poses rather than realism was precisely what early Chinese film theorist Gu Kenfu condemned as inferior in Chinese drama compared to the new, more intrinsically realist medium of film, as discussed in chapter 1.
Pang Laikwan documents that in 1970, the same year that the first film spinoffs of yangbanxi were released, a stunning 245, or 62 percent, of the 393 book titles in arts and literature published in China were connected to yangbanxi, including scripts, music scores, and photo collections. Pang, The Art of Cloning: Creative Production during China’s Cultural Revolution (London: Verso, 2017), 91.
Tom Gunning distinguishes a “cinema of attractions” that focuses on presenting spectacles to an audience from the classical “cinema of narrative integration,” in which the telling of a story takes priority, in his “Cinema of Attractions.” Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar argue that Chinese opera films and martial arts films, including those of the yangbanxi, constitute a cinema of attractions that extends throughout Chinese film history. Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 49–54.
Berry and Farquhar, China on Screen, 47–74.
In the film as a whole, 57 percent of the shots have mobile framing.
My analysis of this scene supports Chris Berry’s argument that while there is “a consistent cinematic poetics for the film versions of the models,” nonetheless, in comparison to the initial ones, the later model opera films showed a “more evolved” and “more dynamic” style, including an ability to “use the camerawork to move the audience more directly into the mise-en-scène, creating a more 3D and less flat experience.” Chris Berry, “Red Poetics: The Films of the Chinese Cultural Revolution Revolutionary Model Operas,” in The Poetics of Chinese Cinema, ed. Gary Bettinson and James Udden (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 44, 45.
Jiang Qing, “On the Revolution in Peking Opera,” trans. Jessica Ka Yee Chan, Opera Quarterly 16, no. 2–3 (2010): 456, originally a speech from the Plenary Discussion with Performers after the Modern Peking Opera Trial Performance Convention in Beijing, July 1964; published in 1967 simultaneously in Red Flag (Hongqi), People’s Daily (Renmin ribao), and People’s Liberation Army Daily (Jiefangjun bao).
The rejected modes included alternative socialist ideas like the “truthful writing” (xie zhenshi 写真实) advocated by censured writer and literary theorist Hu Feng 胡风; the antidogmatic idea of a “broad path of realism” (xianshizhuyi—guangkuo de dao lu 现实主义—广阔的道路) suggested by Qin Zhaoyang 秦兆阳; the “deepening of realism” (xianshizhuyi shenhua 现实主义深化) and use of believable “middle characters” (zhongjian renwu 中间人物) promoted by the author, critic, and cultural official Shao Quanlin 邵荃麟; and the criticism of the emphasis on narratives of war (“the smell of gunpowder”) by playwright, screenwriter, and former deputy minister of culture Xia Yan 夏衍—all of which Jiang Qing and her allies grouped together and dubbed as a “black anti-Party and anti-socialist line.” All this is laid out in “Summary of the Forum on the Work in Literature and Art of the Armed Forces with Which Comrade Lin Biao Entrusted Comrade Chiang Ching,” Peking Review, no. 23 (June 1967): 11. While the “Summary,” widely believed to have been authored by Jiang Qing herself, was published in June 1967, the forum itself had taken place in February 1966. An excellent discussion of it can be found in Richard King, “Great Changes in Critical Reception: ‘Red Classic’ Authenticity and the ‘Eight Black Theories,’” in The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics”: Politics, Aesthetics, and Mass Culture, ed. Rosemary Roberts and Li Li, 22–41 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017).
For an early study of these Cultural Revolution critical denunciations of other modes of realism, see Mowry, Yang-pan hsi, 42–59.
Qing, “Summary,” 457, 456.
Pang, Art of Cloning, 92.
Pearson, Eloquent Gestures.
Pearson, 25.
Xing Ye, “Pingyuan youji dui xiugai ji” [Account of revision of Guerrillas on the Plain], Bai nian chao [Hundred year tide], no. 5 (1999): 74–77.
Xing, 76.
Xing, 75.
Pang, Art of Cloning, 92.
Xing, “Pingyuan youji dui xiugai ji,” 76.
