Untitled

AN AMOROUS HISTORY OF THE SILVER SCREEN
1Rlif.~:t
CINEMA AND MODERNITY
A series edited by Tom Gunning
I
AN
A M O CO (UJ § H ·§ 1 CO V
OF THE SILVER SCREEN
SHANGHAI CINEMA, 1896-1937
ZHANG ZHEN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS • Chicago &London

ZHANG ZHEN is associate professor of cinema studies at New York University.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago/0637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2005 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2005
Printed in the United States of America
14131211100908070605 12345
ISBN: 0-226-98237-8 (cloth)

ISBN: 0-226-98238-6 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zhang, Zhen, 1962 July 8-

An amorous history of the silver screen: Shanghai cinema, 1896-1937 I Zhang Zhen.
p. cm. - (Cinema and modernity)
Includes bibllographical references and index.
ISBN 0-226-98237-8 (doth: alk. paper) - ISBN 0-226-98238-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
I. Motion pictures-China-Shanghai-Histury. 2. Motion pict\lre industry-China-
Shanghai-History. l. Title. II. Series.
PNI 993.5.C4Z55 2005
791.43'0951 I '32-dc22
20050192.56
@) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Primed Library
Materials, ANSI 239.48-1992.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations • vi
Acknowledgments • ix
Introduction • xiii
PART ONE THE VERNACULAR SCENE
Chapter 1 Vernacular Modernism and Cinematic Embodiment • L

Chapter 2 Worldly Shanghai, Metropolitan Spectators • 42
Chapter 3 Teahouse, Shadowplay, and Laborer's Love • 89
Chapter 4 Building a Film World: Distraction versus Education • 118
PART TWO COMPETING MODERNS
Chapter 5 Screenwriting, Trick Photography, and Melodramatic

Retribution • 151
Chapter 6 The Anarchic Body Language of the Martial Arts
Film • 199
Chapter 7 Fighting over the Modern Girl: Hard and Soft
Films • 244
Chapter 8 Song at Midnight: Acoustic Horror and the Grotesque Face
of History • 298 ·
Envoi • 345
Abbreviations • 351
Notes • 353
Glossary • 413
Filmography • 423
Bibliography • 439
Index • 465
ILLUSTRATIONS
0.1 A constellation of Hbright stars" of the Mingxing Company • xx

0.2 Mingxing actress Xuan Jinglin • xx
0.3 Xuan Jinglin in An Amorous History of/he Silver Screen • xxi
1.1 The King of Comedy Tours Shanghai: at the harbor • 14
1.2 The King of Comedy Tours Shanghai: in a sedan chair • 14
l.3 "A Social Phenomenon in Shanghai: The Noisy Shadowplay on
Fourth Avenue" • 17
1.4 Wang Hanlun (center) with her "civilized feet" on screen • 38
1.5 Actress Yang Naimei • 40
2.1 Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century • 46
2.2 The Yangjingbang Canal • 48
2.3 Edward Road • 48
2.4 Longtang: Shanghai-style vernacular housing • 51
2.5 Xiyangjing: a peep show of the kaleidoscopic world • 53
2.6 Tuhua ribao (Illustrated Daily): NA grocery store of new knowledge" • 56
2. 7 The New World entertainment center • 59
2.8 The Great World entertainment center (ca. 1917) • 59
2. 9 Roof Garden on top of Sincere Department Store • 62
2.10 The Tianqiao (Heavenly Bridge) inside the Great World • 64
2.11 Willies Theatre • 69
2.12-13 Film magazines of the 1920s: Dianying zazhi and Yingxi shijie • 73
2.14 Ads for the film True Love (1925) and walnut snacks in Yingxi
Chunqiu • 75
2.15 ·window shopping" Lux soap• 76
2.16 Xin yi12xin9 yu tiyu (Silver/and Sports World) • 79
2.17 QueenofSporls(l934)withLiLili • 80
2.18 Interior of the Paris Theater • 83
3.1 The Qingliange Teahouse • 97
3.2 Slide-show as shadowplay • 97
3.3 Han Wu Di meets his deceased wife through a shadowplay • 99
3.4 The Asia Shadowplay Company • 101
3.5 Victims of Opium ( 1910) • 104
3.6 AdforYanRuisheng(I92I) • 106
3. 7 Laborer's Love ( 1922): Interior of the Teahouse All-Night Club • 112
3.8 Laborer's Love • 114
4.1 Ad for the Peking Theater (from Xu Chiheng's Filmdom in China} • 124
4.2 Ad for the Shijie (World) Theater (from Xu Chiheng's Filmdom
in China) • 126
Illustrations
4.3 Orphan Rescues Grandfather (1923) • 128

4.4 Orchid in the Bmpty Valley (1925} • 128
4.5 The Great Wall Company, founded in Brooklyn, New York • 129
4.6 The Great Wall Company's sta[f and equipment • no
5.1 The Abandoned Wife (1924) starring Wang Hanlun • 161
5.2 Illustrations for trick cinematography in The Science of Shadowplay • 165
5.3 Xu Zhuodai (Xu Banmei), the author of The Science of Shadowplay, in a
female role • 166
5.4 Actors playing with trick photography • 167
5.5 The two-self picture (er wo tu} • 167
5.6 Separate body photograph (fenshen xian9) • 168
5.7 Ad for A String of Pearls (1926) • 170
5.8 A String of Pearls: "Lantern Festival" in electric writing • 111
5. 9 A String of Pearls: at the party • 173
5.10 A String of Pearls: reunion after the husband is released from jail • 173
5.lla-b The company name is transformed into dancing dots (and then into
the "Great Wall") • 174
5.12a-d A String ofPearls: the animated reenactment of "Misfortune" • 176
5.13 The mise-en-scene of narrative •roundness" in Last Conscience
(1925) • 183
6.1 Actress Wu Lizhu • 201
6.2 Wu Lizhu (right), the "Oriental female Fairbanks" • 202
6.3 Actress Xu Qinfang • 202 vii
6.4 Burning of the Red Lotus Temple: Hu Die, second from left; Xia Peizhen, second
from right • 204
6.5 The Cave of the Spider Spirit (1927) • 211
6.6 Burning of the Red Lotus Temple: temple as harem • 212
6. 7 The Great Knight-Errant of Aviation ( 1928) • 215
6.8 Zhang Huimin and Wu Suxin, with the company's camera • 216
6.9 The winged flying machine • 218
6.1 O The special effect of the "light of swords competing in magic arts" • 224
6.11 The art of walking on air: ·female thief leaps onto the roof• • 226
6.12 The Red Heroine ( 1929): shooting on location • 228
6.13 The Red Heroine (1929): Yungu fighting against the bandits • 231
7.1 The modern look of Yinmu zhoubao (Screen l+l!ekly) • 253
7.2 Spring Dream on the Lakeside ( 1927) • 257
7.3 Pink Dream (1932) • 260
7.4 ThreeModemWomen(l933) • 263
7.5 NewWoman(l935) • 265
7.6 Inaugural issue of Modern Screen. featuring Ruan Lingyu • 268
7.7 Li Lili • 270
7.8 Huang Jiamo's essay, "Hard Film versus Soft Film" • 273
7. 9 A cinema built in the 1930s: the international style of the Metropol • 276
7.10 "The speed of flesh": Hu Shan • 278
7.ll Girl in Disguise (1936): the pleasure of cross-dressing• 285
Illustrations
7 .12 Girl in Disguise: the pressure of family values • 287

7.13 The Blood of Passion on the Volcano (1933): idyllic countryside • 293
7 .14 The Blood of Passion on the Volcano: the lovers reunite on the beach under
the moon • 294
7 .15The Blood of Passion on the Volcano: revenge on the volcano • 295
8.1 Ad for Song at Midnight ( 1937) • 299
8.2 The abandoned theater • 301
8.3 Ad for Peace after Storm ( 1931 ), one of the early sound experiments • 306
8.4 Two Stars ( 193 l) • 309
8.5 The disfigured face in The Singing Beauty (1931) • 311
8.6 Wild Flowers ( 1930): ad for the albun:I • 316
8.7 The theater is to be demolished ... • 321
8.8 The shadow of the phantom singer • 321
8.9 Song at Midnighrs director Maxu Weibang • 322
8.10 The Stranger on the Love Scene ( 1926) • 323
8.11 Li Xiaoxia with the wet nurse • 325
8.12 Song Danping in the torture chamber • 326
8.13 Following the singing, Sun Xiaoou finds the phantom singer in the
attic • 327
8.14 Song Danping acting in the play Hot Blood • 337
8.15 Emergency expression: tilted framing • 341
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SOME OF THE OLDEST and finest movie theaters in central ix

Shanghai were within a stone's throw of the neighborhood where I grew
up. Behind the "iron curtains" of the cold war in the I 960s and l 970s, I
enjoyed countless trips to these cinemas, especially Da Shanghai (Metro-
pol, see fig. 7.9) on Tibet Road, where I watched the Chinese, Indian,
North Korean, and Eastern European films offered in that era. Perhaps
I relished more the experience of moviegoing itself, and the seemingly
anachronistic modernist beauty of the theater architecture. It was at
some of these venues that my generation first encountered Shanghai cin-
ema, in particular the left-wing cinema, when it resurfaced in the early
1980s. It instantly captured my imagination, although little did I know
that I would return to write this book about this cinema's place in Shang-
hai's history and worldly modernity. I thank those who first opened my
eyes to this legacy.
The research and writing of this book has incurred many debts to nu-
merous individuals and institutions. Miriam Hansen and Tom Gunning
inspired me to enter the enchanting world of early cinema when I re-
turned to cinema studies at the University of Chicago. Their wisdom and
friendship has continuously nourished this project since I graduated and
became a teacher myself. I am also grateful to the instruction and support
from Harry Harootunian and Judith Zeitlin (both members of my original
dissertation committee), as well as Norma Field, James Lastra, Gregory
Acknowledgments
Lee, Katie Trumptner, Yuri Tzivian, Eugene Wang, and Wu Hung during
my years at the University of Chicago. Among those who contributed to
my work or cheered me along a long journey, I want to particularly thank
James St. Andre, Weihong Bao, Jennifer Bean, Tom Bender, Chris Berry,
Ryan Boynton, Scott Bukatman, Yomi Braester, Xiangyang Chen, Juliette
Yuecheng Cheung, John Crespi, Jonathan Hay, Lucas Hilderbrand, Anna
Holian, Binghui Huangfu, Sergei Kapterev, Paize Keulemans, Eugenia
Lean, Charles Leary, Judith Leeb, Cecilia Li, Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu,
Elizabeth Mcsweeney, Hajime Nakatani, Jackie Stewart, Jennifer Peter-
son, Haun Saussy, Shuang Shen, Mit~1yo Wada-Marciano, Richard Gang
Wang, Paul Young, Liang Zhang, Yingjin Zhang, Xueping Zhong, Tao Zhu,
Angela Zito, and, finally, my colleagues at the department of cinema
studies at New York University.
My project involved extensive research in China, and I have benefited
from the kind assistance of many people and institutions there. I thank
above all Mr. Shu Yan, a former film critic, and Mr. Wu Weiyun, a for-
mer cinematographer, for granting me long interviews despite their
health conditions. Mr. Lu Hongshi has shared with me valuable research
material as well as insights on Chinese film history. Professor Li Shaobai
of the Research Institute of Chinese Art, Mr. Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin of
x I the Research Center of Chinese Film Art, and Professors Zhong Dafeng,
Ma Junxiang, and Chen Shan of the Beijing Film Academy have all
helped me in various ways. I thank Cui Weiping, Imma Gonzales, Tang
Di, Tang Xiaodu, Wen Hui, and Wu Wenguang for their hospitality and
for their friendship during my stays in Beijing. The institutions that facil-
itated my research include the China Film Archive. the Shanghai Mu-
nicipal Archive, the Shanghai Library, the Beijing Library, the Beijing
City Library, the Library at the Shanghai Theater Academy, the Library at
Fu Dan University, and the Hongkou District Library in Shanghai.
A Chicago Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellowship for 1997-98
allowed me to complete the work for this book in a stimulating environ-
ment. An Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford Univer-
sity and a J. P. Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship made it possible for me to
do further research and expand the project's scope and depth. A faculty
fellowship at the International Center for Advanced Studies, and a Paul-
ette Goddard junior grant, both from New York University, gave me ad-
ditional time to think and write. As the book moved from my desktop to
the University of Chicago Press, I have been very fortunate to work with
Susan Bielstein and Anthony Burton, manuscript editor Mara Naselli,
and series edit<>r Tom Gunning. Their enthusiasm and professionalism
made the process truly enjoyable. l gratefully acknowledge the comments
and .interest of the anonymous readers.
Acknowledgments
Finally, I owe my family in Shanghai a great deal for providing me a

veritable home base during my research trips, and more importantly, for
enabling me to reconnect with the past and the present of my native city.
I thank the late "uncle" Xu Zhengming, a family friend who passed away
recently, for his many gifts of books and ideas. Magnus Fiskesjo, my com-
panion in life and intellectual adventures, has been an indispensable part
of this project in countless ways. Lake's arrival during the final stage of
the making of this book brought me joyful diversions. To all of them I
dedicate this book, with love.
INTRODUCTION
AN AMOROUS HISTORY
OF THE SILVER SCREEN
HISTORY, for Walter Benjamin, does not unfold in a Nhomogeneous, xiii

empty time." Likewise, historical thinking that attempts to seize in an il-
luminating flash the image of nonlinear time and heterogeneous experi-
ence involves "not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well....
Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with ten-
sions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a
monad." 1 The year oU 9 31 in early Chinese film history is one of those
monadic moments when history congeals and implodes, generating as
much tension as energy. Everything seemed possible; all the historical ac-
tors found themselves at a masquerade ball that could last forever. Of
course, it did not. Dancing, as a kinetic practice of socialization, was in-
deed one of the keynotes of metropolitan life. as was film culture in
Shanghai in the early 1930s, a time when many events were taking place
at a head-spinning speed, when past and present intertwined. While
dance music entered movie theaters with the advent of sound, the fabric
of urban life was lived out increasingly in cinematic terms.
At this moment the Chinese film industry, concentrated in Shanghai
since the early 191 Os. was suddenly seized by an urgency to reflect upon
its own history on the screen, as though propelled by a desire to arrest its
own image in a hall of moving mirrors. While the city grew into a veri-
table "Paris of the Orient" with dance halls, cabarets, cafes, and movie
theaters, the film industry experienced a second boom and structural
Introduction
transformation. The craze of the martial arts-magic spirit" (wuxia shen-
0
guai) genre was <m the brink of being extinguished by multiple forces.
The left-wing cinema was on the rise. The advent of sound had triggered
a cacophony of public debates as well as a deluge of experiments in var-
ious formats, in particular the dancing and singing" (gewu pian) genre,
0
to incorporate sound into the silent screen. The establishment of the

Lianhua Company (which quickly rivaled to the veteran Mingxing Com-
pany) and the campaign to revive national cinema" (juxing guopian) re-
0
configured the film industry. The Nationalist government took definitive

steps to make its legitimacy felt in t,he film scene by instituting a full-
fledged censorship program, among other restrictions. In standard Chi-
nese film historiography. the year 1931 marked the turning point when
a more progressive and patriotic cinema began to emerge following the
Japanese invasion of Manchuria that same year. That shift was quick-
ened by a new crisis: on January 28, 1932, the Japanese also bombarded
Shanghai, which brought immense destruction to the film industry.
In the midst of these interconnected changes and on the eve of catas-
trophe, the Mingxing Company, a leading studio in the prewar Shanghai
film industry, released an eighteen-reel, two-part feature, called An Amo-
rous History of the Silver Screen ( Yinmu yanshi, 1931).2 Only an incomplete
xiv second part of the film still exists. For many decades this film has been
ignored, if not purposely omitted, by Chinese film historians. Even the
most recent History of Chinese Silent Film (1996) by Li Su yuan and Hu Ju-
bin contains no discussion of it. 3 This film, however, is a condensed tex-
tual instance that expresses the configuration of that particular moment
in history. It reveals the Shanghai film world poised on a threshold with
a vividness perhaps only matched by one other contemporary film, Two
Stars·in the Milky Way (Yinghan shuangxing), produced by Lianhua, in the
same year. One of the nine silent films made by Mingxing in 1931, Amo-
rous History is unique in its direct reference to the film world on multiple
levels, as suggested by the title. The film, structured as a backstage drama,
showcases the Mingxing studios as a technological wonderland and a
simulacrum of the everyday world. It thus also serves as a self-portrait of
Mingxing and a synecdoche of the broad film world in China in the early
1930s. A docudramatic tale about the career vicissitudes of a prostitute-
turned-film actress and her troubled personal life, the film presents,
more significantly, an ambivalent history about Chinese women's rela-
tionship to the cinema-the promise of liberation and social mobility as
well as the lure and risks of a new kind of commodification of the body
by film technology.
Within this larger frame of reference, the interplay on and off the
screen between fiction and documentary, between the film world and
An Amorous History of the Silver Screen
the life world, lends important insights to the understanding of this par-
ticular film as a self-referential text about filmmaking in 1931. It also di-
rects our attention to the question of early Chinese film history as a
whole. What kind of history could we envisage through the lens of the
camera embedded in the film? Why name the narrative an "amorous his-
tory" (yanshi denotes an unconventional, often erotic, tale or history)?
Hence, what is the relationship between such an intimate or deviant his-
tory to the master narratives of film and national culture of the prewar
period as authorized by standard historiography in China? What does
this self-referential gesture tell us about the embodied experience of the
cinema and modernity, beyond the narrow definition of self-reflexivity
often associated with the modernist cerebral obsession with language
and subjectivity?
Before I proceed further into the textual space of the film, I would like
to place the historiographic significance of Amorous History within the
field of early cinema and the related question of modernity generally.
What does it mean to talk about early cinema in a Chinese context?
How "early" -or how "late" -was early Chinese cinema? A clarification
is necessary because the term "early cinema" has a quite specific refer-
ence in film scholarship in the West. More than a period term, early cin-
ema functions as a critical category, one that has gained increased atten- I xv
tion and weight since the 1978 annual conference of the International
Federation of Film Archives (FIAF} held at Brighton, England. It refers
primarily to the cinema-that is, films as well as media intertexts, in-
dustry, and market-between 1895 and 1917. Early cinema has also
been alternatively called the "primitive cinema" or the cinema "before
Hollywood," that is, before the so-called classical narrative cinema-and
the concomitant institutionalization of a particular patriarchal structure
of looking-came to be perceived and received as a dominant mode of
cinematic storytelling. 4 The FIAF conference and the annual Giornate de!
Cinema Muto (Festival of Silent Film} at Pordenone, Italy have provided
the vital fuel for an archaeological project of rethinking early cinema's
aesthetic and cultural significance, especially how it helped shape radi-
cal, new perceptions of time and space, life and death, subject and object
with the onset of modernity. 5
Scholars of early cinema have arrived at the conclusion that early cin-
ema possessed a set of distinctive aesthetics for presenting and repre-
senting the world and lived experience, and that the classical narrative
cinema, along with the seamless fictional world it created, was not the
medium's necessary destiny. This new orientation in historical film schol-
arship highlights the importance of conjoining theory and practice, crit·
ical analysis and archival work, and has opened up many hitherto neg-
Introduction
lected areas of investigation, beyond the films themselves. As early cin-

ema was intimately bound to the practice of exhibition, studies on early
audience formation and viewing relations have relocated the experience
of early cinema in a wide range of cultural practices, such as the vaude-
ville theater, the amusement park, shopping arcades, and so on. It be-
came possible to envisage the film experience in the broader landscape of
modern life-in the street and in the theater, in the city and in the coun-
try, and, I shall hasten to add, in the West as well as in many other parts
of the world. In short, "early cinema" has not only opened new arenas
for studying film, but also offered ~warding conceptual and method-
ological tools for placing film history in an intermedia and interdiscipli-
nary field.
More recently, a strand of feminist film scholarship has enriched this
"new film history" by highlighting the issue of gender with regard to
early women pioneers, sexual coding of stardom and spectatorship,
among other things. 6 This work departs from the earlier feminist preoc-
cupation with the deconstruction of the classical Hollywood cinema as a
seamlessly sutured patriarchal representational system through the
opening of a new avenue for research and empowerment. By inserting
the conceptual as well as historical female spectator qua modern con-
xvi sumer into cultural and social history of cinema, this approach recon-
structs the history of women's participation in cinema as an alterna-
tive public sphere. Beyond reception and consumption, the active role
women played has also been identified in the production sector, in film
journalism, and especially in the area of screen performance by earlier
generations of movie actresses. Gender proves to be of criticalimportance
for understanding the vitality, if not longevity, of the direct address, in-
tenextuality, and open-endedness of early cinema's aesthetic, as well as
understanding its particular epistemology and politics.
But how shall we account for early cinema in Chinese film history?
And in what ways did women contribute to the formation of the new film
culture in early twentieth century China? Despite the fecundity of schol-
arship on early cinema, including the recent trend of feminist new his-
tory, little has been done about the subject in a cross-cultural field, let
alone a consideration of its gender aspect in a non-Western culture. rn
the Chinese context, particularly as used by Chinese film scholars in
periodization, the term early cinema (zaoqi dianying) serves loosely as a
common reference to the cinema before 1949, when the Communists
founded the People's Republic of China. In standard Chinese film his-
toriography, therefore, its connotation has been mainly negative, be-
cause early cinema as a whole is not only construed as aesthetically in-
ferior in the evolutionary chain of cultural development (which is also
often the case in the Western contexts). It has also been linked to the
"pre-Liberation" and hence feudal, and semicolonial political and social
system. "Modern" or moden9, a term prevalently associated with Shang-
hai culture during the Republican period (1911-49), conjured up mean-
ings of cultural decadence, sexual promiscuity, social anarchy, and West-
ern imperialism.
Since the early 1990s, however, with the revival of Chinese cinema
and renewed interest in its historical roots, scholars have been favorably
reevaluating early Chinese cinema and making a finer periodization
within that long "early" period. They subtly challenged prevalent ideo-
logical assumptions and tried to delineate the aesthetic and cultural
significance of genres such as comedy and martial arts film, which had
been largely deemed vulgar or lowbrow. 7 Underlying this diverse, albeit
limited, body of scholarly work, 8 is the vexed question concerning the
political and cultural status of early Chinese cinema, especially in the pe-
riod before the emergence of the left-wing cinema in the early 1930s.
Yet, some of these endeavors still betray a one-dimensional historical
consciousness and impoverished methodology. For example, Zhon99uo
wushen9 dianyin9 shi (History of Chinese Silent Film), commissioned by the
Chinese Film Archive to commemorate the centennial of cinema's arrival
in China, was the first comprehensive account of early Chinese cinema xvii
produced by mainland scholars.9 The book remains, however, mired in
the same evolutionary conception of history, despite its sympathies for
previously denounced or forgotten filmmakers, producers, actors, and
their films.
The unwitting parallel of critical discourses on early cinema in the
West and China, despite their divergent circumstances, motivations, and
applications, offers an opportune moment to relocate early Chinese cin-
ema within a broader cinematic modernity. The divergent origins of the
term in Euro-American and Chinese contexts, and the discrepancies in
periodization respectively, alert us to the heterogeneity or unevenness of
the international film scene in the silent period. Rather than trying to
find an equivalent-or contemporaneous-period and practice in Chi-
nese film history that squarely fits the category of early cinema in the
West, I use the term heuristically to create a critical space that negotiates
its different valences, temporality, and historicity.
Two recent books in English on Chinese cinema before 1949 have
made considerable contribution to the field-Hu Jubin's Projecting a Na-
tion: Chinese Cinema Before 1949 and Laikwan Pang's Building a New China
in Cinema: The Cinematic Leji-Wing Cinema Movement 1932-1937.1° Hu's
book, based on his dissertation completed in Australia, presents a com-
prehensive narrative history of Chinese cinema of the Republican period.
Introduction
It includes a wealth of primary sources on both the film industry and
filmmakers and their works in a manner similar to the aforementioned
Chinese-language History of Chinese Silent Film he coauthored. Hu's book
represents the revisionist historiography in Chinese scholarship on the
mainland, but it is constrained by its linear narrative method and lack of
attention to both cinematic texture and conceptual issues concerning
modernity, urban culture, and gender. Pang's work is on the other hand
more focused in terms of both periodization and thematization as she is
primarily interested in a detailed study of the canonical left-wing cinema
and its relation to gender politics apd national culture. The particular
value of Pang's work lies in her equal attention to both authorship and
spectatorship, both as forms of a collective, gendered subjectivity in the
making in the midst of a national crisis. Both works, though valuable as
the first book-length studies on early Chinese film history, do not break
significant theoretical ground. They focus narrowly on the question of
national cinema and the political valence of cinema-central tropes in
earlier Chinese film historiography. Nonetheless they are admirable ef-
forts in trying to tease out the nuances and contradictions of an impor-
tant part of modern Chinese cultural history.
The first Chinese film was not allegedly made until 1905, and the Chi-
xviii nese film industry only formed in the mid-l 920s. The enjoyment of cin-
ema, however, quickly become an integral part of urban modernity with
the first public commercial showing in a teahouse in Shanghai on Au-
gust 11, 1896. The lack of extant films (actualities, travelogues, educa-
tional films, and early short story films) made before 1922 has made it
difficult to study that part of early cinema. Significantly, many features of
the extended early cinema in China, in aspects of filmmaking as well as
distribution, exhibition, and reception, resonate with similar motifs in
the history of early cinema worldwide. The time lag between early Euro-
American cinema and early Chinese cinema speaks certainly to the semi-
colonial nature of Chinese modernity, especially with regard to "belated"
technological transfer and implementation. Thus, early cinema persists
not so much as a rigidly defined aesthetic or period category but as an
emblem of modernity, or rather competing versions of modernity, on the
"non-synchronous synchronous" global horizon of film culture. 11 To dis-
entangle ourselves from the trappings of such a time lag in periodization,
a shift in focus from early cinema to early film culture, which includes a
wide range of the film experience such as stardom, fan cults, theater ar-
chitecture, fashion, ·as well as what happens on the screen, will allow a
more productive interdisciplinary approach to the study of early film his-
tory in specific cultural locations. Such a shift will also, more crucially,
enable us to expand the horizon of comparative studies of cinematic
modernity. Thus for the purpose of this book I situate this multifaceted
early film culture within the span of the arrival of cinema in China to the
closing of the golden period of Shanghai silent and early sound film on
the eve of Japanese occupation, from 1896 to 1937.
Now I return to Amorous History, and will use it as a case study to probe
the complexity involved in the writing of early Chinese film history, par-
ticularly from a gender perspective. As I will indicate in detail below, the
film opens onto the geography of film culture both through its textual in-
scription and material consumption. As a self-conscious gesture at "writ-
ing" film history on the silver screen, the film and its reception reveal the
capacity of the cinematic medium to offer a unique historiographical reg-
ister in the age of mechanic reproduction of moving images.
Let me first sketch an overview of the film. According to the synopsis
written by publicists of the time, 12 the first part of the film (nonextant)
begins with an establishing montage that constructs a composite, pan-
oramic view of Shanghai's development as a modern metropolis since it
was "opened" as an international trading port (kaibu) following China's
defeat in the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century. A local film in- xix
dustry is born in this urban landscape animated by a prosperous com-
mercial and industrial life, dotted with skyscrapers, lined with asphalt
streets, and crowded with people migrating into the city from all over
China and the world. One large film company, in particular, not only
boasts a studio with a host of large buildings and a contingent of "bright
stars" (min9xin9-an apparent self-reference to the Mingxing Company)
but also features productions "popular all over the world" (fengxing quan-
qiu) (fig. 0.1). One of the "bright stars" in the diegesis, as well as in real
life, rises from the city's pleasure quarters: Wang Fengzhen, played by
Xuan Jinglin ( 1907-92) (fig. 0.2). Her character arrives late for a dient
who slaps her face. Seeing her tears flowing uncontrollably, the man
(who is only given a generic name Baixiangren-playboy or hooligan)
mocks her: "Since you are so good at crying, why don't you devote your-
self to the silver screen to become the oriental Lillian Gish?" 13 He does
not, of course, expect her to take his sarcastic remark literally; but her
dedication and acting range-from the most comic to the rriost tragic,
from that of a young girl to an old woman-quickly win her the title
of "movie star" (dianying min9xin9) (fig. 0.3). Fang Shaomei, a wealthy
dandy, pursues her eagerly by coming to the studio every dayarid lav-
ishly spoiling her. Wang disappoints the director who has contributed to
her stardom when she begins to show signs of negligence in her work,
0.1 A constellation
of "bright stars" of the
Mingxing Company.
0.2 Mingxing actress

