Fallen women, rising stars, new horizons: Shanghai silent film as vernacular modernism

Film Quarterly

Volumn 54, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 10-22

  Hansen, Miriam Bratu ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

^b Committee on Cinema and Media Studies ^*

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748906142     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1213797     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism," forthcoming in: Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 2000)
2. also in Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 59-77
3. My understanding of the public sphere as a general social "horizon of experience" is indebted to Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, The Public Sphere and Experience ( 1972), tr. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Daniel, Assenka Oksiloff, intr. M. Hansen (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
4. Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Fall 1992): 3-41
5. also see M. Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street," Critical Inquiry 25.2 (Winter 1999): 306-43
6. See, for instance, texts by Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Stephen Heath, Laura Mulvey, and Colin MacCabe in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)
7. For examples of neoformalist and cognitivist approaches, see 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)
8. D. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)
9. K. Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988)
10. Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
11. N. Carroll, "Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment," Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 37-70
12. Also see Jane Gaines, ed., Classical Hollywood Narrative: The Paradigm Wars (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992)
13. See, for instance, Editors of Cahiers du cinéma, "John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln,"
14. Raymond Bellour, "The Obvious and the Code,"
15. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,"
16. Colin MacCabe, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure,"
17. Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space,"
18. all reprinted in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology
19. Christian Metz, The Imaginaiy Signifier (1977), tr. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982)
20. Bordwell, "La Nouvelle Mission de Feuillade
21. or, What Was Mise-en-Scène?," The Velvet Light Trap 37 (1996): 23
22. Bordwell, Narration and the Fiction Film, 35
23. also see Bordwell, On the Histoiy of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 142
24. and Bordwell, "Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision," in Post-Theory, 87-107
25. Kristin Thompson's new study is concerned with the persistence of classical principles past 1960, see Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
26. For a critical account of this tendency, see D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ide ology in Contemporary Film Theory (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988)
27. Antonin Artaud, "The Shell and the Clergyman: Film Scenario," transition 29-30 (June 1930): 65
28. quoted in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (1960; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 189
29. Louis Aragon, "On Decor" (1918) in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), I:165
30. Also see ibid., Colette, "Cinema: The Cheat"
31. Louis Delluc, "Beauty in the Cinema" (1917)
32. and "From Orestes to Rio Jim" (1921)
33. Blaise Cendrars, "The Modem: A New Art, the Cinema" (1919)
34. Jean Epstein, "Magnification" (1921)
35. and "Bonjour cinéma and other writings by Jean Epstein," tr. Tom Milne, Afterimage, no.10 [n.d.]: esp. 9-16
36. Victoria de Grazia, "Americanism for Export," Wedge 7-8 (Winter-Spring 1985): 74-81; 77
37. On European versions of Americanism, see, for instance, Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
38. Thomas J. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), esp. chaps. 4 & 5
39. Alf Lüdtke, Inge Marßolek, Adelheid von Saldern, eds., Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996)
40. Jean-Louis Cohen and Humbert Damisch, eds., Américanisme et modernité: L'idéal américain dans l'architecture (Paris: EHESS, Flammarion, 1993)
41. On the role of foreign markets for the American film industry, see K. Thompson, Exporting Entertainment (London: British Film Institute, 1985)
42. Ian Jarvie, Hollywood's Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
43. David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds., Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit Press, 1994)
44. Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997)
45. On the celebration of film as a new "universal language" during the 1910s, see M. Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76-81, 183-87
46. Benjamin develops the notion of an "optical unconscious" in "A Short History of Photography" (1931), tr. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13 (Spring 1972): 7-8
47. and in his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 235-37
48. The significance of the cinema as a new and alternative public sphere was theorized, in the context of the German 1920s, by Siegfried Kracauer, who wrote hundreds of reviews and essays on an emerging media, mass, and consumer culture; in particular, see "Cult of Distraction" (1926), in Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, tr., ed., and intr. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 323-28
49. On the practice of converting happy endings of American films into "Russian endings," see Yuri Tsivian, "Some Preparatory Remarks on Russian Cinema," Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919, ed. Paolo Cherchi Usai et al. (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 24
50. also see Mary Ann Doane, "Melodrama, Temporality, Recognition: American and Russian Silent Cinema," Cinefocus (Bloomington, IN), 2:1 (Fall 1991): 13-26
51. On the popularity of American "low" genres in Soviet Russia, see Tsivian, "Between the Old and the New: Soviet Film Culture in 1918-1924," Griffithiana 55/56 (1996): 15-63
52. On the tension between the film as classically constructed product and the cinema experience, see Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 99-101 & passim