André Bazin, “The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema,” in Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo (London: Routledge, 1997), 26.
Bazin, 33–34.
Xing, “Pingyuan youji dui xiugai ji,” 76.
In the opera version, the Japanese commander’s name has been changed to Kameta, and of course he is played not by Fang Hua but by an opera performer.
Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China, 65–66.
Pang, Art of Cloning, 102.
Pang, 103. On the temporality of the Cultural Revolution, see also Barbara Mittler, A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016), 380–84. Mittler complicates the view of the later years of the Cultural Revolution as only monotonous repetition by pointing out that many artists felt there was a significant artistic opening up beginning in the early 1970s, when, for example, more artistic exchanges with other nations resumed.
The “three prominences” is the Cultural Revolution artistic formula requiring that, in a fictional drama, the positive characters stand out from among all the characters, a group of heroic characters stand out from among the positive characters, and a single great hero stands out from among the heroic characters. For an analysis of how this played out in the poetics of the yangbanxi films, see Berry, “Red Poetics,” 36–39.
Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 257–58.
Clark, 57.
Barbara Mittler shows that although it was coined in November 1966, before the number of model works expanded, the label “eight model works” was not commonly used until after the fall of the Gang of Four, in a way that falsely compressed the number of works that were consumed to reinforce the new official narrative of artistic constriction and stagnation during the Cultural Revolution. Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 47.
Clark, Chinese Cultural Revolution, 56. The next chapter discusses a 1983 film set in the Cultural Revolution, River without Buoys (Meiyou hangbiao de heliu 没有航标的河流; Wu Tianming 吴天明), which has a scene in which the protagonists plead to be excused from a required public viewing of a yangbanxi film on the grounds that they have already seen it so many times.
Clark, “Model Theatrical Works,” 185.
Clark, Chinese Cultural Revolution, 259.
Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 26.
Yurchak, 25.
Yurchak, 10.
Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarinism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 205.
Lefort, 211.
Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality (London: Verso, 2016), 155.
Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 116.
Lefort, 137.
Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 10.
Bazin, “Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema,” 34.
Maurice Meisner, Marxism, Maoism, and Utopianism: Eight Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 156, 163, 164.
Meisner, 156, 168–69.
Meisner, 170.
Meisner, 183.
The term used during the Cultural Revolution was jixu geming 继续革命, though it obviously relates to the earlier Trotskyist concept of “permanent revolution,” which had been translated as buduan geming 不断革命.
John Bryan Starr, “Conceptual Foundations of Mao Tse-Tung’s Theory of Continuous Revolution,” Asian Survey 11, no. 6 (1971): 610–28. These themes are summarized on p. 611.
Pickowicz, China on Film, 86–87.
Wylie Sypher, “The Aesthetic of Revolution: The Marxist Melodrama,” Kenyon Review 10, no. 3 (1948); reprinted in Tragedy: Vision and Form, ed. Robert Corrigan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), 258–67.
Elisabeth R. Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 211–15.
Jane Gaines, “The Melos in Marxist Theory,” in The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, ed. David E. James and Rick Berg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 58–59.
Gaines, 59–60.
The only model opera film that does not end with a tableau vivant is Raid on the White Tiger Regiment (Qixi baihu tuan 奇袭白虎团; Su Li 苏里, 1972). Of the other nine model opera films, five use a track-in during the shot, one has a track-out, two have no mobile framing, and one (Fighting on the Plain) uses a zoom-in. Note that the model ballet films are not included here, because they do not tend to end in tableaux vivants. Note also that one video version of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy that is now available substitutes freeze-frames edited together with what feel like jump cuts for the tableau vivant plus track-in of the original film. These freeze-frames are made from the original shot, and I have not been able to determine when this version was created and circulated.
For a history of this practice, see Kirsten Gram Holmström, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770–1815 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1967), 209–33.
The entire script of the Fighting on the Plains yangbanxi is available at http://www.360doc.com/.
Sypher, “Aesthetic of Revolution,” 261.
Sypher, 262.
Sypher, 266.
Sypher, 267.