Xuan Jinglin (Yinxing,
no. 11, August 1927).
0.3 Xuan Jinglin in An Amoroirs Histary of the Silver Screen. (Courtesy of the China
Film Archive)
breaching her contract with the studio by becoming Fang's concubine, or I xxi
according to the fashionable term of the day, entering a relationship of
"cohabitation" (tongju).
The extant sequel starts with the demise of Wang's domestic bliss and
then moves toward her comeback to the film world. Despite her desire
and effort to become a model housewife, her playboy patron-lover grows
increasingly indifferent to her as he begins dallying with a dancing girl
(played by Xia Peizhen [ 1908-?]). One day after an argument, Wang
dozes off and dreams about arriving at a dance hall and finding Fang with
the dancing girl. After following them to a hotel, she runs into the direc-
tor who is working on a script. He reveals that she has fallen out with
Fang because she is no longer a film star and encourages her to return to
the studio. The next day, just as in the dream, she sets out to the hotel
and confronts Fang in front of the dancing girl for the last time, only to
be insulted again. She finally makes up her mind: "I will go my way. I
won't die hungry for lack of a man!" Arriving at the studio. she tells the
overjoyed director to quickly write a script for her so that she can resume
her career on the silver screen.
Amorous History begins to take on the look of a mock documentary
when the returned star is given a tour of the expanded and technologi-
cally updated studio. On that day, forty truckloads of extras arrive for sev-
eral films being shot simultaneously at different studios of the same com-
Introduction
pany: The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple (Iluoshao Hongliansi, a martial
arts serial film), Shadow ofRed Tears (Ilonglei ying, a melodrama), Fate in
Tears and Laughter (Tixiao yinyuan, a romance based on Zhang Henshui's
popular novel), and Money Demon (Qianmo).1 4 Wang wanders with the di-
rector through the sets for both Money Demon and The Burning of the Red
Lotus Temple, impressed by the sophistication of the new equipment as
well as the dedication of the production crews. The extras are organized
in an assembly-line fashion, finishing make-up quickly and mechani-
cally. Among the extras, Wang recognizes the hooligan who slapped her
face back in her former life as a prgstitute. Their "reunion" on the film
set, following a script specially written for Wang's come-back, turns into
a situation of licensed vengeance as the plot requires Wang to slap the
hooligan character for a scene in a public park. Wang's resolution to re-
turn to the silver screen also magically rekindles Fang's love for her. He
begins to pursue her again by driving her to and from the studio. The dis-
enchanted dancing girl, realizing the romantic power of being a film ac-
tress, decides to try her luck in the film world herself. Along with hun-
dreds of others, she arrives at the studio for an interview, which, without
her knowing it, turns out to be a rigorous audition of her acting skill. She
is provoked to cry and laugh, to be happy and angry (xinu aile). The film
xxii ends with her leaving the studio, hoping that she will return and become
a film star.
On both thematic and stylistic levels, Amorous History does not merely
record a significant segment of Chinese film history but also embodies
the multilayered experience of the women and men who contributed to
the making of that history. As a self-conscious gesture at "writing" film
history on the silver screen, it reveals the capacity of the cinematic me-
dium to offer a different kind of historiographic register, permeated with
an "amorous" economy that underscores the cinematic experience both
on and off the screen.
The particular attraction of Amorous History comes from the intertwin·
ing of a persona~ romance and a studio promotional showcase, feminine
biography and the history of film technology. Set in the liminal space (as
the daydream sequence indicates) between fictional and factual, the film
indulges in cin.ema's potential for both realism and fantasy, or rather, the
magic blending of the two, thereby creating a new perceptual experience
of reality. Some Chinese film historians have pointed to the referential-
ity (zhishixing) rather than representation, romance (chuanqi, or fable)
rather than psychological narrative, as the basic features of early Chinese
cinema. 1' The elusive referentiality and hyperbolic realism of an "amo-
rous history" (which can also be translated as "romance") inside and out-
side the film illustrates this observation. The contemporary fans of Ming-
xing productions, in particular those starring Xuan Jinglin, would read-

ily find Xuan's !He story embedded in the film. Born to a poor family (her
father was a newspaper vendor) and having had only sporadic schooling,
Xuan was working as a prostitute when Zhang Shichuan (1889-1953),
the director and cofounder of Mingxing, discovered her acting talent. The
company had her redeemed from the brothel where she worked. 16 Made
one year after Xuan's return to the studio, and following the dissolution
of her cohabitational relationship with a businessman, the film is in fact
a biographical portrait of a cinematic Cinderella, in this case, Xuan Jing-
Lin herself.
Xuan's rising stardom paralleled the rising fame and wealth of Ming-
xing.17 The first (nonextant} part of the film chronicles her bewilderment
when she first entered the film world. Mingxing, the first fully-fledged
Chinese film enterprise established by Zhang Shichuan, Zheng Zhengqiu
( 1888-1935), and others in 1922, was just beginning to outgrow its
cottage-industry mode of production and become the Mingxing Film
Limited Co. when Xuan joined the company in May 1925. Mingxing's
first glass studio was built while Xuan's first film, in which she played a
minor role, was being shot. From 1925 to 1928, Xuan portrayed an array
of characters, ranging from the country maiden to the poor widow to the
dancing girl to the female gangster. By the time she joined the company xxiii
for the second time in 1930, Mingxing had just begun another large-scale
expansion and modernization following the commercial miracle created
by the martial arts film series, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple.
The new studio, which the actress in Amorous History tours with be-
wildered eyes, is presented as a magic workshop of virtual reality. When
the actress marvels at the grandiose sets, high-tech lighting, and the tech-
nologically advanced production of special effects, the Jove story that
dominates the first part of the film recedes to the background. Instead, it
is taken over by an exhibitionist impulse for display characteristic of early
cinema and the showmanship associated with it. 18 The romance between
the actress and her unfaithful patron is now replaced by the romance be-
tween her and cinematic technology. If woman, as Andreas Huyssen re-
marks, has been prevalently linked to or allegorized as modern technol-
ogy, as exemplified in Fritz Lang's Metropolis ( 1927),1 9 the relationship
between the actress and technology in Amorous History is organized along
a different line and cannot be subsumed under the category of mechan-
ical incorporation or alienation alone. Xuan .is not overpowered by the gi-
gantic new studio and its oversized equipment. The latter functions,
rather, as a hyperbolic backdrop for her personal drama in which she re-
deems her independence. Unlike the dystopic vision of femininity and
modern machinery in Metropolis, technology here emits a humorous en-
Introduction
ergy-due to the comic structure of the plot-which facilitates a social
transformation embodied in the figure of the actress. Xuan, playing her
former self as a prostitute decked out with a huge flower on her chest, is
instructed by the director to slap (back) the hooligan in front of the cam-
era. Screen performance and reenactment of the past enable the re-
demption of her personal history. In front of the camera, Xuan not only
literally acts out her ascendance from the lower social depth to the pan-
theon of movie stars, she is also able to close a painful chapter from the
past. "Just as people whom nothing moves or touches any longer are
taught to cry again by films," she regpins the capacity to feel and emote. 20
The act of revenge made possible by film technology is certainly a utopian
representation of women's agency. At the same time, because of the in-
dexical rapport, or fusion, between Xuan's biographical and cinematic
life, the slap is much more than a simple make-believe dramatic gesture.
It serves as the point where the on-screen action unites with its social and
experiential referent-a personal histoire with a public spectacle.
Xuan's comeback also coincided with another sea change in film tech-
nology that redefined the structure of sensory perception in early Chi-
nese film history. Shortly after the first American talkie was shown in a
Shanghai theater in 1929, several Chinese film companies began experi-
xxiv menting with sound despite the lack of adequate equipment. Mingxing
Company once again proved to be a leader in innovation through col-
laborating with the Pathe recording company of Shanghai to produce
the first (partial) sound film, The Singing Girl Red Peony (Genii hong mudan,
1931), using wax disks. Because the Nationalist government demanded
that sound film use guoyu, or the standard "national language" based on
the Beijing vernacular, many actors who were not of Northern origin
suddenly found themselves suffering from a speech handicap. Xuan Jing-
ling, born and raised in Shanghai, could only speak the Shanghai ver-
nacular with a Suzhou (her maternal native town) inflection. Deter-
mined to catch up with the new technology and surpass her own image
as a silent film star, Xuan took crash lessons in guoyu and singing. By ap-
pearing in the first Movietone film while continuing to make silent films,
Xuan demonstrated that her comeback was not a mere repeat perfor-
mance as an icon for the first Golden Age of Chinese silent film but a leap
into a new era, embodying coexisting technologies, their ambivalent re-
lations, as well as distinctive possibilities. It is significant that during her
"tour" of the studio, the several films being produced simultaneously are
of different genres and appeal, with one of them being a partial sound
and color production, The Fate in Tears and Laughter (1933). She thus per-
sonifies early cinema as a critical category-that technological change
does not easily translate into a shift in aesthetic modes and spectatorial
An Amorous History of the Sl1ver Screen
address, but can expose the very contradictions of technology and its
multiple appropriations.
Besides the main plot surrounding the actress's double-edged Ramo-
rous history," the film, with its numerous references to both production
and reception contexts, points to the breadth and depth of a film culture
far beyond the silver screen and exhibition space. In fact, Amorous History
virtually inventories a cluster of interconnected practices that sustain and
feed back into the film industry: money, stardom, fan culture, and the
broader urban landscape. In this landscape film experience is interwoven
with other contiguous forms of the modern experience-such as ball-
room dancing and window shopping-and the constant transaction and
contagion between them. The emphasis on the commercial nature of the
film industry is clearly seen in a crucial scene inside the studio. The ac-
tress is led to visit the set for Money Demon and taken aback by the gigan-
tic mask of the money demon descending from above and crushing onto
a circle of dancing young women and men. At this moment the film is at
its most self-conscious about the commodity nature of the cinema, as
well as women's ambivalent place within the film world.
Throughout the film, the figure of the actress embodies not so much
the glamour of stardom as the multiple and concrete social roles available
to women at the time, in both the domestic and public spheres. This mul- I xxv
tiplicity manifests itself in Xuan's repertoire of characters of different ages
and classes as well as in her own life experience. To be sure, women's
presence in the film world remained largely confined to performing.
Their visibility as public figures and the heightened social status they
could enjoy were nevertheless considerable, especially at the threshold of
the l 930s, when the film industry had secured its legitimate place in
everyday life, if not quite yet on the altar of art. Starting in the early
l 920s, the profession of film actress provided an unprecedented oppor-
tunity for many women of diverse backgrounds, such as first generation
film actresses Wang Hanlun (1903-78), Yin Mingzhu (1904-?), Zhang
Zhiyun (1905-?), and Yang Naimei (1904-60), just to name a few.
If these aforementioned female stars quickly faded away, Xuan Jing-
ling proved her enduring passion for the silver screen and her ability to
adjust to a fast-changing film industry, in particular with the transition to
sound. Her stardom culminated in her performance as a mother-within
the span of three decades-to twin daughters (both played by the erst-
while "Queen of Cinema" Hu Die) in Mingxing's sound production Twin
Sisters (Zimei hua). The film was released in 1933 and played consecu-
tively for sixty-four days, creating Mingxing's biggest box office hit. 21 Af-
ter several other roles, Xuan decided to retire from the screen in 1936
due to health reasons.22 In an uncanny way, the end of her film career
Introduction
coincided with the decline of the Mingxing Company, which followed

the July 1935 death of Zheng Zhengqiu, a founding member of the com-
pany and screenwriter and director of many of Xuan's films. Due to the
fierce competition in the sound film market, the company found itself in
financial straits in 1936 and could not pay its employees. Seriously dam-
aged by the Japanese bombing of the city on January 28, 1932, the re-
built studio was destroyed beyond repair in August 1937, when the Jap-
anese invaded Shanghai following another massive bombardment.
Amorous History inadvertently recorded the prime of Xuan Jinglin and
the Mingxing Company, when bpth were crucially transforming. In
weaving together personal and institutional histories in a fictionalized
documentary, the film offers a compelling glimpse into prewar Chinese
cinema from an insider and a woman's point of view. The historical vi-
sion presented by the film is both playful and reflexive, involved yet not
without a critical distance. The self-reflexive impulse is never steeped
in a psychological absorption that abstracts experience for moral edifica-
tion or formal indulgence; rather, it motivates the viewer's heightened
awareness of the social significance of the cinematic experience as part of
the larger sensorial economy of modernity. Indeed, this self-reflexivity
should be viewed as stemming from a combination of a residual aesthetic
xxvi I of display with a direct address to the "(in)credulous" audience, on the
one hand,l3 and the impulse to "update" this early history more than
three decades after the invention of the cinema, on the other.
More importantly, this self-reflexivity, unlike the often claustrophobic
introspection characteristic of modernist writing, vibrated on the open
horizon of audience reception, far beyond the geographic limits of Shang-
hai. Seeing the film, one viewer from the remote Jilin province in Man-
churia wrote a long letter to the editors of Yingxi shenghuo (literally "shad-
owplay life") in Shanghai, expressing his enthusiasm for the film and
gratitude to the Mingxing Company for generously sharing the "secrets"
behind the scene and imparting to the audience basic knowledge about
film production. He lamented the fact that, because of the remote loca-
tion of his native town, it usually took months before a new film reached
Jilin. The only theater there was the local YMCA auditorium, which held
screenings mainly for the purpose of education. However, as an avid fan
he watched everything shown there. Amorous History, unlike anything
else he had seen, opened his eyes to what was behind the world of illu-
sion on the screen. He was particularly impressed by the touring se-
quence in the film when the actress visits the sets of several films within
the film, encountering famous actors, directors, and cinematographers.
What astonished him most was how film technology was capable of man-
ufacturing a different kind of reality, or a second nature:
What a big electric fan! It makes us realize the origin of torren-

tial rain or snow in a movie. What a big mountain and what a
fast train! Now we know how a mountain is made and a train is
manufactured.
We know now that a skeleton is painted; a pavilion is but a
miniature; a lavish living room is a backdrop; and a bustling street
is artificial! Flying and leaping in the air-what impressive martial
arts! But it's made possible by a hanging rope! Tears flowing-what
a profusion of emotion! Do you know, though, that he is just using
fake tears?!
Furthermore, [we see] the way the director works, how the
camera runs, and operations in the makeup room and on the
sets-all the things we have never seen or heard of! l 4
As Gunning underscores, the sense of bewilderment and the exhilarating

enlightenment about the "true nature" of the cinema-"the magic meta-
morphosis rather than a seamless reproduction of reality ... reveal not a
childlike belief, but an undisguised awareness (and delight in) film's illu-
sionistic capabilities." 25 Moreover, the revelation, or surfacing, of the cin-
ematic magic, paradoxically, only intensified the provincial viewer's pas-
sion for the cinema. Beyond the gadgets and special effects, he was
gripped by the vivid presence of the people who produced the magic-
"the models draped in gauzy dress, the country women who cry and
laugh hyperbolically, the directors who shout in panic through their
loudspeakers, and the stars with a cocky aura." Seeing these people vic-
ariously through Xuan Jinglin's eyes, the viewer experienced the film as
a three-dimensional virtual space in which the silver screen's flatness ma-
terializes into a tangible reality. The crowded and simultaneous presence
of extras, the "hidden" masters of illusion (i.e., directors and the camera-
men), and the sheer size of sets and equipment endow the film with an
overwhelming visibility and physicality, as well as a democratic appeal.
Nothing is withheld from the viewer; every person and every object
comes to the foreground, even though they are governed by a certain hi-
erarchical organization. This experience puts the audience of a remote
provincial town in direct contact with the pulse of metropolitan moder-
nity, which the film world both fashions and symbolizes.
For the provincial spectator, Amorous History offered a rare occasion to

"travel" to Shanghai's film scene without riding a real train and crossing
mountain ranges from remote .Jilin province; for me it has provided an
Introduction
entry point to begin making sense of a film world that existed decades
ago. I encountered the film for the first time on the video screen in a
shabby, cluttered room at the Beijing Film Archive in August 1995, the
centennial of the cinema. My astonishment and enlightenment was com-
parable to the viewer's experience in a northeast China YMCA audito-
rium more than sixty years before, even though I had the advantage of a
historical hindsight mediated through a new kind of screen practice. Just
as Amorous History offered an introductory lesson on the ABCs of the cin-
ema to the provincial viewer, it proved to be an eye-opening phantom
ride that transported me to the eprly Shanghai film world. I had previ-
ously tried to envision and understand this world through arduous but
inevitably intermittent library and archival research on printed sources.
But in the film, that world suddenly came to life. At that moment, I was
overcome by the embodying power the film transmitted. I was moved not
so much by the rare visual encounter with an extant silent film and its
story, as by the sensation aroused by the cinematic tour of the 19 31 film
world-by being in the company of Xuan Jinglin and her contemporary
moviegoers. Here I found a precious primary source and, more signifi-
cantly, a model for a film history I wanted to compose-one that trav-
erses the lived experience on and off the screen, past and present in
xxviii Shanghai and the larger world. What I try to offer in this book is a cul-
tural history of Chinese modernity through the lens of the Shanghai cos-
mopolitan film culture of the prewar period. Many of the people and
films I have mentioned so far will return at various points in the follow-
ing chapters. Still others will also enter the scene and participate in the
changing configuration of a shared amorous history.
It is, however, not my intention to write a total narrative or compre-
hensive inventory that exhausts-rather than illuminates-history. In-
stead, my trajectory will be emphatically cinematic, as in Amorous History.
It consists of a series of long takes and dose-ups on what I take to be some
significant topoi in the landscape of a "vernacular" film culture-a con-
cept I elaborate on in chapter l and illustrate throughout the book-and
modernity in China, from the arrival of the cinema at a Shanghai tea-
house in 1896 to the eve of the Japanese military invasion in 193 7. Films
constitute a central focus of my endeavor but not the only one; the soci-
ological and historical landscape I delineate along the way should not be
construed as the separate means or the end of the cinematic experience
as the two are inexorably interwoven. On the other hand, films are not
merely treated as isolated aesthetic objects that float outside sociopoliti-
cal and economical environment. I regard the films as significant works
of cultural labor that invite aesthetic analysis and semiotic exegesis in re-
lation to both larger textual or intertextual systems. At the same time, I
treat them as artifacts and commodities that orbit in a broader media

ecology of circulation and consumption. I delve into the contexts of their
production and reception, paying equal attention to authorship, specta-
torship, stylistic repertoires, the formation and transformation of genres,
and the interaction or tension between art and politics. The interpretive
strategies I deploy are thus not "interpretation as identification of given
meaning-structures" in either a purely formalist or a deconstructive vein
but rather, following Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's proposal. the "recon-
struction of those processes through which structures of articulated
meaning can all emerge." The interest in textual "meaning-constitution"
goes hand-in-hand with the concern for the body and other physical and
material properties of signification that have been largely exiled in text-
or mind-centered hermeneutic traditions until recently. 26
There is a more practical reason why this culturally significant history
of early Chinese cinema is by necessity fragmentary: Only a few dozen
out of hundreds of films made before 1937 have survived the ravages of
time. Most only existed on nitrate film stock and burned to ashes, espe-
cially during the two bombing raids of Shanghai by the Japanese. The
films that have survived are mostly fictional narratives of varying length
made after 1922. Similar to other narrative cinemas in the world, the
motif of the love story in various formats and disguises runs through the xxix
history of Chinese silent and early sound film, ranging from the earliest
extant comedy, Laborer's Love (Laogong zhi aiqing, Mingxing, 1922) to the
horror film Song at Midnight (Yeban gesheng, Xinhua, 1937), a Chinese
variation of The Phantom of the Opera that proved sensational in Shanghai.
Crossing a number of genres and technological changes, the amorous
history of this cinema is nevertheless a complicated and multifaceted one
regarding the notion of narrative cinema. Indeed, as Amorous History at-
tests, the permeability between cinema and other cultural forms, such as
photography, serial fiction, drama, musical recording, and dancing, con-
stantly puts the very notion of nnarrative" cinema on trial. This history is
then about the search for both a changing film language of storytelling
and the search for an audience, and how this shared passion for the cin-
ema shaped a modern experience in a way no other medium has
achieved in China in the twentieth century.
The history-a labor of love indeed-is organized into two parts
along the parallel lines of film and culture. The main theme of the book
unfolds along a rough chronology, covering the late Qing period to the
1930s. The eight chapters, laid out as a series of monadic moments in the
spatiotemporal constellations of modern Chinese cultural history, may be
read independently of each other. The four chapters of part l delineate
the vernacular scene as both a material and conceptual construct for the
Introduction
reception of the cinematic medium and the production of a domestic film
industry. In chapter l, which lays out the conceptual framework for the
book, I probe the theoretical and historiographical ramifications of the
vernacular and why cinema became its most important embodiment in
the Chinese context, more than other parts of the world because of mas-
sive scale of a vernacularizing process. Engaging recent scholarship on
vernacular modernism, as well as drawing on architectural, literary, and
anthropological studies, I argue that early film culture in China, as a
complex translation machine and motor for change, generated a mass-
mediated social and aesthetic experience and an inclusive vernacular
modernity. Modern science and technology-along with new ideas
about class, gender, and the body-collided with traditional culture in
some ways but were domesticated and productively absorbed in other
ways. They galvanized the exploration of new aesthetic sensibilities, so-
cial positions, and epistemological orientations. As historical, cultural,
and aesthetic formations, the multifaceted film culture contributed in in-
dispensable ways to the production of a sociocorporeal sensorium and a
broadly defined vernacular movement. In a nutshell, Chinese modernity
cannot be adequately understood outside a modern visual culture, and
cinema supplied the most synthetic and embodied form.
xxx I Any study of early Chinese cinema should not be separated from a
consideration of the historical genesis of the metropolitan culture in
Shanghai. The physical and cultural landscape of the city and its multi-
faceted film scene was nourished and supported by a broad vernacular
culture involving old as well as new expressive and entertainment forms.
Thus in chapter 2, I map out this rapidly evolving film culture that was
deeply embedded in the urban culture throughout the silent period and
the implementation of sound. I begin with an "archaeology" of the prov-
enance of Shanghai-style modernity in the downtown Yangjingbang area
and the pidgin language that incarnated this localized cosmopolitanism
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The subjects that in-
habit this Yangjingbang cultural space are the so-called petty urban
dwellers (xiao shimin), avid consumers of mass culture and moviegoers
with "worldly" tastes. Among the "vernacular genres" that preceded, co-
existed, and fed into the cinema as a quintessentially modern form of sto-
rytelling and socialization, I single out the illustrated newspaper and the
amusement hall as the two premium examples that prepared and sup-
plied the cinema with a new mode of visuality and spectatorship. I also
argue that the visual pleasure of cinema is intimately intertwined with
other modern pleasures such as reading (especially with the growth of
vernacular press and film publications), eating, dancing, sporting, and
dating, as the experience of film becomes deeply enmeshed in the met·
ropolitan experience as a whole.
In chapters 3 and 4 I expand on the historical and theoretical frame-

