An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937 available in Hardcover
An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937
- ISBN-10:
- 0226982378
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226982373
- Pub. Date:
- 02/01/2006
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937
Hardcover
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$117.00Overview
The first sustained historical study of the emergence of cinema in China, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is a fascinating narrative that illustrates the immense cultural significance of film and its power as a vehicle for social change. Named after a major feature film on the making of Chinese cinema, only part of which survives, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen reveals the intricacies of this cultural movement and explores its connections to other art forms such as photography, architecture, drama, and literature. In light of original archival research, Zhang Zhen examines previously unstudied films and expands the important discussion of how they modeled modern social structures and gender roles in early twentieth-century China.
The first volume in the new and groundbreaking series Cinema and Modernity, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen is an innovative—and well illustrated—look at the cultural history of Chinese modernity through the lens of this seminal moment in Shanghai cinema.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226982373 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2006 |
| Series: | Cinema and Modernity |
| Pages: | 456 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d) |
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AN AMOROUS HISTORY OF THE SILVER SCREEN
SHANGHAI CINEMA, 1896-1937
By ZHANG ZHEN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-98237-3
Chapter One
VERNACULAR MODERNISM AND CINEMATIC EMBODIMENT
THE QUESTION OF early Chinese cinema is inexorably connected to the question of vernacular modernism, a concept that has recently stirred up interests and debates in film studies and related fields. I approach vernacular modernism from a specific historical location (in this case China, particularly Shanghai) and place it within the global landscape of modernity in the early twentieth century. Here I will focus on the dynamic but also tension-ridden process of urbanization and modernization against the background of a wide-ranging vernacularizing trend in language, urbanism, mass culture, and everyday life. My theoretical investment in the vernacular joins in the emerging scholarship on the capacity of cinema for serving as both a reflection of and an antidote to the stressful and alienating conditions of modern life. More importantly, cinema as a modern global vernacular par excellence helped forge a new human sensorium and shape a synthetic and productive form of embodiment against the dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism and colonialism.
Film culture in China between 1896 and 1937, from the arrival of cinema to the Japanese invasion, was anintegral part of a profound transformation in everyday life. It changed the way the world was perceived and experienced, knowledge production and dissemination, and the formation of modern subjectivities. The creation and reception of modern imagery through the cinematic vernacular were informed by a host of old and new technologies and related cultural practices. Two interwoven dimensions are central to these concerns: First, the complex ties between cinematic modernity and the vernacular movement, and by extension, the interaction between verbal and visual culture within the broader scenario of the democratization of writing and iconography. Second is the emergence of a film culture in cosmopolitan Shanghai and the new gender relations and perceptions of the body that configured under the impact of mass media and consumerism.
Throughout the book, the vernacular is conceived as an "episteme" and a historical trope arising from a particular form of cultural experience and comprising a web of references and their signification, which the cinema embodies and constantly refashions. The term vernacular readily invokes the linguistic mode of expression and indeed may be linked to the early conception of cinema as a new Tower of Babel. This was encapsulated in D. W. Griffith and Vachel Lindsay's vision of cinema as a modern "universal language" that would unify a world divided since the ancient fall of Babylon. I subscribe to the notion that this concept is globally relevant, following Miriam Hansen's argument that "American movies of the classical period offered something like the first global vernacular" for mediating and articulating the modern experience. It impacted-but was also transformed by-different international film cultures through reception, consumption, and appropriation.
My use of the concept of vernacular modernism overlaps with Hansen's, yet extends into the deeper layers of history. The cinematic vernacular in the Chinese context reveals the content of modern life and, more importantly, determines specific forms of expressibility that defy any rigid boundaries-between the verbal and the visual, the secular and the nonsecular, the material and the imaginary, the high and the low, the political and the aesthetic, and finally, China and the world. This conception has affinity with Jonathan Friedman's notion of modernity as "a field of identifications" resulting from the cyclical historical commercialization and dissemination of cultural products in the global arena and promising transcultural and intersubjective exchanges. Modernism is traditionally and institutionally associated with the high-brow culture of the West (including its self-reflexive critique), which, as a symptom of globalization, also infected the Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the century. Vernacular modernism, however, is open to and dependent on a mass media-based authorship and spectatorship. The vernacular, intrinsically performative and generative, exceeds any attempt to fix its parameters. Yet it is not about a compromised middle-ground, but rather a force field that constantly produces tension as well as energy, separating or combining diverse social and material components, aesthetic traditions and trends, and sensorial and emotional flows.