Ellen R. Judd, “Prescriptive Dramatic Theory of the Cultural Revolution,” in Drama in the People’s Republic of China, ed. Constantine Tung and Colin MacKerras (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 110.
Clark, “Model Theatrical Works,” 184.
Pang, Art of Cloning, 180; Jerome Silbergeld, Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press/Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art, 2008), 32–33.
Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 134.
Roberts, Maoist Model Theatre, 72.
Berry, “Red Poetics,” 36.
Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” collected in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 135.
Thompson, 135.
Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 30.
Clark, Chinese Cultural Revolution, 127–28.
Keathley defines the “cinephiliac moment” as “the fetishizing of fragments of a film, either individual shots or marginal (often unintentional) details in the image, especially those that appear only for a moment.” Keathley, Cinephilia and History; or, The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 7.
Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image, 158.
Jason McGrath, “Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema,” Opera Quarterly: Performance + Theory + History 26, no. 2–3 (2010): 374.
See, e.g., a musician’s comments in Mittler, A Continuous Revolution, 22.
Berry, “Red Poetics,” 48–49.
Xing Fan, Staging Revolution: Artistry and Aesthetics in Model Beijing Opera during the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018), esp. 239–58.
6. A Long Take on Post–Socialist Realism
“Scar literature” or “literature of the wounded” (shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学) was one of the first new movements in literature following the Cultural Revolution, appearing first in 1977 and continuing into the early 1980s in various forms, including in a number of “scar” films. It allowed for public expression of the traumas and dislocations of the Cultural Revolution and introduced elements of humanism and individualism that distanced it from the revolutionary cultural forms of the Mao era.
The Four Modernizations—of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology—were advocated by Zhou Enlai as early as the 1960s but became undisputed national policy only after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978. The initial “scar” stories of 1977–78 would speak not of the Four Modernizations but of the better days to come under the tenure of Hua Guofeng 华国锋, who briefly led China immediately after the Cultural Revolution.
Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art,” in Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, 19–27 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 19–27.
Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype, 22.
Schweinitz, 110.
Schweinitz, 115.
Arif Dirlik, “Postsocialism? Reflections on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” in Marxism and the Chinese Experience: Issues in Contemporary Chinese Socialism, ed. Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner, 361–84 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989).
Just a few examples in the China field include my own Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Robin Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010); Deborah S. Davis and Wang Feng, eds., Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); Judith Farquhar, Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Haomin Gong, Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012). Those covering Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are too numerous to mention, but one notable work that covers those areas as well as China is Aleš Erjavec, ed., Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Paul Pickowicz, “Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism,” in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, ed. Nick Browne, Paul Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau, 57–87 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Chris Berry and Mary Ann Farquhar, “Post-Socialist Strategies: An Analysis of Yellow Earth and Black Cannon Incident,” in Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, ed. Linda Erlich and David Desser, 81–116 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).
Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China.
Yingjin Zhang, “Rebel without a Cause? China’s New Urban Generation and Postsocialist Filmmaking,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Zhang Zhen, 49–80 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).
Berry, Postsocialist Cinema, 5.
McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity.
McGrath, 129–64. An earlier version of the same chapter appears in Zhang, Urban Generation, 81–114. I should acknowledge that Yaohua Shi used the closely related term postsocialist hyperrealism to describe the style of certain films of the second half of the 1990s, but my use of post–socialist realism asserts a much wider application. Shi, “Maintaining Law and Order in the City: New Tales of the People’s Police,” in Zhang, Urban Generation, 316–43.
Zhang Nuanxin and Li Tuo, “Tan dianying yuyan de xiandaihua” [On the modernization of film language], Dianying yishu, no. 3 (1979): 40–52. Translations are my own, but an existing translation in English is Zhang Nuanxin and Li Tuo, “The Modernization of Film Language,” trans. Hou Jianping, in Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era, ed. George S. Semsel, Xia Hong, and Hou Jianping, 10–20 (New York: Praeger, 1990).
Yingjin Zhang, “Directors, Aesthetics, Genres: Chinese Postsocialist Cinema, 1979–2010,” in A Companion to Chinese Cinema, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 62–64.
Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).