work mapped out in the previous chapters by delving into the rich con-
text of the beginnings of a domestic film industry. Here I concentrate on
the transformation of spectatorship during the transition to narrative cin-
ema in the first half of the 1920s. A contextually informed close reading
of the short comedy Laborer's Love (1922), reportedly the earliest extant
narrative film, yields insights into the dynamic transaction between cin-
ema and other cultural forms, such as the puppet shadowplay and the
civilized play (a popular new spoken drama adopted from the West and
Japan), which were often staged in teahouse-style theaters. The film also
invites a look into the transnational composition of the audience for an
incipient cinema. I then analyze the struggle to find a permanent "home"
for a domestic cinema and the accompanying discourse on the ontology
and social function of cinema (i.e., entertainment versus enlightenment)
in the larger public sphere including the first film schools. I explore how
the architectural ex!)ansion of movie theater space-from the hybrid and
haptic teahouse to the exclusive, even luxury cinema-corresponded to
an enlarged and uplifted film world as a whole. This included a bigger
market, the increasing professionalization of film-related vocations, a
more streamlined mode of production and reception, and, above all, the
elevation or legitimization of the previously frowned-upon film world
within the respectable segments of Chinese culture and society.
Part 1 sets the scene for the vernacular culture, which gave rise to and
was in turn reshaped by the cinematic med.ium. Part 2 addresses com-
peting moderns and moves from social and cultural frameworks to con-
siderations of specifically cinematic articulations of urban modernity and
vernacular experience in the golden age of Chinese silent film and early
sound film. Consistently employing the method of historical intertex-
tual analysis and engaging previously unstudied material, I focus on the
competing articulations and practices that fueled cinematic expressions
of modernism, commercialism, urbanism, and politics. As a whole, the
films and other material analyzed in this part illustrate how the different
historical moments in modem Chinese history and early film history are
loaded with translated ideas, competing lifestyles, and malleable social
and gender roles.
In chapter 5, I discuss the emergence of the film script in the mid-
l 920s as a new form of the vernacular written in "electric shadows" and
its implications for cinematic storytelling, especially as manifested in two
divergent forms of melodrama. Toward that end I explore early dis-
courses about the screenwriting and trick photography of two "pearl"
films-A String of Pearls (1926) and Lustrous Pearls (1927), each "trans-
lated" from different foreign sources-and show how they exemplify dif-
ferent aesthetic and social orientations. I argue that the narrative organ-
Introduction
izations of these films around the theme of retribution can be understood

in terms of the persistence of certain traditional narrative conventions
and cultural values put into service in the pursuit of new concerns. The
disparities in their modes of narration reveal the unevenness in the
search for a storytelling language within a heterogeneous film industry,
especially as the films provide allegorical references to the intense com-
petition in the film market at the time.
Chapter 6 canvasses the mass cultural phenomenon of the so-called
martial arts-magic spirit (wuxia shenguai pian) film genre in the late
1920s, which was destined to have po;verful repercussions in Hong Kong
cinema. I first trace the genealogy of the genre in traditional folklore and
contemporary martial arts fiction. The emergence of the genre is also
crucially linked to an important cultural debate on the role of science in
China. Aided by film technology, proliferation of the martial arts genre
effected a redefinition of the body. It also created an array of awe-
inspiring female knight-errant figures, reflecting the new centrality of
women's bodies in the modern imagination, deploying a visual vernacu-
lar of science and magic. These films appealed to urban working classes
as well as rural and diasporic populations, and drastically expanded the
film market beyond the metropolitan area.
xxxii The early 1930s witnessed the transformation of a thoroughly com-
mercialized film industry into an increasingly politicized enterprise (es-
pecially after the Japanese attack on Shanghai in early 1932). Chapter 7
locates this transformation in a number of interconnected topoi in the
film landscape. This includes the prominent role of film criticism infos-
tering a vibrant yet contentious national cinema, the polemic battle over
the so-called soft film versus hard film that erupted between modernist
and leftist critics and filmmakers, and the competing aesthetics in their
respective film practices. I analyze the entry of the leftist intellectuals
into the film world and how this helped establish a popular version of
progressive ideology in a number of productions. This is followed by a
careful examination of the modernist magazine Modern Screen and its
"soft" aesthetic. Modern girls, dandies, and revolutionaries were three
most emblematic figures in Shanghai-both on and off the screen, left-
wing or otherwise-who embodied the exuberance and contradictions
of urban modernity in the face of national distress. The war between left-
ist critics and the modernists was waged over the fate of the modern girl
and the meaning of urban modernity in the face of a national crisis. De-
spite the rising patriotic fervor, the cinema of the time remained mark-
edly heterogeneous. Sun Yu's prolific writing and filmmaking as a whole
generates a productive expression of vernacular modernism at a politi-
cally and culturally volatile time.
Chapter 8, which concludes the main body of the book, is devoted to

the impact of sound on early Chinese film culture. Sound did not con-
solidate its status as a new "dominant" in Chinese cinema until after
1935. It in fact overlapped with the golden age of silent film. At the
center of the chapter is a richly wrought intertextual analysis of Ma-Xu
Weibang's Song at Midnight (1937). A sound film with a gothic overtone,
it was made on the eve of the Japanese all-out invasion of China and oc-
cupation of Shanghai, at about the time of the demise of the silent period.
I consider this film symptomatic of the unresolved tension between the
silent and sound cinemas and between the persistently contending ide-
ologies and aesthetics operating at that crucial moment of Chinese film
history. Taking refuge in an abandoned theater, the disfigured hero and
his disembodied voice provide the uncanny sites where unconsummated
desire and repressed history resurface and are allowed to erupt. These
tensions are carried over into occupied Shanghai and, later on, into Hong
Kong, where segments of Shanghai cinema later migrated and where
other versions of the amorous history of the silver screen would be writ-
ten, and rewritten.
xxxiii
PART ONE
THE VERNACULAR SCENE

CHAPTER ONE
VERNACULAR MODERNISM
AND CINEMATIC EMBODIMENT
THE QUESTION OF early Chinese cinema is inexorably connected I 1

to the question of vernacular modernism, a concept that has recently
stirred up interests and debates in film studies and related fields. I ap-
proach vernacular modernism from a specific historical location (in this
case China, particularly Shanghai) and place it within the global land-
scape of modernity in the early twentieth century. Here I will focus on
the dynamic but also tension-ridden process of urbanization and mod-
ernization against the background of a wide-ranging vernacularizing
trend in language, urbanism, mass culture, and everyday life. My theo-
retical 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 impor-
tantly, 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 cin-
ema to the Japanese invasion, was an integral part of a profound trans-
formation in everyday life. It changed the way the world was perceived
and experienced, knowledge production and dissemination, and the for-
mation of modern subjectivities. The creation and reception of modern
imagery through the cinematic vernacular were informed by a host of old
Chapter One
and new technologies and related cultural practices. Two interwoven di-
mensions 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 sce-
nari() of the dem()cratization of writing and iconography. Second is the
emergence of a film culture in cosmopolitan Shanghai and the new gen-
der relations and perceptions of the body that configured under the im-
pact 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 experi-
ence and comprising a web of references and their signification, 1 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. 2 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 ver-
nacular" for mediating and articulating the modern experience. It im-
2 I pacted-but was also transformed by-different international film cul-
tures through reception, consumption, and appropriation. 3
My use of the concept of vernacular modernism overlaps with Han-
sen's, yet extends into the deeper layers of history. The cinematic ver-
nacular 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 con-
ception has affinity with Jonathan Friedman's notion of modernity as ·a
field of identifications" resulting from the cyclical historical commercial-
ization and dissemination of cultural products in the global arena and
promising transcultural and intersubjective exchanges. 4 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, in-
trinsically 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, separat-
ing or combining diverse social and material components, aesthetic tra-
ditions and trends, and sensorial and emotional flows.
Vernacular Modernism and Cinematic Embodiment
Diverging from the language-centered model of film theory that has

dominated the field of cinema studies, I pursue the more recent theoret-
ical and historical moves toward a sensorial history of cinema. This his-
tory 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 af-
fective 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. 5 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 ele-
ments such as dialogues and texts and cinematic elements such as edit-
ing, sound, and lighting. In a broad context, it stems from the fertile
ground of a vibrant vernacular culture-including the teahouses, the-
aters, storytelling, popular fiction, music, dance, painting, photography, I3
and discourses of modern wonders and magic-that cuts across the arbi-
trary divide of the cinematic and the noncinematic, the premodern and
the modem, 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 West-
ern and Japanese literature and drama. Thus on both domestic and in-
ternational levels, in linguistic and cinematic domains, early Chinese cin-
ema contributed to world cinema and modem visual culture with a
specific brand of modernism a la Shanghai Yangjingbang-a local ver-
nacular 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 l 93 7. These large-scale sociocultural trans-
formations and waves of accelerated modernization substantially, and at
times violently, altered the spiritual and physical landscape of China, es-
pecially its cities. Rather than treating this social landscape as a distant
Chapter One
background for the cinema, I regard some of its features as significant

signposts in an expansive vernacular scene-in both linguistic and the-
atrical senses-on which the cinematic experience is lived out and en-
acted, and which itself is reshaped by the cinema. Instead of tackling the
specific watershed historical events head on, which has been done ex-
tensively by scholars, my focus will be on the complex interaction be-
tween 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 in-
frastructure, a history of film culturq' would be inadequate without con-
siderations of the physical forms, geographical distributions, and social
and aesthetic function of exhibition venues. Thus the vernacular also en-
compasses the urban architectural environment essential to film expe-
rience-the theaters, amusement halls, teahouses, parks, cafes, dance
halls, department stores, and race courts, as well as the residential com-
munities where these venues were often located. This environment was
more than the sum of physical structures; it provided the site for a com-
plex ecology of material conditions and sociocorporeal relations. This
book does not, however, attempt to detail a social history of movie the-
aters and moviegoing experience. Rather, my interests in theater archi-
4 I tecture lie more in the subtle dialectic relations between the vernacular
"hardvvare" (locations, infrastructure, and technology) and the "soft-
ware" (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 ur-
ban 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 tea-
house-style venue to the interiorized and gentrified purpose-built cin-
ema during the first half of the 1920s. This shift in venue was simultane-
ous with the emergence of a morally centered narrative cinema and the
discourse concerning the relationship between enlightenment and en-
tertainment. The martial-arts film craze at the end of that decade, how-
ever, 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 vernac-
ular 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 semi-
nal 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 pop-
ular literature that was systematically discredited as unworthy by the
May Fourth literary discourse. 6 Early Chinese cinema was heavily in-
debted 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 illiter-
ate 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 ur-
ban life style and consumer culture. The vernacular modernism formu-
lated and expressed by the cinematic experience is therefore insepara-
ble from the new configurations of gender relations and perceptions of
the body.
In the following I will elaborate on some key theoretical and historio- Is
graphical issues outlined above. I will begin with a general discussion of
a body of recent scholarship that reconceives cinema as modernity in-
carnated. 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 pro-
vided 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.
Chapter One
The first wave of this scholarship began in the mid- l 980s with archivists
and film historians-silent-film buffs who worked primarily with empir-
ical and textual methods. A second wave of literature by film and art his-
torians 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 criti ·
cal theory, these scholars have engaged the writings of Georg Simmer,
Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, which have been more system-
atically 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 en-
durance 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 attrac-
tions, 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 an-
thology published in 1995, showcases a range of critical approaches and
methodologies for linking cinema with a duster of other cultural forms.
6 I It also declares, almost as a manifesto for the emerging field, that "cin-
ema ... became the fullest expression and combination of modernity's
attributes" in the nineteenth and twentieth century.7 The authors argue
that the complex relationships between various precinematic or paracin-
ematic practices, such as impressionist painting, photography, melodra-
matic 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 histori·
cal practice.'' s 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 pres-
sure" on the emergence of cinema, which in turn "marked the unprece-
dented 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.'' 9 Thus, it is
not only fruitful but also imperative to ground early cinema in the ma-
trix of everyday life in modernity-abundant forms of mass and com-
modity 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 manufac-
tured 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, 1° Kirby ap-
plies the rail passenger's "panoramic perception" of the moving landscape
to the experience of cinema. Because both kinds of "journeys" are pred-
icated on spatiotemporal discontinuity and the "shock of surprise" (acci-
dents, shifts in point of views), the spectator-passenger embodies a mod-
ern 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." 11 Its formation is also
intertwined with nation-building, colonial expansion, and American cin-
ema'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. I 7
Critical investment in the question of gender and historical forms
of female spectatorship has yielded some significant studies, conjoining
early cinema, feminism, and critical theory in productive ways. Anne
Friedberg's book on the correlative mode of cinematic gaze and "window
shopping" found in the viewing practices in both early and postmodern
cinema is one of the early attempts to apply Benjamin's writings on
f[anerie to a feminist inquiry on film spectatorship of the "past, present
and the virtual." Central to Friedberg's argument is that cinema and its
ancillary forms of viewing, such as panorama, diorama, urban strolling,
and window shopping at department stores in fin de siecle Paris, created a
"mobilized virtual gaze" that distinguishes itself from traditional seden-
tary forms of spectatorship (opera, for example). This "imaginary flane-
rie" of cinema spectatorship, argues Friedberg, "offers a spatially mo-
bilized visuality but also, importantly, a temporal mobility." 12 More
importantly, this mobilized gaze is attributed to not simply the aloof male
intellectual f[aneur profiled by Benjamin by way of Baudelaire, 13 but in-
deed to the urban crowd as a whole, particularly women, or f[aneuses,
who made rapid inroads into the public arena in that period.
Lauren Rabinovitz's For the Love of Pleasure, on the other hand, can-
vasses Chicago's turn-of-the-century film and mass culture and identifies
women as active yet ambivalent consumers of this culture. 14 From the
Chapter One
world expositions to the department stores, from the amusement parks

to the neighborhood nickelodeons, women enjoyed unprecedented, al-
beit circumscribed, visibility and freedom in the public space. We also
find this in Shanghai to varying degrees. While Friedberg concentrated
on the theoretical and historiographical significance of early female spec-
tatorship, Rabinovitz is concerned with locating the historical female
spectator in a particular time (the turn of the twentieth century} and
place (Chicago). Unearthing and engaging a wide range of historical and
filmic sources, Rabinovitz's reconceptualization of fliinerie and the fl&-
neuses revises Friedberg's (and/Susan Buck-Morss's} 15 llexaggerated" cel-
ebration of the uninhibited fl&neuses. The supervised appearance and
movement of women (prostitutes, shoppers, and pleasure-seekers) sug-
gests that gender hierarchies, while being challenged, were not over-
turned. By characterizing women's "urban travels" as vacillating between
motion and stillness (for example, waiting and standing), between seeing
and being seen, Rabinovitz offers a more differentiated account of
women's presence in public space. Quite different from the self-reflexive,
radical image of fliinerie, "female urban consciousness" has more to do
with the collective "rituals of urban commodity consumption." 16 Such
patterns of behavior and ambivalence-"the dciuble-edged process of
8 I subjectivity and objectification" 17-were carried into the film experience.
The aforementioned studies focused on the flaneuse or female specta-
tor as an anonymous collective body, afloat in the wonderland of mod-
ern pleasures (and potential dangers). Giuliana Bruno's work on early
Italian film culture bridges spectatorship with female authorship by ex-
cavating the (fragments of) films by Elvira Notari, Italy's first and most
popular female filmmaker. Taking the contemporary reader on a series of
"inferential walks" on the "ruined map" of the turn-of-the-century Nea-
politan urban landscape and vernacular traditions-reminiscent of the
port city Shanghai on the other side of the vast Eurasian continent-
Bruno weaves an intermedial tapestry of cinema, architecture, photog-
raphy, medical discourse, and literature. Employing what she calls a
"typoanalysis" of spectacle and spectatorship, Bruno grounds her explo-
ration of Notari's cinema and writings in the physical and mental geog-
raphy of her milieu. Ultimately, from intertextual restorations of cine-
matic fragments and other transdisciplinary operations that cut across
high culture and popular culture, Notari's panoramic visions chart an ur-
ban culture, along with women's lives and desires inscribed within it. In
this instance, the figure of the flaneuse is at once an individual and a col-
lective body, both spectatorial and authorial, an agent of both cultural re-
ception and production.
These explorations of the kinship between cinema and modernity
have prompted David Bordwell to rather dismissively characterize this

emerging field and its attendant methodologies as "the modernity the-
sis." 18 The core of this criticism resides in the suspicion of Benjamin's
view that urban industrial modernity profoundly altered modes of hu-
man perception, and that cinema represents the synthetic embodiment
of this sea change. A related criticism has to do with the allegedly fuzzy
demarcation between modernity and modernism-or between sociocul-
tural. economic factors and formal transformations in literature, cinema,
and other arts.
Ben Singer in Melodrama and Modernity attempted a sustained engage-
ment with Bordwell's criticism by way of a substantiation of the "moder-
nity thesis." 19 While the book's primary historical materials are the
American theatrical and cinematic sensational melodramas from 1800 to
1920, Singer devotes nearly half of the book to investigating the nature
of a historical era marked by the advent of modernity and capitalism. He
theorizes melodrama as both a product of modernity and a training
ground for the modern subjects to adjust to the "hyperstimulis" of the
metropolis. 20 Singer's book is rich with insights into the issue of specta-
torship, even though it is not at the forefront of his project. Through an
investigation of the social demographics of the American city and the au-
diences of melodrama, Singer shows that the "massive" urban working I 9
class and the white-collar, "burgeoning lower middle class"-both prod-
ucts of modern capitalism's great bureaucratic expansion-were the
main participatory spectators and consumers of the "manufactured stim-
ulus" offered by sensational amusements such as melodrama on stage
and screen. 21 Sensational melodrama attracted both female and male
spectators through its representation of "a new kind of independent, en-
ergetic woman-the New Woman," who was an object of fascination and
a novelty. Beyond being a cultural symbol of urban modernity, the New
Woman was also a "real flesh.and-bones social entity," and sensational
melodramas centered on such figures provided an "iconology of popular
feminism" for a vast number of women c~ntering the work force and pub-
lic spaces such as the theater and cinema.22
As an illuminating interpreter of Benjamin's, Kracauer's, and Adorno's
writings, Miriam Hansen has brought a crucial dose of theoretical rigor
to the argument for the discursive corollary between cinema and moder-
nity. Her more recent work has steered the discussion on cinema as an al-
ternative public sphere, especially in Babel and Babylon: The Emergence of
Spectatorship in American Silent Film, toward a series of polemics on cin-
ema's role in the "mass production of senses." Hansen makes a system·
atic attempt to open up the question of aesthetics precisely to address yet
again the ontological status of cinema, which had so long been confined
Chapter One
to the abstract apparatus theory of a different paradigm. In Hansen's es-

says, the return to aesthetics is intertwined with the return to history be-
cause the two trajectories constitute a common inquiry into the history
of modern senses as witnessed and shaped by the cinema. The writing
of film history thus necessarily entails histories of embodied and lived
experiences of cinema as a constitutive part of modern life. Highlighting
Benjamin's etymological parse of the word aesthetics, or the "theory
[Lehre] of perception that the Greeks called aesthetics," which he em-
ployed to critique its narrow definition associated with the bourgeois in-
stitution of art, Hansen underscor~ the historical significance of Ben-
jamin's investment in the term. Writing at the moment of danger-the
rise of fascism and its appropriation of technology (war machines as well
as mimetic machines such as cinema) for destructive purposes-Ben-
jamin called for a revised and expanded notion of the aesthetic in an ef-
fort to rescue technology from reification or abuse by both the bour-
geoisie and fascism.
Hansen observes a crucial link between this revived notion of the aes-
thetic and the concept of innervation in Benjamin's thinking on the so-
cial. productive reception of technology. This emphasis on aesthetics as
perception and sensation (rather techniques or tastes accessible only to a
10 I few), and on technology as a medium for overcoming alienation and
anaesthetization in the industrial age, shifts the focus of philosophical
debate on modernity from mind to body, from messianism to actuality,
from superstructure to infrastructure, from the sublime to the profane,
from that of the individual to the collective. The political implications
of the notion and practice of innervation are profound, as Hansen
explicates:
The crucial issue is therefore whether there can be an imbrication

of technology and the human senses that is not swallowed into the
vortex of decline; whether Benjamin's egalitarian, techno-utopian
politics could be conjoined with his emphatic notion of experi-
ence I memory; whether_ and how the Nprofane illumination" he
discerned in the project of the surrealists could be generalized into
a "bodily collective innervation," the universal and public integra-
tion of body- and image-space (Leib- und Bildraum) that had be-
come structurally possible with technology.23
Hansen reasons that Benjamin's conception of innervation is tied to his

broader visions of humanity's future. It was produced through an eclectic
mixing and retooling of Freud's psychoanalysis (particularly his neuro-
logical and anthropological accents), contemporary perceptual psychol-
ogy. developmental psychology, reception aesthetics. and acting the-