53. Marie Cambon, "The Dream Palaces of Shanghai: American Films in China's Largest Metropolis Prior to 1949," Asian Cinema 7 (1995): 34
54. For a filmography, see Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai, Xing Zuwen, "Chinese Cinema: Catalogue of Films, 1905-1937," tr. Derek Elley, Griffithiana 54 (October 1995): 4-91
55. and the highly useful dossier compiled and translated by Elley, "Peach Blossom Dreams: Silent Chinese Cinema Remembered," Griffithiana 60/61 (October 1997): 126-79. At the Pordenone festival, the Chinese films were shown with simultaneous translation whenever intertitles were not bilingual; for the films shown on video, I gratefully depended on improvised translation by Zhang Zhen
56. For accounts available in English, see Tse-Tung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960)
57. For the connection between the May Fourth movement and left-wing cinema, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, "The Tradition of Modern Chinese Cinema: Some Preliminary Explorations and Hypotheses," in Chris Berry, ed., Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 6-20
58. Ma Ning, "The Textual and Critical Difference of Being Radical: Reconstructing Chinese Leftist Films of the 1930s," Wide Angle 11.2 (1989): 22-31
59. and Chris Berry, "Poisonous Weeds or National Treasures: Chinese Left Cinema in the 1930s," Jump Cut 34 (1989): 187-94
60. Also see Paul Pickowicz, "The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the 1930s," Modern China 17.1 (January 1991): 38-75
61. The pioneering, if not entirely reliable, account of this tradition remains Jay Leyda, Dianying: Electric Shadows: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972)
62. Also see Scott Meek and Tony Rayns, Electric Shadows: 45 Years of Chinese Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1980)
63. John Ellis, "Electric Shadows in Italy," Screen 23.2 (July/August 1982): 79-83
64. and Marie-Claire Quiquemelle and Jean-Loup Passek, eds., Le Cinéma Chinois (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985)
65. Paul Pickowicz, "Melodramatic Representation and the 'May Fourth' Tradition of Chinese Cinema," in Ellen Widmer and David Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 308
66. For a different approach to the melodramatic quality of 1930s Chinese films, see William Rothman, "The Goddess: Reflections on Melodrama East and West," in Wimal Dissanayake, ed., Melodrama and Asian Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 59-72
67. For revisionist approaches to melodrama in the Western tradition, see Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987)
68. especially Gledhill's introduction, "The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation," 5-39
69. See Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
70. and the collection of articles edited by Yingjin Zhang, Romance, Sexuality, Identity: Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)
71. The most comprehensive and original account of Shanghai film culture as part of urban modernity can be found in Zhang Zhen, "'An Amorous History of the Silver Screen': Film Culture, Urban Modernity, and the Vernacular Experience in China, 1896-1937," Ph.D. dissertation (University of Chicago, 1998)
72. Accounts of the upheaval and challenges of modernization and migration can be found in Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Policing Shanghai 1927-1937 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995)
73. Betty Peh-T'i Wei, Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
74. and Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995)
75. The term "disembedding" for the impact of modernization on social relations is used by Anthony Giddens; see, for instance, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990)
76. and Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991)
77. Pickowicz, "Melodramatic Representation," 307
78. Leyda, Dianying, 79
79. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 21
80. Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 203f
81. See Kristine Harris, "The New Woman: Image, Subject, and Dissent in 1930s Shanghai Film Culture," Republican China 20.2 (1995): 55-79
82. and a later version of this essay, "The New Woman Incident: Cinema, Scandal, and Spectacle in 1935 Shanghai," in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiaopeng Lu (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 277-302
83. See Rothman, "The Goddess," 66
84. See Harris, "The New Woman Incident," and documents in Elley, ed., "Peach Blossom Dreams," 137-43
85. The concept of the "mass ornament" is developed in Kracauer's 1927 essay with the same title; see The Mass Ornament, 75-86
86. See the section on Sun Yu in Elley, ed., "Peach Blossom Dreams," 145-61
87. "A Gentle Discourse on a Genius: Sun Yu," and Li Cheuk-To, "Eight Films of Sun Yu," tr. Jacob Wong, Cinemaya: The Asian Film Magazine II (1991): 53-63
88. see also Chris Berry, "The Sublimative Text: Sex and Revolution in Big Road," East-West Film Journal 2.2 (June 1988): 66-86
89. The young woman's disease resonates not coincidentally with that of Mimi in La Bohème, as does the milieu in which the protagonists live, a connection probably mediated by Frank Borzage's film Seventh Heaven (1927), which Daybreak echoes in, among other things, a remarkable travelling shot that traverses the staircase of the apartment building
90. See Paolo Cherchi Usai, program note, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, 1995
91. This concept of character is central to the classical paradigm; see, for instance, D. Bordwell and K. Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 69, 82
92. Also see Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
93. and the special issue on "The Filmic Character" of Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound 24 (Autumn 1997)
94. Of course, there are still the private moments in which the viewer gets a glimpse of her "true" self, as when she releases her pet bird from the cage before being led from the apartment by the police
95. This moment also resonates with Dishonored, in particular a scene earlier in the film in which Dietrich masquerades as a peasant girl, which creates a similar effect of ironic incongruity
96. Cited in Leyda, Dianying, 13
97. For an interesting allegorical reading of this scene, see Chow, Primitive Passions 4-11
98. also see Ma Ning, "The Textual and Critical Difference of Being Radical," 23
99. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 12