Bai Jingsheng, “Diudiao xiju de guaizhang” [Throwing away the crutch of theater], Dianying yishu cankao ziliao [Film art reference materials], no. 1 (1979). English translation available as Bai Jingsheng, “Throwing Away the Walking Stick of Drama,” trans. Hou Jianping, in Semsel et al., Chinese Film Theory, 5–9.
Zhang and Li, “Tan dianying yuyan de xiandaihua,” 40.
Zhang and Li, 44.
Zhang and Li, 44.
Zhang and Li, 40–41.
Zhang and Li, 45.
Zhang and Li, 46.
Cecile Lagesse, “Bazin and the Politics of Realism in Mainland China,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 316.
Zhou Chuanji and Li Tuo, “Yi ge zhide zhongshi de dianying meixue xuepai: Guanyu chang jingtou lilun” [An attention-worthy school of cinematic aesthetics: On the long-take theory], in Dianying wenhua congkan [Film culture anthology] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1980), 1:148–60.
A graduate of the Beijing Film Academy who attended in the early 1990s once told me that Bazin was more foundational in the curriculum than any other single film theorist.
These figures do not take into account the variable coverage of certain journals in the database over the decades, but the point remains that interest in Bazin certainly appears not to have diminished in the twenty-first century compared with earlier years.
Schweinitz, Film and Stereotype, 238.
Schweinitz, 247.
Jason McGrath, “Black Cannon Incident: Countering the Counter-espionage Fantasy,” in Berry, Chinese Films in Focus II, 25–31.
My aversion to using “generation” as the primary way to categorize Post-Mao Chinese films comes partly from the immense variability of the Fifth Generation’s films over time. Taking as examples its three most prominent directors—Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tian Zhuangzhuang—their early films had much more in common with contemporaneous films of the Fourth Generation than with the melodramas of the Cultural Revolution aimed at Western festival audiences that the same directors would make in the 1990s—Farewell My Concubine, To Live, and The Blue Kite, respectively—or the martial arts epics they would make another decade or so later, that is, The Promise (Wuji 无极; 2005), Hero (Yingxiong 英雄; 2002), and The Warrior and the Wolf (Lang zai ji 狼灾记; 2009), respectively.
Ni Zhen, Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China’s Fifth Generation, trans. Chris Berry (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 164.
Ni, 166.
See, e.g., Zhang Jia-Xuan, “The Big Parade” (review), Film Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1989): 57–59.
Jerome Silbergeld, China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 259.
Paul Clark, Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005), 150.
These included Dong Cunrui 董存瑞 (Guo Wei 郭维, 1955), Railway Guerrillas (Tiedao youjidui 铁道游击队; Zhao Ming 赵明, 1956), and Land Mine Warfare (Dilei zhan 地雷战; Tang Yingqi 唐英奇, Xu Da 徐达, and Wu Jianhai 吴健海, 1962). I have written more about the link to Dong Cunrui in Jason McGrath, “Post-socialist Realism in Chinese Cinema,” in Red Legacies in China: The Afterlives of the Communist Revolution, ed. Enhua Zhang and Jie Li, 214–41 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), while Julian Ward cites the latter two films as sources of the phrase in Ward, “Filming the Anti-Japanese War: The Devils and Buffoons of Jiang Wen’s Guizi laile,” New Cinemas 2, no. 2 (2004): 108.
Gary G. Xu, Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 56. Jie Li argues that Jiang Wen’s black-and-white cinematography is not intended to achieve an unmediated realist effect but rather that he “is far more interested in reproducing and subverting the mediated collective memories of the period,” particularly through “the cinema of the Cold War.” Li, “Discoloured Vestiges of History: Black and White in the Age of Colour Cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6, no. 3 (2012): 250, 252.
Berry, Speaking in Images, 87.
Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image, 157.
Walter Goodman, “China’s ‘Yellow Earth,’” New York Times, April 11, 1986; Goodman, “‘Big Parade,’ Celebration by the Chinese Military,” New York Times, March 15, 1988. Goodman, for example, does not even grasp Yellow Earth’s basic message about Cuiqiao’s fate and the irony of the line “It’s the Communists who save the people” in the song she sings.