ory (Eisenstein's theory of the "expressive movement" derived from
Meyerhold's biomechanic theory). To accomplish the imbrication of sec-
ond technology (mechanically mediated) in capitalism and the human
senses, it requires cultivation of "discarded powers of the first, with
mimetic practices that involve the body, as the 'preeminent instrument'
of sensory perception and (moral and political) differentiation.u 24 How-
ever, the reactivation of the abilities of the body and the reignition of the
instinctual power of the senses must not be construed as a nostalgic re-
turn to the pastoral era before technology and modernity. For technol-
ogy has irrevocably altered the vectors of the historical process and the
conditions for experiencing and transforming the world. As technology
has so deeply penetrated or "cut" into the modem landscape-(the rail-
way, for example, manufa(tured the experience of llpanorarnic travelu), 25
any attempt to achieve "bodily collective innervation" goes hand-in-
hand with a collective innervation of technology. For the restoration of
human senses could only be done by llpassing through" technology that
permeates the air of modem life.
Three major lines of theoretical and historiographic concerns are
shared by the examination of the relationship between cinema and the
experience of modernity: ( l) the grounding of cinema in the phenome- I 11
nology of the metropolis and the kaleidoscopic cultural space of moder-
nity; (2) the decentering of the cinematic object for writing a new inter-
medial and transdisciplinary cultural history of the screen experience.
This history is horizontally distributed and open-ended instead of repro-
ducing a linear, text-centered, teleological film history; and (3) the fore-
grounding and rigorous historicization and affirmation of gendered and
embodied moviegoing experience. These endeavors have not only reen-
ergized cinema studies but together they have applied concepts about the
cinema of attractions to related issues in the 1920s and beyond, well af-
ter the purported hegemony of Hollywood narrative cinema worldwide.
In this regard, "the concept of cinema of attractions allow us to look at
classical Hollywood cinema as a dynamic process," and to uncover the
"interaction between spectacle and narrative so frequently found in
Hollywood genres." 26 This expanded notion of the cinema of attractions,
as I will show in later chapters, is particularly productive when studying
other national cinemas where there is no "early cinema" comparable to
the Euro-American periodization.
The expansion of cinema as a distinctive industry (or dream factory)
and its penetration into everyday life paralleled the intensifying mod-
ernization and capitalist production. Aggravated sensory overload in the
Taylor labor system and urban environment inflicted both deeper trauma
Chapter One
and numbed the modern urban subjects' sensorium. This deprived them
of the initial sense of thrill and astonishment as typically seen in the cin-
ema of attractions or sensational melodrama that often featured the
country rube encountering the city. Cinema (especially American cin-
ema) responded to such routine forms of shock or "hyperstimulus" in
work and leisure with streamlined narrative formulas and a vertically in-
tegrated studio system modeled after the Taylor's labor system. At the
same time, however, this further loss of "aura" or decline of experience-
(the diagnosis of modern culture made by Benjamin in his artwork es-
say) 27-in both life and the mimetAc arts created ever greater needs for
"ever more powerful aesthetic techniques, ever more spectacular thrills
and sensations, to pierce the protective shield of consciousness." 28 The
spiral-effect and subsequent exponential increase of the desire for pleas-
urable compensation or distraction feeds into the symbiotic relationship
between modern life and the culture industry. By the same token, the
film and media culture that transformed and thrived beyond early cin-
ema continued to manifest the attributes and symptoms of modernity in
an ever more complex combinations of containment and excess, anaes-
thetization and stimulation, conformism and ana.rchism.
12 1
PLAYFUL VERNACULAR MODERNISM
A proliferation of youxi, or play and playfulness, appeared in a plethora of

media and discourses-vernacular press, amusement halls, mechanical
theaters, and electric shadow plays-in urban China around the turn of
the twentieth century. At these locations of collective play and perfor-
mance, people experimented with modern mimetic gadgets to reflect and
represent an increasingly technologized everyday life. If '"Lunarparks'
are a prefiguration of sanatoria" where numbed senses and alienated
body parts convalesce, then places like the Great World and New World
in Shanghai where the urbanites play, gamble, eat, drink, and flirt not
only recreate the metropolis, but also serve as a playground for old and
new mimetic technologies. It is hardly surprising that such playgrounds
were the first homes to cinema. Not only were many early films made in
and about amusement parks, they were also among the first projection
venues for the toy-like cameras and childlike performances on the
screen. Modern youxi is not only a concentrated form of urban socializa-
tion and entertainment, it also quickly lent inspiration to early filmmak-
ers. Zhang Shichuan, Zheng Zhengqiu, and their colleagues who started
China's first film enterprises, readily looked for material and frames of
reference in the "profane" world of youxi, in particular vernacular the-
aters and amusement halls that resembled the new medium.
:.·:.:-:·
/ .. As a unique technology that integrates the apparatus and the human

f/&bdy (the actors as well as the spectators), Benjamin saw in cinema a
; hriii:fi:ie medium for such a redemptive process, a medium for the inter-
i play between nature and humanity. This idea was made famous by his
<artwork essay but had been in ferment in One Way Street, a collection of
s'i<etches and essays written in 1928. Hansen elaborates:
/ ·. Fitionlm ofassumes this task not simply by way of a behaviorist adapta-

human perceptions and reactions to the regime of the ap-
· · ... paratus (which seems to be the tenor of parts of the artwork essay)
·.· but because film has the potential to reverse, in the form of play,
the catastrophic consequences of an already failed reception of tech-
nology.... Because of the medium's technicity, as well as its col-
lective mode of reception, film offers a chance-a second chance,
a last chance-to bring the apparatus to social consciousness, to
make it public.29
The notion of play as a concrete form of bodily and collective inner-

vation is critically important. On the one hand, it captures Benjamin's
fascination with the figure of the child and the implications of children's
playful and performative mimetic faculty" with which they explore new
0
I 13
objects in the world and boundaries of their bodies. Play destabilizes the
dichotomy between subject and object and creates an interactive and re-
peatable mode of contact and communication, a mode of cognition in-
0
volving sensuous, somatic, and tactile forms of perception; a noncoercive

engagement with the other that opens the self to experience." 30
For Benjamin, one of the most representative or allegorical sites for
the radical playfulness of bodily innervation is found in the gestalt of
Chaplin, the childlike clown whose body and sentimentality literally
passes through and survives technology repeatedly, as seen in the as-
sembly-line scenes in Modern Times (1936). The worldwide popularity of
Chaplin, a figure whom Andre Bazin characterizes as a man beyond the
0
realm of the sacred," 3 1 is a testimony to the appeal of a childlike, bodily

cinema that is border-defying, curiosity-rousing, and universally intelli-
gible .and translatable. Among the first series of shorts made by the Asia
Company, a small Sino-American joint venture, are two Chaplin-in-
China films. In the first, (the imposter) Chaplin, played by Richard Belt
a British resident of Shanghai who worked as a clown at the New World,
arrives at the docks of Shanghai on an ocean liner and then proceeds to
visit the city, making a fool of himself along the way (figs. 1.1 and 1.2).
In the other film, Chaplin and Harold Lloyd (this time played by two Chi-
nese actors) make a big scene in a theater. 32 The films are in fact pidgin
Chapter One
I.I
The Kins ofCmnedy
To11TS Shanghai:
at the harbor.
(Courtesy of the
China Film Archive)
1.2
The King of Comedy
Tours Shanghai:
in a sedan chair.
14 I (Courtesy of the
China Film Archive)
versions of a global cinematic vernacular a la Shanghaiese, with the

copycat Chaplin "going native" as its embodiment.
Yet the child or the childlike person as the vernacular hybrid who
grapples with the joys and pains of technology is a complex player on the
cinematic playground; it is a figure rather than a specific demographic.
Traditional discourses on early cinema are riddled with the use of the
child figure to denote a "mythic childhood of the medium" in a patron-
izing and evolutionist vein. According to Tom Gunning, however, the
first film audiences of astonishing sights such as the Black Diamond Ex-
press or the electrocution of an elephant were anything but credulous
children. Instead, early film spectators, like spectators of other attractions
such as freak shows and wax museums, were sophisticated connoisseurs
of modern sights and sounds and understood the aesthetic of astonish-
ment-the swing between shock and distraction. The combination of
::
( wonderment and (profane) education, directly bound to the "lust of the

>eye" (rather than the mind) creates an (in)credulous spectator who is a
· . child-adult hybrid, a "freaky" performer who is part of the show rather
than a distanced contemplative subject. Gunning reminds us that this ,
childlike spectator is also a well-tempered modern subject who con-
stantly has to navigate in the agitated urban milieu,
The panic before the image on the screen exceeds a simple physi-
cal reflex, similar to those one experiences in a daily encounter
with urban traffic or industrial production. In its double nature, its
transformation of still image into moving illusion, it expresses an
attitude in which astonishment and knowledge perform a vertigi-
nous dance, and pleasure derives from the energy released by the
play between the shock caused by this illusion of danger and de-
light in its pure illusion. The jolt experienced becomes a shock of
recognition.33
Gunning's conceptualization of the aesthetic of astonishment and

identification of the (in)credulous spectator's "vertiginous dance" with
new forms of urban attractions is germane to the notions of innervation
and play, two sides of the same coin minted by Benjamin. The anchoring I 15
of this collective body in the concrete architectural space of the cinema
(from Grand Cafe in Paris to the picture palaces in Berlin to the Art Deco-
inspired cinemas in Shanghai) calls for a history of cinema in relation to
a history of moviegoing and exhibition practices. This resonates with
Hansen's reading of One Way Street in terms of the urban metaphor of the
street and traffic. By replenishing the neuropsychological term with a
productive meaning and applying it to film and mass culture, Benjamin
envisioned cinema to be a two-way process that cuts through both the
nerve-pathway and the avenues traveled by the urban dweller. This
would have likely included a stop at a movie theater. If film presented it-
self to be a "prism" that could expose the "optical unconscious'134 and
transform our worldviews, the "moviegoing experience would therefore
seem to be the logical site for thinking through the possibility of a bodily
collective innervation, as the condition of an alternative interaction with
technology and the commodity world." 35
The attempt to locate the spectator in the urban environment and the
movie theater brings us closer to identifying the historical spectator, who
is not so much a quantifiable empirical statistics as a condensed figure,
indeed a collective body. This body of the crowd is embedded in the met-
ropolitan life. If the figure of the flaneur represents the (male) writer in
the capitalist marketplace who "botanize[s] on the asphalt" and feels at
Chapter One
home in the arcades ra city, even a world, in miniature"), 36 then the col-
lective body of the urban crowd that frequents the amusement parks, va-
riety shows, and cinemas via the "two-way street" of innervation consti-
tutes a mass flJ.nerie-a vast array of "physiologies" or "metropolitan
typesll in the urban scene.37
One of these metropolitan physiologies that Gunning discerns to be
the embodiment of the cinematic mass f/anerie as opposed to the solitary
dandy-feuilltoniste is the gawker, a street-level spectator qua performer. 38
For Gunning, this plebiay- figure is the quintessential representative of
the early moviegoing experience that is woven into in the urban fabric.
Through this figure, "attractions do more than reflect modernity; they
provide one of its methods." The gawker's desire to stop, stare, and mar-
vel reflects not only the ebb and flow of the distracted urban crowd but
also a new culture of consumption and pleasure through an aggressive
visuality. The gawker, who paces the sidewalks, is a spectator of the ur-
ban scene and its participant. Many early film showmen are, in fact,
gawkers who literally peddled shows on the sidewalks while watching
the surrounding street scenes. Such was the case in China as well. The
Electric Shadowplay on Fourth Avenue, which featured a band promot-
ing teahouse movie shows, furnishes a telling example (fig. 1.3). "The
16 I Whole Town Is Gawking" is a vivid portrayal of the omnipresence of the
gawker with both childlike curiosity and a petty urbanite's consumer
desire. The sidewalks and cinema houses allowed the mutual recognition
of disparate urban subjects and the formation of a public as well as a col-
lective urban subjectivity. At the same time, in ascribing to the city itself
the attributes of the gawker, especially its mass and mobile character,
Gunning grasps the phenomenology of the metropolis as well as cinema
as an embodied vernacular experience.
If the turn of the century mass attractions offered the f/aneuse and the
gawker a democratic, even playful appeal, their effects are usually con-
sidered to be trampled by the emerging hegemonic force of classical
Hollywood cinema. However, Hansen ventures into the realm of classical
cinema, so often seen as the bastion of conservative and patriarchal ideas,
in an attempt to place the "bad object" in a new light by teasing out its
imbrication in the "mass production of the senses." This development is
consistent with her earlier elucidation of Benjamin and I<racauer's fasci-
nation with American cinema as the emblematic form of bodily innerva-
tion, especially from the perspective of a Europe overshadowed by war
and fascism. 39 This vernacularization of an institutionalized type of nar-
rative cinema based on universal mental structures and transhistorical
aesthetic norms seeks to relocate classical cinema in the historical context
of modernity and the practice of modernism in other contemporary arts.
1 11
1.3 "A Social Phenomenon in Shanghai: The Noisy Shadowplay on Fourth Avenue·
(Tuhua ribao, no. %).
The .move from "modernity" to "modernism" is a deliberate one. It is

made possible in part by the retooled, wider notion of the aesthetic-
"one that situates artistic practices within a larger history and economy
of sensory perception that Benjamin, for one, saw as the decisive battle-
ground for the meaning and fate of modernity." 40 At the same time, it at-
tempts to escape from the trappings of the social-scientific frameworks
that hold little regard for aesthetic questions. Rather than replace moder-
nity as an all-encompassing social theory with modernism as a narrowly
formal regime, the modifying term vernacular-as opposed to classical-
accounts t'or their intertwining. By proclaiming that Hollywood cinema
presented something like the first "global vernacular," Hansen brings
cinematic modernism back into the arenas of history and international
film culwre. Manufacturing and promoting itself as the embodiment of
youth, energy, gender equality, and above all, contemporaneity, Ameri-
can cinema streamlined an intelligible, translatable mass-based cinematic
idiom that appealed to the widest possible range of audiences worldwide,
Chapter One
often accompanied by aggressive marketing strategies. Through a com-
plex chain effect of circulation and transformation in different cultural
locations, this vernacular is in turn modified and localized. Thus in a di-
alectical way, precisely through its contact with other cultural contexts,
Hollywood at once offered a reflexive horizon for mediating the global
experience of modernity and became provincialized as other film cul-
tures tried to challenge its dominance.
The transformation of Russian cinema, in particular the emergence
of montage theorY, (a modernist I avant-garde canon), during the revo-
lution illustrates tlansen's argument on the mediating role of American
cinema. The rather quick shift from the Old cinema characterized by
slow-paced melodrama yet multilayered mise-en-scene to the New cin-
ema accentuated by dose framing and rapid decoupage seems to have
taken place through a "process of Americanization." Yet this American
accent is acquired through a complex process of sifting and recombining
disparate elements. Yuri Tsivian suggests that two kinds of Americanism
were at work in this cinematic transition. Many directors, for narrative
efficiency and coherence, borrowed from stylistic elements such as
"American montage" or "American foreground" (standard idioms of clas-
sical cinema). The Russian films of the period, however, carried deep
18 I imprints of the "lower genres" in American cinema, particularly the
body-centered and kinetically charged adventure serials and slapstick
comedies. 41 The coexistence of the two influential currents in the trans-
formation of Russian cinema and the appropriation of American "cine-
matic pulp fiction" by the Russian avant-garde demonstrate both the
malleability of the American cinematic vernacular and the reciprocal re-
lationship between classical cinema and modernism.
Reception gives vernacular modernism concrete, situated meaning.
By outlining the double trajectory of American cinema's universal ambi-
tions and provincialized realities in the international context, Hansen
was able to extend the theoretical discussion of Benjamin's nbodily col-
lective innervation" as a utopian idea into the domain of comparative
cultural histories of the film experience. In a subsequent article, Hansen
takes up Shanghai silent film as an instance of vernacular modernism
that paralleled yet distinguished itself from the "global vernacular" rep-
resented by Hollywood. 42 Discussing a body of silent films screened at the
Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 1995 and 1997, Hansen finds that the
hybrid visual style and star performances in some of the Chinese classi-
cal works from the 1930s illustrate the mechanism of vernacular mod-
ernism Has a sensory-reflexive discourse of the experience of modernity
and modernization, a matrix for the articulation of fantasies, uncertain-
ties, and anxieties." 43 The figure of woman-the on-screen heroines as
well as stars Ruan Lingyu and Li Lili-articulates the polyvalent mean-

ings and contradictory promises of modernity. Li's masquerading perfor-
mance of her character in Daybreak (Tianming, directed by Sun Yu, 1933),
especially in the execution scene, resonates with Marlene Dietrich's in
Josef von Sternberg's Dishonored (1931). The American-educated Sun Yu
in this and other films liberally borrowed from American and European
cinemas and used Chinese aesthetic motifs and artistic repertoires. His vi-
sual style and social concerns indeed mark him as perhaps the most im-
portant master of vernacular modernism in Chinese film history (dis-
cussed more in chapter 7).
In her essay on Shanghai silent film, Hansen tested her general the-
ory of cinema, American cinema in particular, as an exemplary instance
of vernacular modernism. But her foray into Chinese silent film also
stressed the importance of local conditions of the reception or rather,
translation, of foreign cinema and the production of a domestic cinema.
She alludes to the "wealth of intertextual and intermedial relations both
within individual films and in Shanghai film culture," which informs our
project here. The extensive, though by no means exhaustive, historical
work required to excavate and reimagine the multiple, crisscrossing "in-
tertextual and intermedial relations" that Hansen's brief essay called for
is one of the foundations of this book. In the process of explaining the
production of the vibrant cinema within Shanghai urban culture in early
twentieth century, I develop and recast the concept of vernacular mod-
ernism through specification and amplification, approaching it from a set
of intersecting angles. These approaches are intertwined with discussion
of embodiment, yet anchored in the historical context of the vernacular
movement in China.
Vernacular in this manner is a less ideologically loaded term than pop-
ular, yet rich with social, political, and aesthetic implications. It departs
from its cliched definition of a static (and largely agrarian) tradition and
a lack of stylistic sophistication, as often deployed in the field of architec-
ture. 44 Yet the emphasis on craftsmanship, democratic appeal, and on the
use of local materials, techniques, and forms in vernacular architecture
is to some degree relevant to the way a local film culture is shaped and
disseminated. In architecture studies the vernacular has traditionally
been posited against the monumental and the modern and ascribed to
the prosaic and preindustrial landscape and way of life. 45 However, as
Amos Rapoport argues, the vernacular is situated in a fluctuating and re-
lational "continuum" of the primitive, vernacular, popular, and high
styles, such that a movie palace may be regarded as an emblem of high
class in comparison to a nickelodeon, but it is still vernacular next to an
opera house. 4 6 My reworking of architectural discourse, which was bor-
Chapter One
often accompanied by aggressive marketing strategies. Through a com-

plex chain effect of circulation and transformation in different cultural
locations, this vernacular is in turn modified and localized. Thus in a di-
alectical way, precisely through its contact with other cultural contexts,
Hollywood at once offered a reflexive horizon for mediating the global
experience of modernity and became provincialized as other film cul-
tures tried to challenge its dominance.
The transformation of Russian cinema, in particular the emergence
of montage theory (a modernist I avant-garde canon), during the revo-
lution illustrates Hansen's argumedt on the mediating role of American
cinema. The rather quick shift from the Old cinema characterized by
slow-paced melodrama yet multilayered mise-en-scene to the New cin-
ema accentuated by dose framing and rapid decoupage seems to have
taken place through a "process of Americanization." Yet this American
accent is acquired through a complex process of sifting and recombining
disparate elements. Yuri Tsivian suggests that two kinds of Americanism
were at work in this cinematic transition. Many directors, for narrative
efficiency and coherence, borrowed from stylistic elements such as
"American montage" or "American foreground" (standard idioms of clas-
sical cinema). The Russian films of the period, however, carried deep
18 I imprints of the "lower genres" in American cinema, particularly the
body-centered and kinetically charged adventure serials and slapstick
comedies. 41 The coexistence of the two influential currents in the trans-
formation of Russian cinema and the appropriation of American "cine-
matic pulp fiction" by the Russian avant-garde demonstrate both the
malleability of the American cinematic vernacular and the reciprocal re-
lationship between classical cinema and modernism.
Reception gives vernacular modernism concrete, situated meaning.
By outlining the double trajectory of American cinema's universal ambi-
tions and provincialized realities in the international context, Hansen
was able to extend the theoretical discussion of Benjamin's "bodily col-
lective innervation" as a utopian idea into the domain of comparative
cultural histories of the film experience. In a subsequent article, Hansen
takes up Shanghai silent film as an instance of vernacular modernism
that paralleled yet distinguished itself from the "global vernacular" rep-
resented by Hollywood. 42 Discussing a body of silent films screened at the
Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 1995 and 1997, Hansen finds that the
hybrid visual style and star performances in some of the Chinese classi-
cal works from the 1930s illustrate the mechanism of vernacular mod-
ernism "as a sensory-reflexive discourse of the experience of modernity
and modernization, a matrix for the articulation of fantasies, uncertain-
ties, and anxieties." 43 The figure of woman-the on-screen heroines as
well as stars Ruan Lingyu and Li Lili-articulates the polyvalent mean-

ings and contradictory promises of modernity. Li's masquerading perfor-
mance of her character in Daybreak (Tianming, directed by Sun Yu, 1933 ),
especially in the execution scene, resonates with Marlene Dietrich's in
Josef von Sternberg's Dishonored ( 1931). The American-educated Sun Yu
in this and other films liberally borrowed from American and Et1ropean
cinemas and used Chinese aesthetic motifs and artistic repertoires. His vi-
sual style and social concerns indeed mark him as perhaps the most im-
portant master of vernacular modernism in Chinese film history (dis-
cussed more in chapter 7).
In her essay on Shanghai silent film, Hansen tested her general the-
ory of cinema, American cinema in particular, as an exemplary instance
of vernacular modernism. But her foray into Chinese silent film also
stressed the importance of local conditions of the reception or rather,
translation, of foreign cinema and the production of a domestic cinema.
She alludes to the "wealth of intertextual and intermedial relations both
within individual films and in Shanghai film culture," which informs our
project here. The extensive, though by no means exhaustive, historical
work required to excavate and reimagine the multiple, crisscrossing "in-
tertextual and intermedial relations" that Hansen's brief essay called for
is one of the foundations of this book. In the process of explaining the I 19
production of the vibrant cinema within Shanghai urban culture in early
twentieth century, I develop and recast the concept of vernacular mod-
ernism through specification and amplification, approaching it from a set
of intersecting angles. These approaches are intertwined with discussion
of embodiment, yet anchored in the historical context of the vernacular
movement in China.
Vernacular in this manner is a less ideologically loaded term than pop-
ular, yet rich with social, political, and aesthetic implications. It departs
from its cliched definition of a static (and largely agrarian) tradition and
a lack of stylistic sophistication, as often deployed in the field of architec-
ture.44 Yet the emphasis on craftsmanship, democratic appeal, and on the
use of local materials, techniques, and forms in vernacular architecture
is to some degree relevant to the way a local film culture is shaped and
disseminated. In architecture studies the vernacular has traditionally
been posited against the monumental and the modern and ascribed to
the prosaic and preindustrial landscape and way of life. 45 However, as
Amos Rapoport argues, the vernacular is situated in a fluctuating and re-
lational "continuum" of the primitive, vernacular, popular, and high
styles, such that a movie palace may be regarded as an emblem of high
class in comparison to a nickelodeon, but it is still vernacular next to an
opera house. 46 My reworking of architectural discourse, which was bor-
Chapter One
rowed from nineteenth-century linguistics, emphasizes the interpene-

trating of the old and new temporalities and attendant spatial practices.
As both "language" and physical structures the cinema manifests the dy-
namic transactions between the cosmopolitan and the local. the high and
the low, the decline of aura and the retooling of the archaic.
In its original homestead of language and literature, the vernacular,
invoking both heterogeneous experience and the polymorphous forms of
language, has always attracted the avant-garde in search of a radical lan-
guage bound to the materiality of the signifier. Among the modernist
artists who experimented wi,th typography Guillaume Apollinaire's cal-
ligrammatic poems stand out for their striking figural dimension that is
enmeshed in the realm of experience. As Johanna Drucker stresses in her
study of the futurist and Dada experiments with typography, Apolli-
naire's rejection of ossified classical poetic structures was "accompanied
by coming to terms with the richness of spoken language and an infusion
of vernacular, daily speech patterns into his poetry." 47 Quite different
from his contemporaries' (including Eisenstein's and Pound's) whimsical
intellectual deployment of the Chinese ideograph, Apollinaire's interest
in the ideograph as "a contemporary hieroglyphic, a dense bearer of vi-
sual I verbal values" was informed less by esotericism than by a ver-
20 I nacular sensibility focused on the "simple, evident, even banal forms."
His overall method is characterized by a "sensual leap to the work" or a
"presentational mode" rather than "intellectual processing." 48 The typo-
graphic attempt to create the visible word is fueled by an impulse to ren-
der the world legible and tangible. As such it comes close to some of the
aesthetic manifestations of early cinema: the direct address, the presen-
tational mode, and the teeming presence of everyday life a.nd vernacular
expressions. Apollinaire's and other avant-garde artists' affinity with the
"mystery" of the everyday may have resulted in a certain form and idiom
of the modernist vernacular. The sensuous, ·experimental" language of
the cinema of attractions, which, as Gunning has underscored, has a di-
rect bearing on the historical avant-garde and hatches a vernacular mod-
ernism that would subsequently diversify and transform in different his-
torical contexts.
Because the vernacular is "discovered" by both linguists and architects
alike as a pervasive background against which modern towers of Babel
may be erected, 49 the modern is inevitably and simultaneously shot
through with the vernacular as a source of inspiration or nostalgia, al-
ternately an object for derision and colonization. Rather than two an-
titheses, the vernacular I modern is indeed a pair of Siamese twins-
inextricably connected yet existing in permanent codependence and
competition. In this ambivalent symbiosis the hand joins the machine,
primitive technology penetrates the second nature. Hardly a timeless tra-