Diverging from the language-centered model of film theory that has dominated the field of cinema studies, I pursue the more recent theoretical and historical moves toward a sensorial history of cinema. This history is one that parallels, intersects, and embodies the history of urban modernity in the wake of industrial capitalism in the world context. In this regard, my book presents a cultural history of the body and the affective regime created or mediated in China through the cinema in the early decades of the twentieth century. The specific films and modes-such as slapstick comedy, melodrama, martial arts film, and horror-serve as nodal points for portraying this vernacular overtly or covertly, and fit within the "body genres," which prompt visceral responses as much or more than intellectual ones. This technologically and culturally mediated vernacular competed with the nativist vernacular movement that attempted to install a radically new form of modern vernacular (mixing Beijing dialect, Western grammar, and Japanese loan-words) as the standard, official language of a unified modern nation state. On the profilmic level, the cinematic vernacular includes both linguistic elements such as dialogues and texts and cinematic elements such as editing, sound, and lighting. In a broad context, it stems from the fertile ground of a vibrant vernacular culture-including the teahouses, theaters, storytelling, popular fiction, music, dance, painting, photography, and discourses of modern wonders and magic-that cuts across the arbitrary divide of the cinematic and the noncinematic, the premodern and the modern, China and the outside world. As a dialectic of home-spun formulations and "imitations" of imported movies (and lifestyles), the early Chinese silent and sound film practices manifested an energetic, if sometimes aggressive, appropriation of the global vernacular represented by Hollywood and other variants, including literary adaptations of Western and Japanese literature and drama. Thus on both domestic and international levels, in linguistic and cinematic domains, early Chinese cinema contributed to world cinema and modern visual culture with a specific brand of modernism à la Shanghai Yangjingbang-a local vernacular with unabashed cosmopolitan aspirations (this will be discussed more in chapter 2).
This cinematic vernacular came out of the tumultuous cultural sea change across the threshold of the twentieth century: Chinese people tried to come to terms with modernization spanning from the late Qing reforms, the Republican revolution of 1911, the May Fourth and New Culture movement, and the subsequent political and social upheavals until the Japanese invasion in 1937. These large-scale sociocultural transformations and waves of accelerated modernization substantially, and at times violently, altered the spiritual and physical landscape of China, especially its cities. Rather than treating this social landscape as a distant background for the cinema, I regard some of its features as significant signposts in an expansive vernacular scene-in both linguistic and theatrical senses-on which the cinematic experience is lived out and enacted, and which itself is reshaped by the cinema. Instead of tackling the specific watershed historical events head on, which has been done extensively by scholars, my focus will be on the complex interaction between cinema and history, and how the history of film culture confronts and revises the more familiar narratives of modern China.
Because the film experience is public and requires an architectural infrastructure, a history of film culture would be inadequate without considerations of the physical forms, geographical distributions, and social and aesthetic function of exhibition venues. Thus the vernacular also encompasses the urban architectural environment essential to film experience-the theaters, amusement halls, teahouses, parks, cafés, dance halls, department stores, and race courts, as well as the residential communities where these venues were often located. This environment was more than the sum of physical structures; it provided the site for a complex ecology of material conditions and sociocorporeal relations. This book does not, however, attempt to detail a social history of movie theaters and moviegoing experience. Rather, my interests in theater architecture lie more in the subtle dialectic relations between the vernacular "hardware" (locations, infrastructure, and technology) and the "software" (imaginative communities, everyday practices, social relations, and aesthetic expressions) that manifest the utility and meaning of the cinematic vernacular for the moviegoer, the quintessential modern urban subject. This subplot, which traces the changing face and place of movie theaters throughout the first three decades of cinema in China, is intimately tied with the transformation of spectatorship at different stages. For instance, in chapters 3 and 4, I connect the shift from a teahousestyle venue to the interiorized and gentrified purpose-built cinema during the first half of the 1920s. This shift in venue was simultaneous with the emergence of a morally centered narrative cinema and the discourse concerning the relationship between enlightenment and entertainment. The martial-arts film craze at the end of that decade, however, instigated a certain regression by throwing the door back open to the working class. The interactions between the linguistic, the visual, the visceral, and the architectural domains and their capacities for social change constitute the foundations of early Chinese film culture's vernacular scene.
Key to a new understanding of Chinese modernity lies in the question of women, as has been demonstrated, for example, by Rey Chow's seminal study, Woman and Chinese Modernity, in which she offers provocative rereadings of the urban fiction by the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school authors. She argues for the "modernity" of this literature-a popular literature that was systematically discredited as unworthy by the May Fourth literary discourse. Early Chinese cinema was heavily indebted to this middlebrow literature. It was written in a hybrid language and disseminated widely through newspapers and magazines, and much of it was adapted to the silver screen, making it accessible for the illiterate or semiliterate audience, especially women. The cinematic translation of this literature also radically redefined the meaning of the vernacular, particularly through first generation of female actors, who embodied modernity as well as new models for Chinese women. The audiences in the theaters responded to the tears shed and laughter emitted onscreen, thereby creating a collective sensorium. This sensorium helped absorb, deflect, and overcome the shocks and stress of modern life and release the mounting tension in a society caught in between existing patriarchal codes and nascent conceptions of gender and sexuality informed by urban life style and consumer culture. The vernacular modernism formulated and expressed by the cinematic experience is therefore inseparable from the new configurations of gender relations and perceptions of the body.