Evgeny Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History: Museum of the Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 5.
Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces, 59–62.
Silbergeld, China into Film, 20.
Jason McGrath, “Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China,” World Picture 3 (Summer 2009), http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_3/McGrath.html.
Geremie Barmé and John Minford, eds., Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 253.
Bonnie McDougall, The Yellow Earth (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1991), 6.
Michael Berry, Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022), 178.
André Bazin, “Cabiria: The Voyage to the End of Neorealism,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Gray, 87.
“White telephone” is a metonym deriving from the lavish interiors that were the frequent settings for these films.
Ni, Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy, 134–35, 159–62, 176–80.
Ni, 168.
For more discussion of this, see McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 136–47.
Chris Berry has elaborated on the concept of “on-the-spot realism” (jishizhuyi 纪实主义) in “Facing Reality: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism,” in The First Guangzhou Triennial: Reinterpretation—a Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990–2000), ed. Wu Hung et al. (Guangzhou: Guangzhou Museum of Art, 2002), 121–31, and “Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism,” in Zhang, Urban Generation, 115–34. On the importance of xianchang to China’s vibrant postsocialist independent documentary scene, see J. P. Sniadecki, “The Cruelty of the Social: Xianchang, Intersubjectivity, and Interobjectivity,” in DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film, ed. Zhang Zhen and Angela Zito, 57–75 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), and Luke Robinson, “From ‘Public’ to ‘Private’: Chinese Documentary and the Logic of Xianchang,” in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record, ed. Chris Berry, Lu Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel, 177–94 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010).
Kracauer, Theory of Film, 60.
Keathley, Cinephilia and History.
Mullarkey, Philosophy and the Moving Image, 202.
André Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 102–3. Emphasis mine. (Gray, 37.) As in earlier chapters, where available, I use Barnard’s translations of Bazin rather than the looser ones by Hugh Gray that are more readily available in the United States, but I cite Gray’s translations of the same passages in parentheses in the notes.
This comparison is pursued through close readings of films from the two eras in Augusta Palmer, “Scaling the Skyscraper: Images of Cosmopolitan Consumption in Street Angel (1937) and Beautiful New World (1998),” in Zhang, Urban Generation, 181–204.
Chris Berry, “Seeking Truth from Fiction: Feature Films as Historiography in Deng’s China,” Film History 7, no. 1 (1995): 94.
Zhang and Li, “Tan dianying yuyan de xiandaihua,” 45, 15.
Yang Ni, “Lun jishixing gushi yingpian de xushi jiegou: Jian yu Tan Peisheng tongzhi shangque” [On the narrative structure of documentary-style fiction films: A response to Comrade Tan Peisheng], Dianying yishu [Film art], no. 7 (1984): 17–30. Published in English as Yang Ni, “Film Is Film: A Response to Tan Peisheng,” trans. Hou Jianping, in Semsel et al., Chinese Film Theory, 59–75. Following notes provide page numbers for the original and the translation, in that order.
Yang, 19–20; 63.
Yang, 26; 69.
Yang, 26; 72; Kracauer, Theory of Film.
Hang, Literature the People Love, 75.
Lukács, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, 43.
Lukács.
Lukács, 132.
André Bazin, “Umberto D: A Great Work,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 2:81.
Michael Berry, Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures: Jia Zhangke’s “Hometown Trilogy” (London: British Film Institute, 2009), 30–31.
Wikipedia defines mumblecore as “a subgenre of independent film characterized by naturalistic acting and dialogue (sometimes improvised), low-budget film production, an emphasis on dialogue over plot, and a focus on the personal relationships of people in their 20s and 30s.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumblecore.
I take the term “minor” ellipses—in which relatively unimportant plot points are skipped over and left for the audience to deduce as they follow the larger story—from David Desser’s analysis of ellipses in the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Desser, “A Filmmaker for All Seasons,” in Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, ed. Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 20–21.
Gilberto Perez, The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 194.
André Bazin, “De Sica: Metteur en Scène,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 2:66.
Barmé and Minford, Seeds of Fire, 259.