dition, the vernacular "landscape" is made up of material culture (in-
cluding architectural forms such as the amusement hall and the movie
theater), as well as social and affective experience in modernity. It is in-
herently porous, dynamic, and generative. It evolves from a homegrown
culture while drawing and even thriving on global forms of communica-
tion and representation spurred by modern technology and cosmopoli-
tan culture. The constant transformation of the vernacular, as persua-
sively argued by Sheldon Pollock, is simultaneously propelled by the
attractions of "cosmopolitan universals" (communicative media such as
literature and cinema) and "affective attachment to old structures of be-
longing." Both the attractions of the new and attachment to the old can
be profoundly intertwined and ambivalent. As Pollock reasons, any ver-
nacular movement inevitably "consists of a response to a specific history
of domination and enforced change, along with a critique of the oppres-
sion of tradition itself, tempered by a strategic desire to locate resources
for a cosmopolitan future in vernacular ways of being themselves." 50
In sum, my theoretical investment in the vernacular is not simply mo-
tivated by a desire to get away from the much-contested and delimiting
categories of the "popular" or ·mass culture" deployed in discourses on
marginality vis-a-vis hegemony, or subversion vis a vis domination. I 21
Rather, it is fueled by an urge to reestablish the historical connection or
dialogue between film culture and modernity, and between the cinema
and other media. At the same time, early Chinese cinema does manifest
the ambivalence toward Euro-American culture, in particular the global
vernacular embodied by Hollywood cinema. The emergence and survival
of the Chinese film industry is thus a tension-ridden process of negotia-
tion between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, between film as a uto-
pian "universal language" on the one hand and local vernacular(s) on
the other. In that sense, the vernacular experience from which the early
Chinese film culture emerged and in turn refashioned is inherently poly-
valent and resilient. It was constantly being experimented with, lived
out, and redefined.
Stemming from but ramifying beyond the domain of language, the
vernacular thus encompasses the realm of the everyday, including archi-
tectural and urban space, and the impact of cinema as a commingled me-
dia on the experience of modernity. As such it functions as a conceptual
and experiential scaffolding that, in locally specific yet globally significant
ways, reconstructs the twentieth century Tower of Babel. The vernacu-
lar, retooled and conjoined with the phenomenology and representation
of modem life, has the potential to account for competing forms of mod-
ernism, the relationship between high and low cultural repertoires, and
Chapter One
globalizing formulas and localizing permutations-including subversive

mimetic play and appropriation.
THE PAINFUL EXPERIENCE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
As articulated in early Shanghai cinema, vernacular modernism had dis-

tinctive historical and cultural markers. The international culture of
modernity, largely a product of industrial capitalism and colonialism, re-
sulted in the uneasy coexistence of cosmopolitan yearnings and nation-
alist aspirations. As noted ~arlier, one of the most consequential changes
effected by the movement took place in the domain of language and lit-
erature, that is, the promotion and institution of the vernacular language
(or Mandarin, based on the Beijing dialect) as the standard modern Chi-
nese. The #discovery" of the vernacular by the late Qing reformers and
then the early republican intellectuals coincided with the emergence of
a modern urban culture and the introduction of cinema in China. When
we move from the vernacular movement as a "literary revolution" (wenxue
geming), conceived and practiced by the intellectuals, toward the embod-
iment of the vernacular experience in Shanghai cinema, the perspective
of film and cultural history reveals fruitful insights on the very question
22 I of Chinese modernity.
Print culture and popular literature flourished in the late Qing period.
New print technologies made texts more accessible to an expanding read-
ing population with varying level of literacy, and reshaped a new ver-
nacular culture. The pressure to modernize and open up to the world im-
pelled the reformers to explore a more democratic form of writing that
would not only represent the proliferating forms of modern life but also
cohere the motley of local vernaculars into a recognizable, standardized
script shared by the elite and the populace. In 1905, as part of the reform
program, the institution of imperial examinations was abolished. With it,
the supremacy or official status of classical Chinese (wenyanwen), a so-
phisticated written language largely isolated from the different spoken
vernaculars, was dismantled (although its usage continued in less rare-
fied forms). Baihuawen, the new vernacular, was a written language
based on colloquial speech. Easy to understand and unencumbered by
arcane allusions, it was quickly adopted by the new print industry, espe-
cially in newspapers catering to the expanding urban population and in
textbooks for new-style schools. Minbao, the earliest newspaper using the
vernacular, appeared in Shanghai in 187 6 as a supplement of the middle-
to highbrow Shenbao. Between then and the end of the Qing dynasty in
I 911, there were more than 140 vernacular newspapers all over China,
with 27 based in Shanghai alone (some of which catered to communities
of provincial sojourners in the city). 51 They functioned largely as portable

instructions for enlightenment (qimeng), appealing to women, children as
well as other semiliterate #petty urbanites" (xiaoshimin) such as shop
clerks and workers. Even the newspapers using classical language fre-
quently published texts in the vernacular to widen its readership. To in-
crease comprehensibility, vernacular newspapers adopted punctuation
and sentence breaks, onomatopoeia and dialect terms-features largely
absent in canonical classical texts. Responding to a flourishing mass cul-
ture. a number of newspapers specialized in entertainment and leisure,
such as Youxibao founded at the end of the 1890s by Li Boyuan, a famous
middlebrow fiction writer. 52 The proliferation of the illustrated newspa-
pers, on which I will have more to say in chapter 2, was also part and par-
cel of this surge of vernacular press. This trend, which aimed to achieve
mass literacy in both language and modern consciousness, created a fu-
sion of communicative and expressive forms that emphasized intelligibil-
ity and performativity. The new vernacular liberally drew on storytelling
(shuoshu), public speech (yanshuo), and the popular theater. Qiu Jing, the
legendary female revolutionary and poet who also started a vernacular
paper in 1904 in Japan, emphasized that the new writing form must not
overshadow its oral origins. Rather, she insisted that printed texts supply
the ready source for public speech and storytelling that appealed to the ] 23
illiterate. 53 Within this broad vernacular movement, the boundaries be-
tween the written and the spoken, the image and the text, and the pre-
sentational and the representational were often blurred. This in turn
stimulated the growth of the new-drama (xinju), a modern form of the-
ater that used vernacular speech and was modeled after the naturalist
spoken drama of the West. (In chapters 3 c1nd 8, I will discuss how this
vernacular drama supplied the impetus and ready material for Shanghai
cinema.)
Standard Chinese film historiography produced in the mainland has
consistently regarded the film practice of early Chinese cinema, in par-
ticular that of the 1920s, as part of the nonprogressive popular culture,
outside of the May Fourth movement that was intimately bound to the
vernacular movement. 54 In an influential but rather biased essay, the vet-
eran screenwriter and film critic Ke Ling asks rhetorically, #Why didn't
the strong shock waves of the May Fourth movement reach the film
circle?" 55 According to Ke Ling, it was only after the Japanese bombing
of Shanghai in January 28, 1932 that left-wing writers began to enter the
film world, and that Chinese cinema belatedly connected with the New
Culture movement. Briefly, the movement stemmed from a particular
political movement, namely, the surge of Chinese nationalism triggered
by the students' demonstration in Beijing on May 4, 1919. The students,
Chapter One
mostly from Beijing University, and Beijing citizens protested the im-
minent signing of the post-World War I Versailles treaty, which would al-
low the Japanese to take control of Shandong province from Germany.
The incident was a pivotal point within a decade-long (1915-25) radi-
cally antitraditional and iconoclastic cultural movement, alternatively la-
beled the HChinese Enlightenment." 56 The two banners of the movement
upheld by the May Fourth intellectuals are Mr. Democracy (Demokelaxi
xiansheng) and Mr. Science (Saiyinsi xiansheng), first articulated by Chen
Duxiu in an article published in the radical journal New Youth (Xin qingn-
ian), in January 1919. 57 As part of its'modernization program, the move-
ment sought to carry out the unfinished enlightenment launched by late
Qing reformers and intellectuals: to eradicate superstitious beliefs, popu-
larize mass education, and replace the classical language and literary
canon with a new vernacular literature.
Countless studies in English on the origin and impact of the vernacu-
lar movement have centered on the literary revolution in the May Fourth
movement and the literary corpus it generated. Little effort has, however,
been made to locate the question of vernacular writing and modern print
culture beyond the confines of literary history, in a broader inquiry on
the "technologizing of the word" and its interaction with the cinema. 58
24 I Early Chinese cinema was related to the vernacular movement and
May Fourth culture in a complex way. The adoption of the vernacular
language and its wide-ranging impact on culture paved the way for the
emergence of a film culture in China. By the late 19 lOs, the vernacular
press had extended beyond popular education to highbrow literature as
well as political, intellectual, and scientific discourse. Attempts were
made to standardize the pronunciation of the vernacular language and
homogenize the vast dialectal differences across China. In 1918 the min-
istry of education promulgated a standard table of phonetic signs. The
standards were met with a lukewarm reception because they were dif-
ficult to master, especially in the South where the Mandarin, the new
Northern-based national language, was rarely spoken. In the subsequent
years several revised proposals were presented but none proved satisfac-
tory.59 Yet the standard vernacular became increasingly formal and so-
phisticated-so much so that it began to lose touch with its sources.
Thus, within the vernacular culture itself, new hierarchies were formed
along levels of education as well as social and political proclivities. The
language the May Fourth writers devised and promoted, heavily in-
debted to Japanese loan words and Western grammars, eluded the
masses they intended to engage and enlighten. In fact, it became de-
tached from traditional popular Chinese literature and drama as well as
spoken languages, and this modern language effectively became the elite
cosmopolitan parlance of those well-versed in Western and Japanese lit-

erary and philosophical canons.
The strand that had closer connections with traditional popular and
modern mass cultures evolved into a more syncretic vernacular form that
mixed the classical, the vernacular, and the foreign, as well as different
media. This vernacular language and its sensibility were carried into the
film culture. In a sense, this polyphonic, vibrant trend in language con -
stituted an unofficial vernacular movement that refused to be institu-
tionalized and turned into an edifice of the nation state. The inclusive-
ness of this vernacular allowed it to be a lively cultural form rather than
simply a strictly codified artificial language to deliver, process, and digest
the top-down vernacular movement. The film culture in urban China
that emerged in the first three decades of the twentieth century exem-
plifies such inclusiveness and synthesis. Many modern ideas about social
reform, mass education, and scientific knowledge were absorbed by film-
makers of various ideological and aesthetic inclinations. The actual pres-
entation of these ideas in their films were, however, often mediated
through a combination of techniques derived from a wide range of
sources, compounding modern and traditional beliefs, values, and no-
tions of embodiment and representation. Because early filminaking in
China was a conspicuous commercial venture, the high-flung May I 25
Fourth movement's progressive ideas were confronted with the capitalist
tendencies of the film industry, and the supposedly low- or middlebrow
tastes of the petty urbanites.
To further connect the discussions on vernacular modernism in the
field of cinema studies to the specific context of the Chinese vernacular
movement, it is useful to flesh out the term experience. This will help trace
its global circulation and local articulation in the age of mechanical re-
production, particularly because it was a cornerstone of the vernacular
movement. My theoretical and practical interests are grounded in the
two interlocking categories of experience and embodiment and their po-
tential for conceiving the cinema as a unique catalysifor the production
of a global vernacular and a modern sociophysiological sensorium. Ben-
jamin memorably spelled out the double-layered meaning of experience
in his corpus. It is essential to note that there are two German terms for
experience. The first term, Erlebnis, denotes a singular event and adven-
ture-often a fragmented piece of information and or sensation in the
modern city-and is perhaps closer to the English word experience, which
also contains the root of experiment.60 Erfahrung, on the other hand, un-
derscores the vector of bodily movement and its temporal duration. It is
associated with the holistic way of life and the storytelling tradition that
the modern life threatens with atomization and sensationalism.61 In his
Chapter One
famous essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin traces the bifurcated term to the
tradition of "philosophy of life," from Wilhelm Dilthey's Das Erlebnis und
die Dichtung (Experience and Poetry) to Henri Bergson's Matiere et memoire
(Matter and Memory}. Arguing that this philosophical tradition tends to
isolate experience in the realm of nature, rather than locating it in "man's
life in society," Benjamin proceeds to excavate, via Proust's "discovery" of
memoire involontaire, the transmutation or restructuring of experience in
the age of industrial production. For him, the singularity of Baudelaire's
poetry lies in its recognition of and confrontation with the fracturing of
experience-or the "disintegratym of aura"-in the age of shock and
sensation and in its desire to give expression to an innervated experience
regaining the sense of wholeness and liveness for the collective senso-
rium. 62 Rather than a complete replacement, this new Erfahrung would
always contain the traumatic kernel of shock when individuated Erlebnis
is jolted into a collective-and reflective-modern experience. How-
ever, the reflexivity imbued in the aftershock experience is hardly the
property of the intellect but rather stems from the new llphysiology• of
the modern urban life, to which the virtual sensation of "seasickness on
dry land" belongs.6 3
We encounter yet another linguistic and cultural problem of transla-
26 I tion when we try to allocate the Chinese equivalent for experience. Al-
though the term jingyan had existed in the Chinese lexicon denoting a
more embodied cultural practice before the introduction of Western em-
piricism,64 its modern usage has, over time, acquired the reified positivist
meaning connected withjingyan zhuyi. The latter is a sinicized translation
for empiricism as an epistemological and methodological practice based
on observation and quantified accumulation of knowledge, as well as the
abstraction or objectification of lived experience.
The concept of experience came to play an important role in Chinese
intellectual and cultural history at the turn of the century, particularly
through the vernacular movement and related transformation in liter-
ary and artistic expression. Hu Shi ( 1891-1962}, one of the Western ed-
ucated intellectuals who spearheaded the Chinese enlightenment, was
an avid advocate of experience as an antidote to orthodox traditional rit-
uals and doctrines, such as those perpetuated by Confucianism and the
imperial court. He had derived the term jingyan largely from the prag-
matic philosophy of John Dewey with whom he had studied at Colum-
bia University. 65 Hu Shi's status as the "father" of the vernacular move-
ment was established instantly when he published "Some Modest
Proposals for the Reform of Literature" in New Youth in 1917. 66 Hu Shi put
forth a literary and linguistic program for a "living literature" (huo
wenxue) written in the vernacular (baihua), so that the latter could take
over the canonical status traditionally accorded literature and historiog-

raphy written in the classical language (wenyan). The proposals contain
eight remarks, summarized as the "eight do-not-ism" (babu zhuyi), which
quickly became a mantra for the vernacular movement:
l. Writing should have substance

2. Do not imitate the ancients
3. Emphasize the technique of writing
4. Do not moan without an illness
5. Eliminate hackneyed and formal language
6. Do not use allusions
7. Do not use parallelism
8. Do not avoid vulgar diction 67
The first and last remedies Hu prescribed are particularly suggestive for
his aesthetic of experience as a social intervention. Interestingly, Hu Shi's
program for a modem vernacular reform draws heavily upon a particu-
lar traditional canon derived from folklore and oral literature. The first
"remark" emphasizes "substance" (wu), or "matter," which Hu Shi asso-
ciates with "feeling." He substantiates his point by citing the famous
"Great Preface" of Book of Poetry, a foundational collection of ancient po- I 27
ems: "Feelings come from within and are shaped through language. If
language is insufficient, then one may chant or sing; if chanting or
singing is insufficient, then one may dance with one's hands and feet."
The equation Hu Shi tries to draw between vernacularity and embodi-
ment of emotions, which was to remain an unrealized dream of the ac-
tual May Fourth literature, would have unintended implications for the
cinema. Hu Shi envisaged a literature that stemmed from the lived, sen-
sory world in which a "living language" was borne out of "the creation of
new phrases to describe and portray what people see and hear with their
own eyes and ears or personally live through."6s
In the last remark, Hu Shi actually performs an archaeological exca-
vation of the vernacular tradition. He traces the origin of vernacular
canon formation to the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese
and their subsequent dissemination in Buddhist lectures and catechism,
which resulted in the "dialogue" (yulu) form. According to Hu Shi, the
tradition of a Jiving language ran through the Song Neo-Confucians and,
to some extent, the Tang-Song poetry, the Yuan dynasty drama (960-
1368), culminating in the formation of "an incipient popular literature,
out of which emerged the novels On The Water Margins, The Journey to the
West, and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and innumerable dramas.• 69
"At that time [Yuan dynasty], Chinese literature came closest to a union
Chapter One
of spoken and written languages, and the vernacular itself had nearly be-
come a literary language." 70 Hu Shi lamented that if that tradition had
not been "arrested" in the Ming period by the ascendance of a literary
"archaism" (fugu) and the imperial institutionalization of the "eight-
legged essay" (baguwen), China would have had a "living literature"
comparable to those in Europe, which emerged from •vulgar" replace-
ments for Latin. It is interesting to note that Hu Shi deploys, in a positive
way, the Chinese word su for vulgar, which was later often used by May
Fourth ideologues to attack popular literature and cinema. It is, however,
within the overlapping semantic spa<ie of the "vulgar" and •vernacular"
(su) that Hu Shi's vernacular poetics may be productively wrested out of
the orthodox May Fourth ideology.
While studying at Columbia University, Hu Shi also began the radical
experiment of writing poetry in vernacular Chinese to prove the empiri·
cist theory of "experience." Even more than prose and drama, poetry as
an art of the educated elite had been composed primarily in the classical
language. His book of poetry, Collections of Experiments, became a model
text for the vernacular movement, and the poem "Dream and Poetry" is
its centerpiece.
28 I All are but ordinary experiences

All are but ordinary images
When they rush into dreams by chance
They are transformed into so many new and strange patterns!
All are but ordinary feelings

All are but ordinary words
When they encounter a poet by chance
They are transformed into so many new and strange poetic lines!
Having been drunk, one knows the strength of wine
Having been in love, one knows the heaviness of feeling:
You cannot compose my poem
Just as I cannot dream your dream.11
In the postscript for the poem, Hu Shi describes the poem as a mani·
festo for his "poetic empiricism" (shide jingyan zhuyi; jingyan zhuyi literally
means "experientialism"). It is hard to miss the recurrent quotidian im·
agery in the poem carried by the word "ordinary" (pin9chan9). In his at-
tempt to do poetic justice to everyday material, Hu Shi was not, however,
simply envisioning a democratic literary space crowded with tangible ob-
jects. His emphasis on the "transformation" of experience points to the
tension or interpenetration between concreteness and abstraction, con-
tent and form that is crucial to his "poetic empiricism." Reality as such is
not static but is rather malleable and even magic (bianhuan). The last
stanza goes one step further in foregrounding the body not only as a
sponge absorbing the "influence" of life but, more crucially, as a medium
for processing worldly experience and subject formation.
The visceral experience of writing in the vernacular is nowhere more
pronounced than in the preface he wrote for the fourth edition of the
collection. 72 More strikingly, here he compares the vernacular experi-
ment to the physical pain of unbinding feet (fangjiao) that many Chinese
women were experiencing at the time:
Now when I look back on the poems I wrote in the past five
years, it feels as though a woman who has unbound her feet looks back
on the changing size of her shoe pattern. Although they have en-
larged year after year, each shoe pattern is tinged with the bloody
smell of the foot binding era ....
But women with bound feet can never regain their natural feet.
I have once again sorted through my "shoe patterns" over the last
five or six years, selected some while omitting those that are totally
shapeless and even potentially harmful [to readers). There remain
some "small patterns"; by retaining them, however, I hope people I 29
can learn something about the pain of foot binding. If that would
serve some historical purpose, then I would not worry as much.73
The use of foot binding (and unbinding) as a metaphor for cultural

renaissance resonates with Rey Chow's claim for Chinese male intellec-
tuals' masochist identification with (oppressed) women. She argues that,
by assuming the position of the premodern female subject, the male in-
tellectual came to terms with the traumatic encounter with the West and
the process of modernization. 74 Chow's psychoanalytical and feminist ap-
proach has heralded a body of scholarship concerning gender and na-
tional culture in the study of modern Chinese literature. What concerns
me here is the sliding interchangeability between writing and body in the
production of the vernacular as a cultural practice beyond the limits of
language and literature. In other words, the bodily metaphor carries a
quire referential weight. The grafting of a linguistic experiment onto the
social body of modernity as a lived, gendered experience-pain as well as
liberation-suggests that the cultural ambition of the vernacular move-
ment extends into a larger cultural domain, including the transforming
perception of the body and its epistemological status. Rather than the ex-
clusive property of language, the vernacular is grasped as an affective
experience enmeshed in the larger referent of everyday life and social re-
Chapter One
ality (e.g., the unbound feet), as well as a discursive formation that de-
mands the creation of a flexible sign system (e.g., the shoe pattern).
The production of the vernacular entails the production of a historical
trope (or npurpose") and its attendant forms of expressibility. Language
is an integral but by no means the only way this historical trope gets ar-
ticulated. Hu Shi's effort to anchor the process of vernacularization in the
flesh and blood of the female experience of becoming modern remained
a literary masquerade (by borrowing the identity of the suffering women
with bound feet). But the historical impulse behind recognizing the ver-
nacular as an embodied experienct has a heuristic implication for my
conception of early Shanghai cinema as the quintessential medium of the
vernacular. Thus instead of a semiotic approach championed by Christian
Metz and his followers, who treat the cinema, or rather, its narrative cod-
ing, as a form of language that has a self-contained sign system and nar-
rative structure,75 I proceed along a different route, one that does not
seek to conceptualize cinematic language in terms of verbal language
only. Rather, it places cinema in a historical context as a larger signifying
field, in which body and affectivity are crucial conduits of collective and
individual expression.
30 I ORNAMENT, EMBODIMENT, EMPOWERMENT
In grafting cinema studies onto the social and experiential body of a

modernizing vernacular culture in China, my primary concerns lie with
the parallel and intertwining vernacular movement and Shanghai cin-
ema. The latter manifests itself as a complex ramification of, contribution
to, and intervention into the former. The vernacular here is configured
as a cultural (linguistic, visual, sensory, and material) "processorn that
blends foreign and local, premodern and modern, high and low, cine-
matic and other cultural ingredients to create a domestic product with
cosmopolitan appeal. This processor-a worldly technology, a translation
machine, and a cultural sensorium-allowed for different levels of me-
diation and forms of synthesis. It continually catered to and changed the
local audiences' tastes, shaping and reshaping their worldviews. The cin-
ema substantially fashioned China into something of a modern demo-
cratic society, and as such it imagined and configured new perceptions of
the body, gender, and sexuality. These changes were exemplified by the
first generation of screen actresses and cinematic renderings of the mar-
tial heroine, the dandy, the revolutionary, and the Modern Girl.
Hu Shi's psychosomatic poetics of the vernacular experience, in-
formed by a scientific impulse, emerged largely outside of the early Chi-
nese film culture. However, the desire to incorporate modern science
into a poetic sensibility was not entirely divorced from a prevalent cul-
tural sentiment shared by the emerging Shanghai cinema, which began
to sprout around the same time as the vernacular movement. Rather
than hastily denouncing the applicability of experience because of its ori-
gins in modern Western science and subject formation, I choose to reen-
ergize the term by locating it in the realm of embodiment.
Writing in the vernacular took on great importance for the Chinese
intellectuals and their project of modernization. Even more importantly,
expressing oneself and living in the vernacular, especially in the emerg-
ing urban centers, went beyond the linguistic and literary domain of the
term, bringing it into a heterogeneous field of cultural production and
consumption. For these reasons, I find jin9li and tiyan (either functioning
as verbs or nouns), in place ofjingyan, to be better terms for encompass-
ing a shifting and lived experiential horizon because these compounds
incorporate the words for history (lishi) and embodiment (tixian). Em-
bodiment as such includes sociocultural practices that are directly ex-
pressed through the body and a form of "sensuous" knowledge and
memory production that extends beyond textual inscription or herme-
neutics.76 To reintroduce the notion of experience at this point histori-
cizes its multilayered nature and its embodied articulation.
The shifted emphasis from intellectual discourse to lived experience, I 31
from representation to embodiment, has methodological implications for
writing a materialist cultural history. Taking the body as a being-in-the-
world, an experiential agent rather than an object or sign, and placing it
at the center of a historical analysis of cultural change and subjectivity
formation allows for a "radical empiricism" as advocated by an emerging
strand of ethnography. 77 In his critique of the dominance of semiotics
over phenomenology in anthropology in the wake of poststrncturalism
(a situation shared by cinema and literary studies as well), Thomas Csor-
das proposes a new synthesis of the methodologies that would place body
and text in a dynamic, complementary relationship. Not to jettison text
and textuality altogether as useful analytical categories, he rather juxta-
poses to them the "parallel figures of the 'body' as a biological, material
entity and 'embodiment' as an indeterminate methodological field de-
fined by perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in
the world." The paradigm of embodiment is thus offered as a "dialectical
partner" to texuality, and a fruitful combination of both opens up possi-
bilities for explorations of intertexruality (semiotics) and intersubjectiv-
ity (phenomenology) .7a
The cultural etiology of the bound feet, deployed by Hu Shi to convey
the pain as well as the liberation that characterizes the vernacularizing
process, allows me to take the word movement in the expression avernac-
Chapter One
ular movement" even more seriously and quite literally. The vernacular
movement was not a static or pedantic enterprise concerning only a few
modernist intellectuals. It involved the production of a pervasive, if often
contradictory, hist0rical force and the emergence of a new collective so-
cial body and, as a consequence, individual, gendered bodies. This theo-
retical move resonates with Vivian Sobchack's invocation of Merleau-
Ponty's view of language as an embodied and enworlded experience for
restoring the sensuous power of the motion picture to signify. As a new
vernacular "language" for perception and expression, the cinematic ex-
perience is always already situated (l]'ence the term "address of the eye")
in the "flesh of the world" and grounded in the embodied existence and
material world. 79
The embodied experience, with both local inflection and global reso-
nance, enables the understanding of modernity as a fusion of disparate
yet connected cultural sensibilities and worldviews. These worldviews
then acquire unprecedented palpability and global appeal when the
"world itself has taken on a 'photographic face.'" 80 It conditions us to-
ward a new perception of the phenomenal world, one in which physi-
cality is revealed and recreated by the "optical unconscious" of the cam-
era described by Benjamin. If photography inaugurated a mechanically
32 I reproducible means to arrest reality and congeal life in a split second, the
cinema was able to reassemble the "still" images and put them into mo-
tion, or rather, as Kracauer saw it, back into the "flow of life."s 1 The cin-
ema is a "new mode of embodiment" in modernity, not simply because
of its photographic indexicality and visual immediacy, 82 but also because
it stimulates and reorganizes a whole range of sensory experiences, such
as tactility, smell, taste, and sound through mass mediated technology.
Susan Buck-Morss has argued, extending Benjamin's view on the tactile
quality of the "optical unconsciousn of photography and cinema; that the
film screen is a prosthesis of sense perception. 83 It is through the (re)en-
actment of physiological movement and everyday life that the cinema
emerges as the exemplary "mimetic machine" for embodying the frac-
tured and constantly metamorphosing experience of modernity. Within
the virtual space between the original and the copy, fidelity and fantasy,
the mimed and the mime, an embodied sense of alterity and the revived
faculty to experience springs, even just momentarily, out of the prison
world of alienation and fragmentation.8 4
Kracauer's work is particularly helpful as we attempt to conceptualize
cinema as an embodiment and constituting force of vernacular mod-
ernism. His conviction that cinema presented both the historical oppor-
tunity and the means for the "redemption of physical reality," is system-
atically laid out in his Theory of Film, first published in 1960. But his
interest in the subject stems from his early writings in Weimar Berlin and
from his exile in France during the war. Indeed, as Miriam Hansen points
out in her introduction to the most recent edition, the Hmaterial aes-
thetic" inherent in film can be traced back to photography. The Hphoto-
graphic nature" of film endows the medium with an indexical rela-
tionship to reality in a particular temporal and spatial composition,
mimetically reproducing and also revealing the lived world it repre-
sents.85 Kracauer's Nphotographic approach to film is encapsulated in
0
the opening of his essay, "Photography, n published in Frankfurter Zeitung