In the following I will elaborate on some key theoretical and historiographical issues outlined above. I will begin with a general discussion of a body of recent scholarship that reconceives cinema as modernity incarnated. I then explore the theoretical import of vernacular modernism for cinema studies and the methodological possibilities it opens up for studying a particular film culture within the global context. Ultimately, I conceptualize early Chinese cinema in relation to the historically specific vernacular movement, and propose an embodied and gender-conscious approach to the subject as the "amorous" relationship between women and cinema significantly redefined it.
CINEMA AND MODERN LIFE
To globally contextualize the development of early Shanghai cinema, it is necessary to begin with an evaluation of the recent scholarship on the symbiotic relationship between cinema and modernity. The new critical history of early cinema has redirected attention to the epoch that provided the catalyst for cinema's birth and worldwide dissemination. What started as a tentative "archaeological" project to salvage and make sense of the legacy of early cinema has turned into a rigorous inquiry into the relationship between film and the culture of modernity-an inquiry that has hitherto only focused on the European and American experiences. The first wave of this scholarship began in the mid-1980s with archivists and film historians-silent-film buffs who worked primarily with empirical and textual methods. A second wave of literature by film and art historians with more pronounced theoretical agendas widened the category "early cinema" beyond the narrow period of nonnarrative or preclassical narrative cinema before 1915. Borrowing ideas and methods from critical theory, these scholars have engaged the writings of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, which have been more systematically translated and interpreted in the past two decades.
The second wave of scholarship on early cinema and mass culture peaked around the centenary of cinema in the mid-1990s. The endurance of cinema in the face of the explosive popularity of television and the Internet, and the cross-pollination of these old and new screen technologies and social practices further inspired critical probing into the cinema's early years. Scholars of the second wave explored mass attractions, and why this quintessential medium for storytelling and sensorial experience illuminates the phenomenon of modernity and its unfinished business in postmodernity. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, an anthology published in 1995, showcases a range of critical approaches and methodologies for linking cinema with a cluster of other cultural forms. It also declares, almost as a manifesto for the emerging field, that "cinema ... became the fullest expression and combination of modernity's attributes" in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The authors argue that the complex relationships between various precinematic or paracinematic practices, such as impressionist painting, photography, melodramatic theater, wax museums, morgues, mail catalogues, and panoramic literary genres, impacted or were derived from the cinema. As such they provide keys to the understanding of "cinema spectatorship as a historical practice." Rather than a quantitative and evolutionary culmination of these preceding or concomitant modern cultural practices, the series of early or adjacent practices exerted considerable "epistemological pressure" on the emergence of cinema, which in turn "marked the unprecedented crossroads of these phenomena of modernity." Cinema congealed these "component parts" of modern life into "active synthesis with each other.... In providing a crucible for elements already evident in other aspects of modern culture, cinema accidentally outpaced these other forms, ending up as far more than just another novel gadget." Thus, it is not only fruitful but also imperative to ground early cinema in the matrix of everyday life in modernity-abundant forms of mass and commodity culture that intertwined with the flourishing of the cinema, as well as the political, social, economical, and cultural transformations.
Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life is a collective effort to map out the terrain of an emerging field in which cinema studies rejoins the study of visual culture and sociocultural history. A number of monographs have also treated the subject. The underlying theoretical interests of Lynne Kirby's Parallel Tracks, an exhaustive study of the early American and British railroad films, stem from the fascination with the manufactured kinetic sensations of both cinema and trains. These emblematic modern machines engender and transform the human sensorium and social behaviors. Drawing on Wolfgang Schivelbusch's influential study of the railway's impact on landscape and human perception, Kirby applies the rail passenger's "panoramic perception" of the moving landscape to the experience of cinema. Because both kinds of "journeys" are predicated on spatiotemporal discontinuity and the "shock of surprise" (accidents, shifts in point of views), the spectator-passenger embodies a modern urban subject "jostled by forces that destabilized and unnerved the individual." This unstable collective subject is thus "hysterical or, in the nineteenth century terms, 'neurasthenic' subject." Its formation is also intertwined with nation-building, colonial expansion, and American cinema's claim to universality. Because a large number of railroad films stage scenarios of romance and transactions of libidinal economy, multiple gender performances and transformations unfolded along the parallel tracks of the railroad and cinema.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from AN AMOROUS HISTORY OF THE SILVER SCREEN by ZHANG ZHEN Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part One - The Vernacular Scene
1. Vernacular Modernism and Cinematic Embodiment
2. Worldly Shanghai, Metropolitan Spectators
3. Teahouse, Shadowplay, and Laborer's Love
4. Building a Film World: Distraction versus Education
Part Two - Competing Moderns
5. Screenwriting, Trick Photography, and Melodramatic Retribution
6. The Anarchic Body Language of the Martial Arts Film
7. Fighting over the Modern Girl: Hard and Soft Films
8. Song at Midnight: Acoustic Horror and the Grotesque Face of History
Envoi
Abbreviations
Notes
Glossary
Filmography
Bibliography
Index