in 1927, in which he describes a photograph of the female star of a cine-
matic tour de force similar to Chinese incarnations examined later:
This is what the film diva looks like. She is twenty-four years old,
featured on the cover of an illustrated magazine, standing in front
of the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido. The date is September. If one
were to look through a magnifying glass one could make out the
grain, the millions of little dots that constitute the diva, the waves
and the hotel. The picture, however, does not refer to the dot ma-
trix but to the living diva on the Lido. Time: the present. The cap-
tion calls her demonic: our demonic diva. Still, she does not lack a
certain look. The bangs, the seductive position of the head, and the I 33
twelve lashes right and left-all these details, diligently recorded
by the camera, are in their proper place, a flawless appearance.
Everyone recognizes her with delight since everyone has already
seen the original on the screen. It is such a good likeness that she
cannot be confused with anyone else, even if she is perhaps only
one twelfth of a dozen Tiller girls. Dreamily she stands in front of
the Hotel Excelsior, which basks in her fame, a being of flesh and
blood, our demonic diva, twenty-four years old, on the Lido. The
date is September.s6
The photographic image of the diva on the cover of an illustrated mag-

azine has a great deal to say about the changed meaning of memory and
history when the appearance of the whole world undergoes a photo-
chemical process. If photography has created a new kind of depository
for historical truth in place of memory-images that Noutlast time, this
0
depository is no deeper than the surface of a glossy magazine cover that

flattens time into a spatial continuum. However, this flattening process
does not necessarily lead to petrifaction. The photograph registers not
only a flawless appearance but also a moment of origin and an exterior
of a concrete location-"a means of expression as generally intelligible as
language." What has animated the life of the film diva out of the stock-
Chapter One
piled dots is the "demonic" power embedded in the "life of the original,"
to which the image provides access for the contemporary beholder. For
the knowing reader who has seen the film diva on the silver screen, her
photographic pose relates to a context, a situation he or she has lived
through in the movie theater. The film diva cannot be reduced to a fash-
ion photo because the reader I viewer is constantly reminded of her cor-
poreal reality, as herself as well as the characters she portrays. The sur-
face of the magazine is thus shot through with a "being of flesh and
blood." The readability of the image-"intelligible as a language" -relies
on this sense of immanence and p;tlpability in spite of the fact that its
meaning, unlike a traditional artwork, is stockpiled in and produced by
the photochemical process rather than accumulated over time. The con-
tingency and materiality of the photographed "history" can hardly au-
thorize a total history with a deep-seated truth; rather, "this history is like
a monogram that condenses the name into a single graphic figure that is
meaningful as an ornament." s7
The idea of this • (photo ]graphic figure as new "writing" {JJraphe) and
as a condensed "ornament" invokes Kracauer's fascination with the col-
lective figure of the Tiller girls, referred to in the passage cited above. The
singularity and corporeality of the film diva are subsumed under the
34 I mass image of the Tiller girls, the revue dancers popular in the Berlin
scene from 1924 to 1931.8 8 In "The Mass Ornament," an essay published
shortly before "Photography," Kracauer spells out his ambivalence to-
ward the aesthetic of "surface," as manifested in the "body culture" of the
Tiller Girls. The mass ornament, inherently photogenic, can be alterna-
tively read as "mass embodiment." The exteriority or spatial quality of
the mass ornament is compared to "aerial photographs of landscapes and
cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions,
but rather appears above them." 89 Kracauer finds in the production of
the "mass ornament" a potential analogy of social reification and dehu-
manization effected by the Taylorist system-the "hands in the factory
corresponded to the legs of the Tiller Girls." Body parts are interchange-
able with machine parts; thus, "[t]he mass ornament is the aesthetic
reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system as-
pires." The individual bodies of the Tiller Girls are emptied out in the pro-
cess-or on the assembly line in the factory of distraction. But it would
be beside the point 10 try to redeem the individual body and return it to
a pristine natural order. The Tiller Girls could attain their expression and
vitality only through the "assemblage" of a second nature or the "body
without organs." 90
Rather than leading to total rationalization and social abstraction, the
production of the "mass ornament" paradoxically triggers the formation
of a new physicality and organicism that create a self-legitimating aes- 0
thetic pleasure. N91 With this Kracauer was able to defend the Nmass orna-
ment" and its capacity to bestow form" upon life material in an epoch
0
that was increasingly losing touch with itself. This "aesthetic goes be-
0
yond the realm of conventional representational art, such as painting or

sculpture, and is charged instead with the kinetic power aroused by the
undulation and movement of the Tiller Girls. The '"mass ornament'' rep-
resents both the means and the end in bringing the aesthetic back to re-
ality. With this realization, Kracauer concludes, "No matter how low one
gauges the value of the mass ornament, its degree of reality is still higher
than that of artistic productions which cultivate outdated noble senti-
ments in obsolete forms-even if it means nothing more than that." 92
Toward the end of his essay on photography, I<racauer envisions the
contribution that the cinema might offer to a new, however provi- 0
sional, configuration of nature and its meaning amidst the ruins of alien-
0
ation or fragmentation. Photography created the confrontation between

human consciousness and lived reality by stripping the latter of its "nat-
ural shell" and disintegrating the original order" of things. The loss of
0
context and the danger of the reification of experience constitute what

Kracauer calls the "go-for-broke game of history" in the tum to photog-
raphy. The image of the film diva may be recuperated only through the I 35
production of a new sense of context, aided by the cinema and the
movie-going experience. The revolutionary potential of the cinema lies
not simply in its "capacity to stir up the elements of nature" but also in
the way it "combines parts and segments to create strange constructs." 93
The new cinematic reconstitution of the relationship between the human
world and natural order that Kracauer envisions differs radically from
any return to an organic origin within a linear history. Instead, closer to
the logic or formula of dream, the "strange constructs" of the cinema will
yield newfound connections between images and experiences.94 In this
light, the daydream episode in Amorous History takes on a critical signifi-
cance. The actress sees herself wandering in a disjointed urban landscape,
a place where she soon finds herself. In the story that follows, especially
as she slaps the hoodlum! the actress succeeds not so much in taking re-
venge as in making connection between past and present experience-
and between different registers of reality.
Kracauer's critical insights on the relationship between technology,
mass media, and social (self-)representation supply useful conceptual
tools for the understanding of early Chinese film culture. But more sig-
nificantly, his sociophenomenological observations on urban modernity
in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s delineate a cultural landscape sim-
ilar to Shanghai during the same period. The Tiller Girls did in fact come
Chapter One
to Shanghai as well, in the form of both revue shows and film musicals.
A scene in Money Demon. one of the films shown in production during the
studio tour in Amorous History, features a group of Chinese girls and boys
dancing under the spell of the ·money demon." The scene of the extras'
synchronized act of putting on make-up offers yet another instance of
the cinematic mass ornament in a Chinese dream factory. Queen of Sports
(Tiyu huanghou, 1934), Sun Yu's ambiguous contribution to the Nation-
alist New Life movement, also features mechanic choreography of female
athletes' robust legs. The film vacillates between the body cultures of
dancing and sport, embodying the di,ial nature of the "mass ornament· -
its utopian potential for the liberation of the senses as well as the danger
of ideological exploitation of bodily energy, as happened in extremis in
Germany under fascism.
The •mass ornament" has a global appeal, though its configuration is
contingent upon the local conditions of any mass-mediated cosmopolitan
culture. "Simultaneity• (Gleichzeitigkeit), which Kracauer found to be the
underlying structure organizing work and leisure under the industrial
mode of production, 9 ' can certainly be expanded to envisage the mass
ornament as a global experience of modernity. On this coeval horizon,
the early Shanghai film culture-(the same argument could be made
36 I about other metropolitan centers such as Tokyo, Bombay, and Rio de Ja-
neiro)-participates in the local production and transformation of the
global mass ornament. How the "mass ornament" became "Shanghai-ed"
is part of the main story of this book. The link between the readily intel-
ligible language embodied by the Tiller Girls' legs in Kracauer's diagnosis
of mass culture and the unbound feet in Hu Shi's cultural pathology of
the vernacular language may at first seem arbitrary. What is so strikingly
similar in their visions, however, is the investment in the energy and
anxiety unleashed by the physical entrance of women into the public
arena and the cultural statements they make, consciously or uncon-
sciously. These women represented a utopian potential of a new "lan-
guage" for reconnecting aesthetic expression and lived experience, or
representation and its referent.
Hu Shi did not realize that, when he was writing about the pain of un-
binding the feet of vernacular literature and trying to resuscitate true ex-
perience in its endangered form of poetry, the first Chinese female film
star Wang Hanlun (1903-78) entered the cultural scene with her un-
bound feet. Wang became an instant celebrity in 1922 after portraying a
widow convinced of the virtue of education in Orphan Rescues Grandfather
(Gu'er jiuzuji, 1923), produced by the Mingxing Company. If the silver
screen made her unbound feet, referred to at the time as "civilized
feet''(wenmingjiao), visible to the public (fig. 1.4), it was the life story of
her unbinding herself from the fetters of an old society that made her an
urban legend of her day. 96 Born into a gentry family, Wang Hanlun was
forced to marry a stranger in her late teens. After a hard-won divorce, she
moved to Shanghai. Emboldened by the "swelling [movement] of wom-
en's rights," she entered the work force and acquired marketable skills.97
At first supporting herself by teaching in an elementary school, she then
worked as office clerk at a foreign company and later as a typist for an in-
ternational sports association (Wanguo tiyuhui). 98 Unsatisfied with mere
economic independence, she felt that she "wanted to find a different
path, to do something on a grand and spectacular scale." Though Chinese
cinema was emerging and still met with disdain (including by her fam-
ily), she decided to "sacrifice" herself to the new medium. 99 Wang Han-
lon abandoned her original family name Peng and took Wang as her new
name: the Chinese character for Wang (which also means king) is part of
the complex Chinese character for tiger-a fearless creature. 100 Hanlun,
on the other hand, was derived from her English name "Helen." Director
Zhang Shichuan recalled years later that Wang was one of the few "mod-
ern girls" (modeng niilang) of the time; her fashionable dress and makeup
deeply impressed him and his colleagues. 10 1 Her linguistic gifts-being
able to speak Mandarin and English in addition to the Shanghai dialect-
added to her modern flair. Not only did Wang boldly show her unbound I 37
feet on the screen during the shooting of a film in 1926, she also had her
long hair cut in front of the camera. Though required by the plot, this
"cut" (from her past) added another bodily token to her image as a mod-
ern girl.
The cinema created new vocations for women as well as significant so-
cial positions and public images. Because many women contributed sub-
stantially to early film ventures in capacities that went beyond acting, it
is not too far fetched to consider them pioneers of Chinese cinema and
film culture as well. Traditionally Chinese women had been largely ex-
cluded from the public arena. Only the few very chaste or filial women
who sacrificed themselves for patriarchy could be regarded as public
models for emulation. Before the coming of the cinema only women
from poor or marginal social groups worked as actors, mainly in all-
women traveling opera troupes catering to the rural population or lower-
class town residents. Women and men neither were to appear on the
same stage, nor allowed to sit together in the audience, if women were
admitted at all. While the cinema as a mass attraction drastically changed
the gender makeup of audience and women quickly became avid specta-
tors, the earliest Chinese films only featured male actors, mainly with
theatrical backgrounds. In 1913, Yan Shanshan became the first Chinese
woman to appear on the silver screen, in the short story film Zhuang Zi
Chapter One
1.4 Wang Hanlun (<:enter) with her "civilized (eet" on screen. (Courtesy o[ the China Film
Archive)
38 I Tests His Wife (Zhuang Zi shiqi), directed by her husband Li Minwei. Iron-
ically, Yan played the minor role of the maid while Li played Zhuang Zi's
wife. 102 At the time, it was still inconceivable for women to appear in film,
much less playing leading roles. Before becoming a film actress, Yan was
known as a member of the female bomb squad during the Republican
Revolution in 1911. Even after her breakthrough there were hardly any
women playing female roles until 1921, when Wang Caiyun, a theater
actress-turned singsong girt played the leading role as a prostitute in Yan
Ruisheng.
The cinema boom in the early I 920s-especially the proliferation of
long narrative films and a growing popular "taste for reality" and melo-
drama-created a demand for actresses not just to fill the scenes but also
to play leading roles.1°3 The profession of screen acting thus provided an
unprecedented opportunity for many women of diverse backgrounds, in-
cluding the new-style female students who defied family and societal
prejudice to embrace the cinema as well as courtesans or singsong girls
who saw in the medium a chance for improving their social standing.
With the help of the print media, including early trade journals and fan
magazines, the beginnings of a star system were already in place. Ac-
tresses including Wang Hanlun, Yin Mingzhu, Yang Naimei (1904-60),
Zhang Zhiyun (1905-?), Zhang Meilie, Fu Wenhao, Li Minghui, Xu Su'er
(?-1931 ), Zhao Jinxia, Wang Huixian, and Cao Jianqiu displayed their
courage in embracing a modern mass medium, which was still shunned

by the elite society.1°4 Their stardom partly derived from their image as
champions of the modern lifestyle in many aspects-in fashion, hair-
style, car-driving, and unconventional sexual life (such as having
boyfriends or choosing cohabitation over marriage).1os They were in fact
the first generation of Chinese "modern girls."
Among them, Yin Mingzhu and Yang Naimei were probably the most
prominent. Yin, born to a gentry family, studied at a Western-style
women's college in Shanghai. She was known for her skills in danc-
ing, singing, horse-riding, biking, and car-driving. Because she always
dressed as foreign movie stars, she came to be called Miss F. F. for Foreign
Fashion. 106 Together with Dan Duyu, an artist-turned- director, Yin
founded the Shanghai Shadowplay Company (Shanghai yingxi gongsi},
one of the early cottage-industry ventures. Beside her involvement in the
operation of the company, Yin was the leading star of their popular pro-
ductions. Yang Naimei, on the other hand, was famous for her "roman-
tic" life style and her penchant for "strange clothes" (fig. 1.5). The only
daughter of a successful Cantonese businessman, Yang went to· a girls'
school and indulged in performances. After a small role in a Mingxing
box-office hit, Jade Pear Spirit (Yu Li hun, 1923}, she quickly became a
major star and character actress, specializing in playing wayward, I 39
amorous women. Her off-screen hobbies, like high-speed driving
through the main thoroughfare in central Shanghai, also brought her no-
toriety. Yang's fame outraged her father who saw acting as nothing Jess
than prostitution and consequently disowned her. In 1926, Yang wowed
the film world by appearing in tableaux vivant fashion during the screen-
ing of The Resurrection of Conscience (Liangxinde fuhuo, 1926), dubbing live
the Kunqu tune "Song of the Wet Nurse," which she sang in the film; Un-
satisfied with being dictated by male directors, she. founded her own
company, the Naimei Film Co. and produced a film about a legendary
modern woman in 1928. None other than she played the protagonist.io7
Wang Hanlun's film career also culminated in the opening of a film
company under her own name, and producing and starring in the fea-
ture Revenge of the Actress (Nilling fuchou ji) in 1929 . 10s It was practically a
one-woman enterprise. She hired a director but had to take care of all
other aspects of production herself, including editing. Because of the
negligence of her partners, she eventually bought the shooting script
from the director and finished the postproduction by herself. With the
aid of a manual projector, she completed editing the film at home. After-
wards, she traveled with the film all over China, going as far as Ha'erbin
.in Northeast China and performing live during intermissions. 109 The
profit generated by the film enabled her to retire from the screen and
40 1
1.5 Actress Yang Naimci was famous for her "romantic" life style and her penchant for
"strange clothes." (Silver/and, n(). 33, 1931 ).
establish the Hanlun Beauty Salon, which became an eye-catching spot

in Shanghai.
The ascendance of Wang Hanlun and Xuan Jingling as screen stars
and icons, despite their different social origins, exemplifies the transfor-
roative power of the cinema. It presented both women with a chance for
a second life on and off the screen. At the same time, their disparate back-
grounds and ways of living out their potential demonstrate the hetero-
geneous origins of early Chinese cinema and Shanghai's urban culture.
Whereas Wang came from a wealthy family and received her education
at a missionary school, Xuan belonged to the lower strata of society and
was hardly literate when she entered the film world. One escaped from
an arranged marriage and cut her ties with a traditional family, the other
left the pleasure quarters and later the confines of modern concubinage.
The film world became their new home as well as their university of life.
Although the sense of liberation and empowerment felt by Wang and
Xuan was incomplete and often ambivalent, the silver screen neverthe-
less allowed them to experience their changing self-perception through
performance and role-playing. Through this act of play, which functions
as a "mirror, a doubling split between action and actor,"' 1 10 they could
attain a sense of alterity and enjoy the experience of transgression.
Through the blending of these early film actresses' personal histories I 41
with the lives of the characters they played on the screen, the collective
experience of Chinese women, poised on the threshold of different
worlds and destinies, began to receive meaningful articulation. If the
movement toward embodiment in Hu Shi's vernacular poetics remained
symbolic, the reenactment and transformation of the lived experience of
the first generation of film actresses on the silver screen carried the
weight of a particular historical indexicality and concreteness.
CHAPTER TWO
WORLDLY SHANGHAI,
METROPOLITAN SPECTATORS
I
42 I ALL ABOUT SHANGHAI, a well-known guidebook compiled and

published by English and American expatriates in Shanghai in the mid-
l 930s, opens with a hyperbolic hymn to the city and its spectacular
manifestations of modernity:
Shanghai, sixth city of the World! 1

Shanghai, the Paris of the East!
Shanghai, the New York of the West!
Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city on the world, the fishing
village on a mudflat which almost literally overnight became a
great metropolis.
Inevitable meeting place of world travelers, the habitat of people
of forty-eight different nationalities. Of the Orient yet Occidental,
the city of glamorous night life and throbbing with activity, Shang-
hai offers the full composite allurement of the Far East.
Not a wilderness of temples and chop-sticks, of jade and pyja-
mas, Shanghai in reality is an immense and modern city of well-
paved streets, skyscrapers, luxurious hotels and clubs, trams, buses
and motors, and much electricity.2
The rather blatant Orientalism notwithstanding, this introduction to

Shanghai underscores the world-class nature of its modernity, its cosmo-
Worldly Shanghai, Metropolitan Spectators
politan character with its "composite allurement." Instead of the usual

exoticization of the wilderness of temples and chop-sticks" often found
0
in foreign sojourners' travelogues, the authors of this "standard guide" to

the Chinese metropolis placed the city on the same level as, if not higher
than, the most prominent cities in the Western hemisphere. With its
wide streets, bright lights, soaring skyscrapers, and exuberant urban life,
Shanghai is deemed ultramodern mainly because the facades of this
modernity seem on par, or perhaps even superior to, those found in Paris
or New York.
During the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twen-
tieth century, Shanghai was a hotbed for the production and consump-
tion of mass culture, including the cinema. Baptized "Paris of the Orient,"
the city was seen as a major metropolitan center in the modern global
geography. Its urban infrastructure and cultural trends indeed had much
in common with the Paris immortalized in Benjamin's Arcades Project,
Berlin under the observing eyes of Kracauer, and even more with New
York, a coastal multicultural metropolis in the new age of global capital-
ism. Shanghai was hardly slow in consuming and recycling all sorts of
mass culture and brands of modernism imported from America, Europe,
and Japan. On the contrary, the growth of the city into a major metrop-
olis also involved the emergence of a vibrant Chinese culture industry I 43
that included cinema.
In the above-quoted eulogy to Shanghai's honorary status as a haven
for global capitalism, the city's multifaceted vernacular culture and social
unevenness is made invisible. These aspects are precisely what I desire to
reveal, through the looking glass of film history as an emblematic cul-
tural history of modernity. It is hardly my goal here to uncover an "au-
thentic" oriental jungle of "chopsticks, jade and pyjamas," which only
existed in the fantasy of the exotica hunters roaming about in a vast Chi-
natown. Nor is my aim to reclaim Shanghai for various brands of Chinese
nationalism that have always harbored a deep suspicion toward the city's
cosmopolitan legacy, particularly its manifold manifestations of material
culture and entertainment industry. Rather, this book tells how its vi-
brant film culture, which has almost become synonymous with the world
city of the Republican period, contributed crucially to a culturally an-
chored and mass-mediated cosmopolitan experience.
Beyond the bulk of guidebooks and travelogues authored by old and
new Western and Eastern Shanghai aficionados, a large body of Shang-
hai scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on perspectives of its politi-
cal and social life to explain or describe the city's role as the harbinger of
Chinese .modernity.3 Recently, more attention has been directed to the
flourishing forms of material culture and everyday life that characterized
Chapter Two
what Leo Ou-fan Lee terms "Shanghai Modern" in the Republican era. 4
For instance, in his book Lee engages the popular print culture, includ-
ing newspapers, magazines, advertisements, and calendar posters, to
write a broadly contextualized literary history as part of a modern expe-
rience. Cinema, however, remains largely a backdrop or playground for
scholars of modernism. 5 This approach, in part inspired by the effort to
both reinstate the historical role of literary modernism in modern Chi-
nese literary and cultural history and compare it with its Western coun-
terparts, nevertheless perpetuates the tradition of author-centered liter-
ary criticism. Its explanation of urbart' modernity and cosmopolitanism
remains text-bound and elite-oriented rather than attending to its em-
bodied mass participation.
The cinematic legacy is an indispensable link in the history and con-
ceptualization of modernity in China. It is an integral part of Shanghai's
metropolitan identity through the late Qing, the Republican period, and
beyond. Early Chinese film enterprises and audiences were overwhelm-
ingly concentrated in this rapidly expanding trading port and urban cen-
ter, which attracted large numbers of people from other parts of China
and the world. While the golden age of Chinese film familiar to Shang-
hai fans is often equated with the Shanghai modern of the l 930s and
44 I 1940s, the early years of Chinese film history have rarely been consid-
ered as an integral part of the story of Chinese modernity. Alongside tow-
ering skyscrapers and luxuri()Us clubs and exclusive hotels teemed a
world of vernacular culture and mass entertainment. It was a part of the
city that was more readily accessible and affordable for the Shanghai pop-
ulation at large-a broad and fluctuating social strata of the so-called
xiaoshimin, or petty urbanites. "Electric shadows," as the cinema was
called, belonged in the world of electric power that fueled the city's in-
dustry and illuminated the phantasmagoria of commodities. In order for
us to understand the significance of this film culture as the embodiment
of the Shanghai modern, we must revisit the origins and transformation
of the metropolis, and reconsider the reasons for its peculiar mode of
modernity and for being the cradle of Chinese cinema.
SHANGHAI MODERN, YANGJINGBANG STYLE
By no means was Shanghai a "fishing village" prior to its opening as a

treaty port in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the signing of the
Nanjing Treaty in 1843. 6 In fact, Shanghai had been a thriving commer-
cial port for hundreds of years. Nevertheless, the pace of Shanghai's
transformation into a world city in the second half of the nineteenth cen ·
tury and in the early twentieth century was breathtaking. During this pe-
Worldly Shanghai. Metropolitan Spectators
riod, the complex social fabric and the corresponding urban geography
gave the city a particular modern character that was at once vernacular
and cosmopolitan. I choose to make sense of this character through the
term Yangjingbang (or pidgin) style rather than the more entrenched and
glamorous term, haipai, or the Shanghai style. 7 The Shanghai style-the
"visual equivalent of an attitude"-has acquired inflated and ahistorical
valences, but the sense of "big-city edginess" identified by art historian
Jonathan Hay in the late Qing Shanghai school of painting remains the
kernel of its various expressions. 8 It was also during this period that
Shanghai truly became, literally and figuratively, Da Shanghai or Big
Shanghai (not unlike the Big Apple), as it is still referred to by the rest of
China. When the port opened, Shanghai was a county seat of 540,000
people. By the dawn of the twentieth century, it had emerged as the
largest city in China, boasting a population of 1.08 million. By 1915 this
number was nearly doubled to 2 million, and by the end of the 1920s, the
population had risen to 3 million:> A significant portion of the Shanghai
population at any given time during those decades was comprised of
"floating" subjects, including foreign travelers and refugees (notably Rus-
sians) and Chinese migrants (who often arrived in waves in times of war
and natural disasters). As a result, there were probably as many nation-
alities and languages as there were Chinese regional identities and di- I 45
alects that filled the city streets.
The population growth paralleled the rapid, often chaotic, and hardly
adequate expansion and transformation of the urban space. The city
map was frequently redrawn by both the Chinese and foreigners, in or-
der to reflect and define the constant physical and demographic changes
(fig. 2.1 ). 10 After the Republican revolution of 1911, Shanghai's designa-
tion was changed from cheng (town) to shi (city). While the former con-
notes etymologically a walled city, the latter suggests more the notion of
the market place, a modern city as a municipal entity. 11 This makes par-
ticular sense as the wall enclosing the small and crowded Chinese area
(Nanshi) was torn down in 1912, shortly after the Republican revolution
that ended China's dynastic history. Where the wall once stood, there
now nms a wide, paved street with ceramic sewer ducts underneath. The
street was given a quaint composite name, Fahua Minguo Road (French-
Chinese Republican Road, now Renmin lu or People's Road). Many of the
dried-up, stinky canals were filled, more roads were paved, and bridges
were built (most importantly over the Suzhou River, which runs through
the northern part of the city and into the Huangpu River). A mass trans-
portation system was installed,1 2 thus ·making the boundaries more per·
meable between zujie or the foreign concessions in the North (interna-
tional settlement) and the West (French concession) of the old city, and
Chapter Two
2.1 Shanghai at around the turn or the twentieth century.
the Chinese areas (including Zhabei on the north side of the Suzhou
River). These new urban infrastructures enabled people, money, and
46 I commodities, as well as languages, ideas, and lifestyles to circulate widely
and quickly through the city. In the process, the basis of a syncretic yet
uneven metropolitan identity emerged, mapped out on an equally un-
even urban geography.
Prior to the tearing down of the wall, large numbers of Chinese resi-
dents had already entered to live or work in zujie, especially in the wake
of the Taiping Rebellion that seriously affected the Chinese old city. They
contributed to the building of the wealth and glamour of the so-called
shili yangchang or "ten miles of foreign land" (one Ii is about half a kilo-
meter); many of them also became the first Shanghainese to speak a pid-
gin English or Chinglish, inflected with Shanghai and other dialects. In
the early years following the opening of the Shanghai port, foreign set-
tlers (mainly British subjects) had constructed and lived in a relatively
segregated area alongside the embankment of the Huangpu River north-
east of the walled city. The Chinese first regarded this area as a yichang
(barbarian's land). With the illegal expansion of the concessions and the
increasing coexistence of foreign and Chinese residents and businesses,
the term yichang gradually gave way to the less pejorative yangchang.13 It
refers primarily to the Bund area and the Nanking Road (then Huayuan
Long) lined with shops, offices, and banks. The commercial prosperity
and thriving entertainment establishments in yichang, with flashy adver-
tising banners, billboards, and electric lights, became a modern spectacle
and earthly wonder in the eyes of both the Shanghai residents and visi-
tors. The more neutral term yang denotes foreign and exotic things (yang
also means "ocean" or "beyond the horizon") as well as connotes things
and manners that are stylish in an uninhibitedly modern, even cosmo-
politan way. Over time, yangpai (foreign style), became interchangeable
with haipai (Shanghai style), especially as both yang and hai means
ocean.1 4 The name of Shanghai itself is almost synonymous with "going
to sea" (shanghai) or "on the sea" (haishang) due to its proximity to the
China Sea and the Pacific Ocean.15
This change of terminology and perception is significant in that zujie,
a product of unequal treaties, acquires new meanings as the concessions
became increasingly domesticated and diversified. Over time, shocking
foreignness gave way, though unevenly and never entirely. The Chinese
taking residence in the concessions rapidly outnumbered the foreigners;
many Chinese found it legitimate (this was China after all) and some-
times even profitable (one could evade the taxes and other laws leveled
by the Chinese authorities) to live and do business there.
Yangjingbang, a peculiar Shanghai vernacular expression, is perhaps
the single emblematic token of this grassroots metropolitan conscious-
ness and ambivalent semicolonial experience. Popularly known as a form
of pidgin language spoken by Shanghai residents, Yangjingbang was orig- I 47
inally the name of a canal dividing the British and French concessions,
not too far from the old Chinese City just to the south (fig. 2.2). It was
the area where the foreign and Chinese interaction was most intense,
due to its proximity to the docks along the Huangpu River. The embank-
ments of the shallow canal were popular sites for migrants' shelters,
shops, and brothels. Many tour guides, porters, translators, middlemen,
flower girls, and prostitutes made a living there doing business with for-
eigners. As the well-known late Qing reformist thinker Wang Tao ob-
serves in his Nuying Miscellaneous, perhaps one of the first books to record
the emergence of modern Shanghai, "The Yangjingbang area is a floating
world, ... whenever one enters the Yangjingbang area, the sights and
sounds there are extraordinary." i,; The canal was filled in 1915 and be-
came Edward Road-(or Aiduoyalu in pidgin via French, renamed as
Yan'an Donglu after 1949)-in a move to facilitate the connection be-
tween the two concessions, and to "clean t~p" the area (fig. 2.3 ).17
Yangjingbang marks the site of the correspondence of spatial and lin-
guistic practices. Perhaps because of the ambiguous character of the so-
cial geography of the canal-turned road, over time the name became a
Chinese reference to zujie as a whole. More significantly, the geographi-
cal term coalesced with the linguistic term for pidgin (or "business") En-
glish developed by the Shanghai residents of lower classes in daily trans-
Chapter Two
2.2 The Yangjingbang Canal.
48 1
2.3 The canal was filled in 1915 and became Edward Road.
actions with foreigners.ls Irreverent of grammatical rules and full of

chance (and sometimes creative) combinations, the Yangjingbang speech
mixed English, Chinese (including local dialects), and elements of other
languages that permeated the city. Bernard Shaw allegedly spoke highly
of the Yangjingbang language after his visit to Shanghai in 1931 and
commented that one day it might become a world language. 19 In an early

urban study of Shanghai, Yao Gonghe, author of Shanghai xianhua (Idle
Talk of Shanghai), attributed the birth of the Yangjingbang language
to the self-employed lloutdoor translators" (lutian tongshi) congregating
in the area. These translators were partially responsible for inventing a
new phonetic system for transcribing English sounds with radicals taken
out of Chinese characters. 20 Several English dictionaries and glossaries
marked with Chinese transliterations were published to popularize and
llstandardize" this hybrid vemacular. 21 The oft-cited pidgin terms are
delii.feng for telephone, kangbadu for comprador, namowen for Number
One. Other terms show the wit of the transcribers such as heiqi bandeng
(black-lacquered bench) for husband and leidesi (tired to death) for
ladies.i 2
With the rise of mass print enabled by new technologies (lithography
and photography) and the rising demand for cheap cultural products
and entertainment by the migrant Shanghai citizens, Yangjingbang also
found its way into newspapers, magazines, and popular fiction (includ-
ing translations).23 Prior to the official adoption of the standard vernacu-
lar language in 1905, most publications from Shanghai catered to the
moderately educated readership. The publications were liberally illus-
trated and employed a vernacular that mixed classical (written) and spo- I 49
ken Chinese, Shanghai dialect sprinkled with Yangjingbang words.
The popular dissemination of the Yangjingbang speech and sensibility
also contributed to the quick reception of cinema in Shanghai following
the first screenings by traveling foreign showmen. Although early silent
nmoving photographs" (huodong xiezhen) did not require reading skills in
any language whatsoever, the increased use of intertitles, especially with
the advent of story films between 1900 and 1920, did not create a signifi-
cant barrier for Shanghai audiences who had been accustomed to Yang-
jingbang pidgin. Running commentaries by the shoyvmen or "explainers"
(jieshuo), who functioned as a cinematic tongshi (translator), also helped
Shanghai audiences. The Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly writers quickly
took up the task of penning film stories, intertitle cards, and programs for
foreign and domestic films using a peculiar trademark Butterfly-style
Chinese. This style produces a mosaic text that interweaves the vernacu-
lar or colloquial (bai) language and the classical or literary (wen) lan-
guage, and is often interspersed with Yangjingbang words.
Yangjingbang, a direct product of the so-called huayang zaju (Chinese-
foreign mixed residences), became more of a norm than an exception in
late nineteenth-century Shanghai. Beyond a mere linguistic phenome-
non, Yangjingbang constituted and gave expression to both a spatial prac-
tice and a form of everyday life that placed Shanghai in the world and the
world in Shanghai. The emergence and proliferation of this spatial ver-
0
Chapter Two
nacular" has less to do with the tearing down of zujie boundaries than the
interpenetration and collision of diverse forms of life and conscious-
ness.24 Naming both zujie and the pidgin with the residual name of an
erased locality, the Chinese residents were able to reclaim the conces-
sions for themselves and for their everyday use. In the process, a unique
urban experience crystallized, which in turn forged a particular metro-
politan identity. This juxtaposition and mixing of the Chinese and foreign
mores and ideas made an impression on the physical look of the urban
space and city's architectural style.
Cultural historians interested in the.Shanghai modern have shown a
fascination with the eclectic Western architecture in Shanghai, especially
the landmark structures built in the high modern period of 1930s. The
pervasive vernacular establishments and housing, however, have been
relegated to the background. The recent Shanghai nostalgia is essentially
a postcard collection of these colonial remains. The Bund in particular
has been widely acknowledged as the emblem of the World's Fair (Wan-
guo bolanhui) style architecture. 25 The vast collection of neoclassical and
art deco buildings and design in Shanghai are singled out as proof that
Shanghai was a world-class city. This cosmopolitan splendor, in the eyes
of the ordinary inhabitants and migrants, was by and large a "mirage," "a
so I world of fantasy which cast a mixed spell of wonder and oppression.· 26
The Chinese-foreign coresidence was by no means harmonious and
equal. With the flourishing of material emblems of urban modernity,
Shanghai became radically divided. The well-to-do foreign taipans and
Chinese compradors resided in luxurious mansions or apartment hotels.
The majority of lower-middle and working class Chinese lived in modest
and ill~equipped quarters, in particular the so-called lon9tan9-housing
particular to Shanghai that mixes the Western row house and the Chi-
nese courtyard model. The first row houses were wooden Chinese-style
structures built by the British settlers to rent to the refugees from the
nearby provinces. After a big fire in 1870, a safer material used for re-
building more liberally combined Western and Chinese style of vernacu-
lar housing. 27 The even less fortunate migrants and coolies concentrated,
however, in the shantytowns of Zhabei and other Chinese areas where
the living costs were far lower.
Making up the broad, fluctuating middle strata of Shanghai are the so-
called petty urbanites or the longtang residents. They constituted the
backbone of the consumers of popular culture and were avid theater- and
moviegoers. The skyscrapers on the Bund and Nanjing Road, the villas
with private gardens, and luxury art deco apartment buildings in the
French concession stood for the Western face and the "upper" end of
Shanghai Modern. The vast longtang neighborhoods and communities of
2.4 umgtang: Shanghai style vernacular nousing (photo by the author).
commerce and culture in surrounding areas, on the other hand, are spa- I 51
tial and social manifestations of the Yangjingbang vernacular (fig. 2.4).
Yet these two sides of the cosmopolitan city presuppose each other, ex-
isting and evolving in a symbiotic relationship. On a representational
level, early Chinese films, the majority of which were set in Shanghai,
longtang was a ubiquitous and often essential element o.f the mise-en-
scene for tales of urban life, as can be glimpsed in such classics as New
Woman (Xin nuxing, 1935) and Street Angel (Malu tianshi, 1937). Although
there are gradations between old style (more crowded and less modern)
and new style longtang, an average longtang compound is an alley (usu-
ally off-limits to cars) with a main entrance on the street and lined with
two-story rowhouses and an inner courtyard. While the more affluent
took up an entire unit, more often it was shared by more than_ two fam-
ilies, with each family only occupying a single room. Occasionally non-
Chinese residents also lived in longtang, sharing not only space but also
lifestyles and languages with their Chinese neighbors. The easy access
from longtang to major commercial thoroughfares and entertainment
and cultural establishments such as teahouses, theaters, and bookstores,
however, allowed the longtang residents to readily participate in the
broader arena of urban life. In that sense, if Yangjingbang is an erased ge-
ographical entity (the canal and its environs) whose spirit lived on in the
Shanghai pidgin, the sprawling longtang housing stands as the physical,
Chapter Two
and more domesticated, incarnation of Yangjingbang. Through this built

environment, the diversity and unevenness of the Shanghai modern finds
salient vernacular expression.
Yangjingbang as a mixture of geographical, linguistic, and social prac-
tices occupying the same temporal plane endows the treaty port with a
composite worldly character, which is at once cosmopolitan and local,
ambitious yet pragmatic. This double-edged worldliness was reflected in
the world of mass entertainment. In this playground and laboratory a
particular form of cosmopolitanism emerged. Inseparable from the con-
ditions of modern colonialism and industrial capitalism, the Yangjing-
bang style of Shanghai modern illustrates what Ackbar Abbas aptly calls
a ,,cosmopolitanism of extraterritoriality." Shanghai's architectural legacy
and other forms of cultural production, including cinema, embody "a
shallow kind of cosmopolitanism, a dream image of Europe more glam-
orous than Europe itself at the time." 28 This shallowness casts into relief
the promises as well as contradictions of the modern experiment away
from the metropole(s) in the West. At the same time the delight in "shal-
lowness" -rather than elitist indulgence in high-minded cosmopoli-
tanism-opens up the physical and social space of mass culture. 29 While
Ion9tang represented the more domestic and subdued side of modern life,
52 I the teahouses and amusement halls that gave rise to an early film cul-
ture stood for the spectacular and playful aspects of that life in public
domains. Shanghai modern, an arbitrary convergence of modernity,
spurred an "unintended" city with a host of different social groups and
urban identities that laid their own claims to the city and its cosmopoli-
tanism.30 As manifested in the Yangjingbang phenomenon and vernacu-
lar architecture of longtang, this form of urban modernity expresses a
complex cultural experience and historical process.
ATTRACTIONS OF THE CITY, CINEMA OF ATTRACTIONS
With the influx of large number of immigrants and migrants to the city
came an explosive demand for leisure. With the expansion of the city,
countless entertainment joints, gambling parlors, teahouses, brothels,
and eventually movie theaters crowded and transformed the urban land-
scape. Many of these establishments clustered, as they had in the past, in
the old Yangjingbang area.
For those newly arrived from the countryside, the city itself was an at-
traction that inspired shock as well as wonderment. From tall buildings
to bridges made of concrete and steel, from escalators to revolving doors,
from trams and trolleys to shop windows, from women's fashion to the
strange countenance of the foreigners, Shanghai was an earthly mirage
overflowing with novel objects, vehicles, and all kinds of people. For
I s3
2.5 Xiy1m9jin9: a peep show of the kaleidoscopic world.
many, coming to Shanghai meant #opening [one's] field of vision# (kai

yanjie) or broadening one's horizon, to gaze into a giant kaleidoscope of
a magic world (kan xiyangjing) (fig. 2.5). To these migrants and visitors,
the very name Shanghai was tantamount to modern spectacle. In fact,
many men of the country gentry became so infatuated with the sights
and sounds of Shanghai that they decided to take up residence in long-
Chapter Two
tang and devote themselves to the enjoyment of the city. These yu9on9
(apartment misters} formed a prototype of an urban-based "man of
leisure" (baixian9ren) that emerged in the late Qing period. Many more
petty urbanites also sought diversion and pleasure to relieve the fatigue
or stress from work and from daily routines. Street scenes alone could
not satisfy the craving for novelty, spectacle, and escape. The hustling
and bustling urban space was stressful and even dangerous, as attested by
the deluge of press reports on traffic accidents and other urban perils of
the time. Two major forms of affordable, accessible recreation and relax-
ation allowed people to experience metxppolitan attractions without the
anxiety caused by the "real" city or the drudgery of the everyday: the il-
lustrated newspapers and amusement halls.
Illustrated Newspapers
In the late nineteenth century the attractions of the city were instantly
reproduced as attractive features in newspapers and magazines.Theil-
lustrated newspapers (huabao) occupied a central place in the display and
representation of the pleasures and dangers of the modernizing city. The
dynamic combination of texts and images, which created a vividness, im-
54 I mediacy, and docudramatic effect, may be seen as one of the precine-
matic forms that fostered what Benjamin discerned as the "optical un-
conscious" in the age of mechanical reproduction. For the less-educated
or illiterate people, and particularly women and children, the illustrated
newspapers were cheap and easy to understand. It was no coincidence
that the first illustrated newspaper founded by Western missionaries in
1875 was called Xiaohai yuebao (Little Children's Monthly). 31 In the late
Qing period, there were ninety-eight illustrated papers published all over
China, the majority of which were based in Shanghai, the capital of mass
print industry. Among them, the most famous and long lasting Dian-
shizhai huabao was founded in 1884. Its team of illustrators consisted of
leading painters of fengsuhua paintings (such as Wu Youru, Jin Zhan-
xiang, and Ma Ziming), which depicted contemporary and vernacular
scenes with a combination of Chinese and Western techniques. Due to
popular demand, about twenty distribution agencies for Dianshizhai hua-
bao (Dianshizhai Illustrated) were set up in other cities. An additional pa-
per, Feiyin99e huabao edited by Wu Youru, was created in 1890 and sold
at the same price: a mere five cents. 32 Many text-based papers also added
illustrated supplements to satisfy the craving of mass readership for visu-
alization and novelty.
Through its innovative synthesis of image and text portraying a large
inventory of incongruous subjects huabao appealed to a readership across
different ages, genders, and classes; in effect it created a modern visual

vernacular that was part and parcel of the Yangjingbang culture. Through
huabao, the petty urbanites could access or open their "field of vision" to
a wide array of metropolitan attractions and world phenomena in a
printed simulacrum, free of danger and anxiety. In the inaugural issue
the editors announced that their paper "would choose the more unique
and interesting news from regular newspapers, such as the invention of
a gadget or the spotting of a new thing, and explicate them through
illustrations and words in order to make the readers believe." 33 Theil-
lustrated papers remained popular until about 1912, when copperplate
photography became less costly for mass print and widely adopted. The
glossy Tuhua zhoukan (Pictorial Weekly), Liangyou huabao (The Young
Companion), Rensheng huabao (Life Magazine), and the early 1920s movie
magazines are representative of this new kind of huabao, replete with
black and white or even color photo plates.
In addition to serving as a portable public school for the masses,
huabao also functioned as a printed newsreel that showcased happenings
in the city and in the world, as well as intrinsically modern spectacles,
such as skyscrapers and trains. The breadth of its coverage is often suf-
fused with vivid details: from observations of urban daily life (the neigh-
borhood market, new trolley lines) to reports of the extraordinary (mur- I 55
. ders, ghosts, fire, war). The best-selling attractions were tales of strange
urban phenomena that blended the Chinese and Western mores as well
as old and new values, such as Shanghai women playing golf,34 or de-
scriptions of novel. magic (shenqi) gadgets such as the x-ray and elevators.
The high point of huabao's popularity coincided with the appearance
of cinema in urban China at the turn of the twentieth century. Tuhua
ribao (Illustrated Daily), published by Around the Globe Press (Huan-
qiushe) in 1908 (fig. 2.6), was a major huabao that consistently show-
cased new modern attractions and people's reactions to them, including
the cinema, then called noccidental shadowplay" (xiyang yingxi). The sev-
enth issue from August 1908 reported and illustrated nNoisy Shadow-
plays on Fourth Avenuen as a particular social phenomenon in Shanghai.
The writer of the story appears amazed at the use of trumpets and even
Chinese gongs and drums in front of the teahouse to promote the foreign
shadowplay. Not only are the films being shown inside the venue adver-
tised, the boisterous on-location publicity, in Yangjingbang style, presents
an urban attraction in its own right. Throngs of people (mostly men)
filled the streets to watch the live advertisement while a few women pass-
ing through in the sedan chairs also showed their curiosity (see fig. l.3).
Tuhua ribao also devotes much space to popular entertainment or per-
formance of all kinds that coexisted with the foreign shadowplay, such as
Chapter Two
:.· .. :· . . ·. . . ·.. · ...
• .• <:J:j:111111> ,. ti11illllilt~
s6 I
2.6 Tulma ribao (Illustrated Daily): "A grocery store of new knowledge.•
new-style Peking opera, the civilized play (wenmin9xi, spoken drama us-
ing the vernacular), puppetry, storytelling, and magic shows. The clien-
tele of this teahouse culture consisted mostly of urban commoners of
varying means who patronized venues appropriate to the depth of their
pockets. Both men and women attended shows, though the seating was
sometimes segregated. The audience usually was seated around tables;
waiters with big trays carried teapots, cups, and snacks to them. Fanning
themselves, women chatted and gossiped. Such a space was often de-
picted as a hotbed of women's freedom and sexual desire and hence a

constant source of public anxiety. For instance, the phenomenon of sum-
mer night gardens (ye huayuan) allegedly provided a haven for romantic
rendezvous, and the illicit liaisons in certain theater houses between fe-
male spectators and actors scandalized the public. 35
Not only is huabao linked to the new phenomenon of cinema through
its coverage of contemporary mass culture, its thematic repertoire and
presentation format are structurally similar to the cinema of attractions
that characterized the early cinema before the institutionalization of nar-
rative cinema and its corresponding spectatorship.36 The term ncinema of
attractions,n coined by Tom Gunning, made a vital contribution to the
new historical turn in cinema studies in the mid- l 980s and provided a
key to the reperiodization of film history before (and to some extent af-
ter) narrative integration and the solidification of classical Hollywood
cinema. Gunning's concept challenges the previous text-based psycho-
analytical theories of spectatorship. The latter posited the spectator as a
homogeneous disembodied male (or hysterical female) voyeur inscribed
in classical Hollywood cinema. Unlike the commercial narrative cinema
produced within the parameters of the studio system and attendant nar-
rative or genre formulas, the content and presentation of early cinema
possessed qualities that created a more heterogeneous experience. While 1 57
frontal tableaux and minimal camera movement or editing are often as-
sociated with the "primitive" form of early cinema, the true aesthetic and
historical visage of early cinema is best understood not in terms of its
evolutionary (Nlow") value with respect to later film forms but rather to
be appreciated with regard to its unique mode of address and its social
and cultural implications. The cinema of attractions, argues Gunning,
consists nless of a way of presenting stories than as a way of present-
ing a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory
power ... and exoticism." 37 Rather than voyeurist, the appeal or form of
this cinema is inherently "exhibitionist" and as such it offers a more dif-
fused and alternative form of visual pleasure-a kinetically oriented ex-
perience of the cinema. Its mode of address hinges on display, immedi-
acy, and participation, thereby mobilizing rather than repressing the
viewer, as typified by the Hale's Tours shows of simulated train rides,
which placed the audience at the center of the motion picture.
By virtue of its portability, affordability, novelty, and its nature as a
commingled media, the Hlustrated newspaper prepared for the cinema
and served as its companion; at the same time, cinema effectively func-
tioned as a sort of live newspaper. The kaleidoscopic range of thematic
content carried over to the silver screen in various forms and combina-
tions. The twelve news categories covered by Tuhua ribao resemble the
Chapter Two
"genres" of early cinema: ( l) scenic sites, (2) architecture in Shanghai,

(3) portraits of famous historical figures around the world, (4) biogra-
phies of Chinese or foreign heroines, (5) fiction with social themes,
(6) detective fiction, (7) world news, (8) social phenomena in Shanghai,
(9) sketches of the marketplace, (10) the "grocery store" [column] of
modern knowledge, (11) illustrated news of other cities, ( 12) miscella-
neous. J8 The world covered by the illustrated newspapers was both mi-
croscopic and macroscopic; the multifarious knowledge and pleasures
they disseminated explicitly catered to the petty urbanites at large. Read-
ers around the country found themselves virtually in the same temporal
and spatial realms, gaining practical know-how to navigate daily life in
the metropolitan environment as well as basic knowledge in world poli-
tics and national culture. The vast number of readers who consumed il-
lustrated newspapers to make sense of their rapidly changing world be-
came modern subjects and citizens in the viewing process, forming a
ready film audience .
.Amusement Halls
While huabao presented an approximate or protocinematic experience
58 I through its visual immediacy, thematic variety, and low price, youlechan9
(amusement halls) that mushroomed in the 1910s and continued to
thrive well into subsequent decades offered similar yet even more com-
petitive pleasures, also at an affordable price. Not only could the urban
attractions be experienced in three-dimensionality, the visitors were also
encouraged to regard a trip to these funhouses as an attraction and di-
version in itself. One Chinese scholar called the craze for amusement
halls in the 1910s a "world fever" (shijiere), an apt description because
many of these entertainment complexes included the word shijie (world)
in their names. 39 But why "world"? What does that pervasive name tell
us about the "worldliness" of this sort of secular Mecca of leisure and fun
for the masses? And in what ways were the amusement halls related to
early film experience?
A sociological survey of Shanghai public culture in 193 3 defines these
worlds as "amusement resorts that cater to patrons with moderate means" (em-
phasis in original). 40 They came in different sizes and capacities, but
cheap admission and a variety of shows and services were standard.
Louwailou (The Tower beyond Towers), founded by Jing Runsan in 1912,
was essentially a big glassed-in teahouse on top of the Xinxin Wutai The-
ater on Zhejiang Road. The attractions featured there, in addition to the
regular acrobatic and drum-singing numbers, included distortion mirrors
imported from Holland near the entrance and, for an extra dime, an el-
2.7
The New World
entertainment
center.
2.8
The Great World
entertainment I 59
center, ca. 1917.
evator that would take the visitor directly to the top floor. 41 The place was
always crowded; many came for the fun while others simply wanted to
be at the center of happenings in the city. Cheap admission, social con-
viviality, and diversity of programs and popular regional performances
were particularly appealing to the working class and migrants.
The success of Louwailou inspired many more to follow suit. Xin Shi-
jie (New World) and Da Shijie (the Great World) appeared in 1915 and
1917 respectively, each with imposing multistory structures and even
more diverse attractions (figs. 2.7 and 2.8). Many more "worlds" of plea-
sure sprung up all over the city, in Chinese areas as well as in the con-
cessions: Shenxian Shijie (The World of Fairies) on Simalu (now Fuzhou
Road), facing the famous Qingliange Teahouse; Daqian Shijie (The World
of Myriad Spectacles) on Shimeng Road in the French concession; and
Xiao Shijie (Little World) near the north gate of the old city. The Great
Chapter Two
World, which was the largest of all and remained open (despite seve-
ral transmutations) until recently, was erected in 1917 at the crossroads
of Edward Road and Tibet Road, a densely populated triangle zone that
linked the different concessions. The simulacrum of urban attractions
(and conveniences) within the Great World was made more complete
with a daily newspaper and a twenty-four-hour bank of its own (to
encourage visitors to stay longer and spend more money, of course). This
artificial cosmos even boasted a mini zoo housing lions, tigers, and
peacocks. 42
The amusement halls were a kind oJ. urban Coney Island and World's
Fair a la Shanghainese, a "phantasmagoria which a person enters in or-
der to be distracted." 4 ' They possessed the full-blown form of what
Jonathan Hay calls the "architecture of spectacle" that emerged in late
nineteenth-century Shanghai, "frankly embodying the excitement of
big-city life as spectacle." 44 This type of architecture is crucial to the un-
derstanding of the emergence of the metropolitan crowd and mass spec-
tatorship in urban centers in China. Most of these earthly wonderlands
were located in the center of the city, in particular around the former
Yangjingbang area. These entertainment venues catered mainly to or-
dinary city dwellers and functioned as a "virtual emporium of cultural
60 I motifs" 45 where diversity and hybridity-from local operas to skating
rinks and mini golf courses-embodied and amplified the Yangjingbang
legacy.
Unlike the more respectable and genre-specific public entertainment
venues such as the theater house, where largely fixed and segregated
seating limited movement and social intercourse, the amusement halls
allowed women to delight in their accessibility, diversity, and freedom.
With a few cents, they could spend a whole day inside the world of phan-
tasmagoria until closing time at midnight, moving from booth to booth
and stage to stage. The amusement halls were also dubbed "Love Ex-
change" (Aiqingjiaoyisuo), for lovers as well as those who sought roman-
tic encounters With the courtesans from the nearby brothels clustered
around Simalu. 46 The social marginality yet public visibility of the cour-
tesans ironically gave them early exposure to new forms of urban attrac-
tions such as the "foreign shadowplay" and the "flying ship," which hov-
ered in the open space above the large indoor arena. In these floating
·worlds" the Butterfly writers would find material for their stories and
scenarios, as well as their heroines. In his memoir, Bao Tianxiao, one
of the foremost Butterfly writers, recalls his experiences in the amuse-
ment halls.
I recall that it was at the Great World founded by Huang Chujiu

where I first saw films. Inside there was also a small Peking opera
theater called "Little Peking Troupe." It had a male-female mixed

cast. Although it was inside the Great World, the theater charged a
separate entrance fee. It was merely 30-40 cents. The show would
start at 8 p.m. and end at midnight. It was then followed by movies,
lasting till around I: 30 a.m. The movies were even cheaper, at just
about 10-20 cents. Business was especially good at these hours.
The "sisters of flowers" [courtesans} would come together, because
they would have some free time by then .... There was no silver
screen to speak of, only a piece of white cloth. The people in the
movies jumped around even when walking, while the houses were
also on the move. There were lots of exterior scenes, but the sto-
ries were confusing.... I often asked those "sisters of flowers": "Do
you have any idea what kind of characters are in these movies?"
They would reply, "We know there are three types of characters: .
women, good people, and bad people." Really succinct and clear,. ·•
smart words spoken by smart girls. 47
It was while working at this New World that Zhang Shichuan first spot-
ted a lively Xuan Jinglin with pigtails inside the donkey riding court.
Years later, working as director at Mingxing, Zhang rediscovered Xuan,
who starred in Amorous History of the Silver Screen. 48 Besides being specta- I 61
tors or consumers, women also worked as performers in the amusement
halls, presenting shows that sometimes played with or revised established
cultural repertoire and crossed gender boundaries. In addition to the
male-female mixed troupe stationed inside the Great World, as men-
tioned by Bao, the World of Fairies featured an all-women Peking opera
troupe (mao'er xi).49
The popularity of amusement halls was contagious. Several major
department stores on the Nanjing Road, including Xianshi (Sincere),
Yong'an (Wing'an), and Xinxin (Sun Sun), also opened rooftop amuse-
ment gardens. 50 Sincere Company, founded in 1900 on;the site of a tea-
house, was among the first retail establishments to install a roof garden,
which featured, among other things, an all-female Cantonese opera stage
(fig. 2.9). The twenty-fifth anniversary album of the company is filled
with poetic proclamations by the Butterfly school writers, eulogizing the
"fairy" world of the garden and the elevators (shengjiangji) that lifted
one's body as well as spirits. A poem penned by Li Liying captures the
thrill of entering this otherworldly urban jungle:
Going straight up to the "Tower that Touches the Stars"

Enjoying the panorama by the railings
Precariously, the building stands on the boulevard
Trees far away hint at a cool autumn
Chapter Two
"genres" of early cinema: ( l) scenic sites, (2) architecttire in Shanghai,

(3) portraits of famous historical figures around the world, (4) biogra-
phies of Chinese or foreign heroines, (5) fiction with social themes.
(6) detective fiction, (7) world news, (8) social phenomena in Shanghai,
(9) sketches of the marketplace, (10) the "grocery store" [column] of
modern knowledge, (11) illustrated news of other cities, (12) misce!la·
neous. 38 The world covered by the illustrated newspapers was both mi-
croscopic and macroscopic; the multifarious knowledge and pleasures
they disseminated explicitly catered to the petty urbanites at large. Read-
ers around the country found themselvis virtually in the same temporal
and spatial realms, gaining practical know-how to navigate daily life in
the metropolitan environment as well as basic knowledge in world poli-
tics and national culture. The vast number of readers who consumed il-
lustrated newspapers to make sense of their rapidly changing world be-
came modern subjects and citizens in the viewing process. forming a
ready film audience.
Amusement Halls
While huabao presented an approximate or protocinematic experience
58 I through its visual immediacy, thematic variety, and low price, youlechang
(amusement halls) that mushroomed in the 191 Os and continued to
thrive well intc> subsequent decades offered similar yet even more com-
petitive pleasures, also at an affordable price. Not only could the urban
attractions be experienced in three-dimensionality, the visitors were also
encouraged to regard a trip to these funhouses as an attraction and di-
version in itself. One Chinese scholar called the craze for amusement
halls in the 19 lOs a "world fever" (shijiere), an apt description because
many of these entertainment complexes included the word shijie (world)
in their names.19 But why "world"? What does that pervasive name tell
us about the "worldliness" of this sort of secular Mecca of leisure and fun
for the masses? And in what ways were the amusement halls related to
early film experience?
A sociological survey of Shanghai public culture in 1933 defines these
worlds as "amusement resorts that cater to patrons with moderate means" (em-
phasis in original). 4 0 They came in different sizes and capacities, but
cheap admission and a variety of shows and services were standard.
Louwailou (The Tower beyond Towers), founded by Jing Runsan in 1912,
was essentially a big glassed-in teahouse on top of the Xinxin Wutai The-·
ater on Zhejiang Road. The attractions featured there, in addition to the
regular acrobatic and drum-singing numbers, included distortion mirrors
imported from Holland near the entrance and, for an extra dime, an el-
2.7
The New World
entertainment
center.
2.8
The Great World
entertainment 1 sg
center, ca. 1917.
evator that would take the visitor directly to the top floor. 41 The place was
always crowded; many came for the fun while others simply wanted to
be at the center of happenings in the city. Cheap admission, social con-
viviality, and diversity of programs and popular regional performances
were particularly appealing to the working class and migrants.
The success of Louwailou inspired many more 10 follow suit. Xin Shi-
jie (New World) and Da Shijie (the Great World) appeared in 1915 and
1917 respectively, each with imposing multistory structures and even
more diverse attractions (figs. 2.7 and 2.8). Many more •worlds" of plea-
sure sprung up all over the city, in Chinese areas as well as in the con-
cessions: Shenxian Shijie (The World of Fairies) on Simalu (now Fuzhou
Road), facing the famous Qingliange Teahouse; Daqian Shijie (The World
of Myriad Spectacles) on Shimeng Road in the French concession; and
Xiao Shijie (Little World) near the north gate of the old city. The Great
Chapter Two
2.9 Roor Garden on t<ip of Sincere Department Store.
62 I The city feels near with the sound of the crowd

The theaters opens with flickering electric shadows
This paradise is unique and hardly vulgar
Men and women flaunt their fashionable and unconventional
style. 51
The architecture of amusement halls and rooftop gardens is particularly

conducive to physical interactivity and the production of a Hmobilized
gazeH through a kind of "window shopping," which, as Anne Friedberg
argues, was characteristic of the perception and experience of early cin-
ema.52 A foreign visitor's observation connects this mobilized gaze with a
mobilized Htaste":
[The crowd] shuffles slowly from one hall into another, here
watching a juggler or magician, there listening to the high-pitched
squeaking singsong of a girl, sipping tea on a rock roof-garden, tak-
ing a donkey-ride in a miniature menagerie, laughing at their dis-
torted images in concave mirrors, dictating a family letter or taking
a bite of some delicacy from a far away province of China. 5 J
These structures-amusement complex or rooftop recreational gar-

dens-were derived from late imperial Chinese gardens (as a miniature
world) and teahouses; they were also inspired by the world's fairs. Ves-
tiges of traditional landscaping were juxtaposed with modern building
materials and equipment, particularly the elevator and electric lighting.
Due to the high land price in central Shanghai, the exquisite, elite her-
mitism associated with gardens or pavilions found in the architecture of
elegant leisure in the Jiangnan region gave way to multistory establish-
ments replete with sights and sounds. 54 The combination of horizontal
panoramas (or series of views} with the thrill of vertical movements (en-
hanced by elevators) puts the patrons onto a constant roller coaster ofvi-
sual and kinesthetic sensations as well as virtual tours of the world. The
diversity of attractions. popular genres, and modes of presentation and
address traversed the boundaries between the old and new, Chinese arid
foreign, high and low. These constant border crossings helped to turn the
urban crowd into a worldly-that is, both cosmopolitan and vernacu-
lar-body of spectators and, to some extent, public actors.
The structures of the Great World and the New World were most rep-
resentative of this integrated architecture. Both were located at major in-
tersections and had a circular facade; their size and capacity gave them
the imposing air of a department store. The former was an extended two-
story building resembling a sports arena when viewed from above. It was
decorated with several Chinese-style pavilions symmetrically arranged I 63
on top of the second floor, and large commercial advertisements were
painted on the outer walls. In 1925, after a major fire, the structure was
rebuilt with four stories and an eight-floor tower, which looked like a
pagoda yet included definitive baroque features, and was placed on top
of the main entrance. Inside, in addition to the assortment of entertain-
ment booths, there were various »scenicll spots modeled after the Chi-
nese garden. On the meandering elevated passageway (tianqiao) linking
various booths, stages, and pavilions, visitors of different ages, genders,
and classes brushed shoulders, made associations, and even brokered
deals (fig. 2.10). The New World, on the other hand, was a compact
three-story building with identically shaped arched windows and bal-
conies on both the inside and outside, so it was easy to see and be seen.
Before later renovations, it also featured a central tower and Chinese-
style eaves. The complex boasted Shanghai's first skating rink and billiard
room, in addition to a completely tiled and well-lit underground pas-
sageway, which was decorated with an aquarium and linked its North
and South buildings across Jing'ansi Road (Bubbling Well Road, now
Nanjing Xilu).55
Because amusement halls were among the first venues of film exhibi-
tion in China, they occupy a significant place in early Chinese film his-
tory. Their importance is underscored by their contemporaneity with the
Chapter Two
2.10 The Tianqiao (Heavenly Bridge) inside the Great World.
beginnings of domestic film production by people closely associated with

the culture of amusement halls, such as the Butterfly writers and mem-
64 I bers of the civilized play troupes. Both played a crucial part in the for-
mation of a domestic cinema. The amusement hall, more than the illus-
trated press, fostered an embodied metropolitan mode of spectatorship
with a mobilized gaze trained by the variety of Jive performances and at-
tractions. Inclined toward a "taste for reality," this viewing habit prepared
them for a new medium that would synthesize and transform the expe-
rience of being metropolitan subjects.
THE PETTY URBANITES AS COSMOPOLITAN AUDIENCE
Because these media and experiences intertwined in the public space,

readers of the illustrated papers and visitors to the amusement halls and
rooftop gardens actually constituted the early film audiences. The "opti-
cal unconscious" embedded in these earlier or contiguous forms of par-
ticipatory reading and viewing gave rise to a mobilized virtual gaze that
absorbed urban shocks and sugarcoated the attractions. It also partici-
pated in the formation of a mass mediated vernacular culture, of which
cinema was an integral component. These overlapping bodies of audi-
ences belonged to the broad social base of petty urbanites-street ven-
dors, clerks, students, actors, migrants, courtesans, and middle-lower-
class men and women in general. 56 As a broadly and vaguely defined
social class, the petty urbanites were a composite urban formation of the
traditional and modern nonagrarian workers, small merchants, and the

petty bourgeoisie. They included an emerging white-collar class (of both
genders) that staffed banks, law and accounting offices, hotels, and de-
partment stores.~ 7 The majority of them occupying lower or lower-
middle class positions are xiao or upettyll because of their nonelite so-
cioeconomical status (not, however, at the bottom of society), young age
(often because of their immigrant origins), and limited education and
outlook (yet endowed with a measure of cosmopolitan spirit). For the
most part they were residents of the longtang and modest apartment
buildings. Their cultural tastes and commercial acumen, a conspicuous
marker of the Shanghai social character, were eclectic, curious, and
worldly (shisu) in both senses of the word. The petty urbanites ap-
proached the middlebrow. Their participation in the production and con-
sumption of a burgeoning mass culture gave rise to a distinctive metro-
politan culture, which voraciously mixed popular entertainment with
cultural aspirations, cosmopolitan yearnings with everyday concerns.
Though conceived as petty in its relative social position, the petty urban-
ites were large in number and enormously significant in their social and
political potential. As their population and demographic expanded in
Chinese domains as well as the European concessions (in residential ar-
eas, entertainment establishments, and industrial and professional sec- I 65
tors), they became the very flesh and blood of the city.
The elasticity of the social and cultural orientation of the petty urban-
ites, both fostered and exploited by consumerism, frustrated the elite
May Fourth intellectuals devoted to modernity as a teleological project
for national strengthening. In fact, some of them are responsible for coin-
ing the term xiao shim in, a pejorative word that persists today as a stereo-
type. They regarded the petty urbanites as an anarchic social body cor-
rupted by both feudal" values (because of the rural origin of many
0
migrants) and modern evils of the city (due to their economical aspira-
tions and urbane tastes). In his essay on uThe Feudal Arts of the Petty Ur-
banites," Shen Yanbing (pen name Mao Dun), a writer known for his re-
alist novels on Shanghai, reacted unfavorably to the popularity of the
Butterfly fiction and popular film genres such as the martial arts film and
family melodrama that attracted a wide following across China. 58 Zhou
Zuoren, a representative of the Jingpai (the Beijing school, as opposed to
Haipai, the Shanghai school) writer, attributed the emergence of the
petty urbanite class in any modernizing Chinese city to a certain "Shang-
hai air" (Shanghai qi) that infected and corrupted their mind and body. 59
The formation of this massive urban crowd paralleled the emergence
of an incipient film culture in Shanghai and beyond. To be sure, when
the "Occidental shadowplayll or electric motion pictures entered the tea-
Chapter Two
houses and theater houses around the turn of the century, it was by no
means a commanding medium. Films first appeared in teahouses in
Shanghai in 1896 and in Beijing in 1902, but the early film exhibitions
by traveling foreign and Chinese showmen quickly spread to other trad-
ing ports and cities. At that stage, cinema was but one novel attraction
among many and was seen as a variation on-or extension of-the ex-
isting puppet shadowplay. Before long, the power of cinema increased
dramatically as the movie-only venues were built to house the growing
number of films and audiences. Several Chinese entrepreneurs also be-
gan to produce films set in China and ab.6ut Chinese lives. It is widely be-
lieved that attempts were made to record and exhibit Peking opera epi-
sodes by the Fengtai Photo Studio in Beijing, beginning in 1905, but a
studio fire abruptly ended the project. Beijing ceased to be the main site
of Chinese film production for other reasons as well. Some scholars have
attributed the abortive start to the conservative attitude of the more ho-
mogenous Beijing citizenry, as well as that of the imperial family, toward
what was seen as a new and dangerous medium. In Shanghai, however,
the worldly population, including the petty urbanites, supplied both en-
thusiastic audiences and amateur filmmakers. The unique Yangjingbang
style of modernity also contributed to the ready acceptance of this novel
66 I technology and the ferment of a Jess ideologically charged alternative
vernacular culture. Thus, some argue that it was historically #accidental"
for Beijing to be the first site for Chinese productions, whereas it was "in-
evitable" for Shanghai to become the cradle of Chinese cinema.60
Unlike the Peking opera recordings produced in Beijing, the early cin-
ema of attractions made in Shanghai were distinctively concerned with
contemporary subjects, ranging from current affairs, slapstick comedies,
and scenic panoramas to educational materials. From around 1900, a
handful of foreign sojourners in Shanghai shot footage of local street
scenes for exhibition at local venues, as well as for export. In the 1910s,
many Chinese picked up secondhand cameras and began experimenting
with the medium. The number of films made domestically and exhibited
in Shanghai during this period was still limited, yet the range of subject
matter and production modes was remarkable. Foreign-Chinese collabo-
ration was sporadic yet still the prevalent mode in the early 191 Os; in the
later half of the decade all-Chinese productions emerged and eventually
led to the establishment of a domestic film industry. The Asia Company,
cofounded in 1913 by Zhang Shichuan, Zheng Zhengqiu, and a couple of
Americans, shot its first films in an outdoor "studio" on Hong Kong Road
near the Bund. The dozen short comedies (mostly one- or two-reelers,
except for the four-reeler, The Difficult Couple) depict everyday scenarios
of the petty urbanites-country bumpkins having fun or running into
trouble in the city, bicycle accidents, gambling brawls, and satires on ar-
ranged marriage. The titles alone offer a taxonomy of the xiao shimin
taste:
Thieves on Trial (Da Chenghuang, literally, "hitting the god at the

city temple")
A Gambler Plays Possum (Dutu zhuansi)
The Silly in Town God's Temple (Erbaiwu baixiang Chen9huan9miao)
A Funny Love Affair (Huaji aiqing)
Bride Meets Ghost (Xinniang huajiao yu Bai Wuchang, a.k.a. Huo
Wuchan9)
Bicycle Accident (Jiaotache chuanghuo, a.k.a. Hengchon9 zhizhuang)
A Deal (Laoshao yiqi, literally, "the old and the young swaps wife")
Die for Marriage (a.k.a. The Difficult Couple; Nanfu nanqi)
Family's Blood (Sha zi bao, a.k.a. Jiating xue)
A Corrupt Official Returned (Tanguan ron99ui)
Mascot Is Coming Here (Wufu lin9men9, a.k.a. The Playboy Monk,
Fengliu heshang)
New Camellia (Xin Chahua)
An Overnight Fidget (Yiye bu'an)61
1 67
The subjects of these shorts are not entirely unique to China; themes
such as the country rube's encounter with the city were staple ingredi-
ents in early cinema as a whole.6 2 They echoed the thematic repertoire
of. among others, Max Linder and Charlie Chaplin, who were popular
among the Chinese audiences and embodied a global image of the petty
urbanites and immigrants, complete with their upwardly mobile but pre-
carious social positions. Yet these films, which are set (mostly on loca-
tion) both in the Old City and in the concessions, carry geographical in-
dices of Shanghai and specific cultural inflections. For example, the
setting of the City God Temple, the contested cultural practice of arranged
marriage, and popular beliefs in retribution and ghosts are featured in
this group of comedic sketches that portray the ambivalence of modern
life. They recorded the everyday experience, the pleasure, and the anxi-
ety that petty urbanites faced through a mixture of old and new situa-
tions and choices in the metropolis. Several films address the issue of
money and moral corruption in an intensely commercialized society.
One of the films, The Shop Apprentice Who Lost His Lottery Ticket, offers a sat-
ire of the capitalist lottery system and its problematic promise of social
mobility. The apprentice is so worried that he may lose his ticket that he
glues it on a door. As it turns out, he has the winning number, but un-
able to peel the ticket off, he has to carry the whole door to claim his
Chapter Two
prize.63 The comedic mode (huaji) that solicits both laughter and reflec-
tion, much like the distortion mirrors at the amusement halls, accentu·
ates the incongruity and absurdity of the "composite allurement" of a
Chinese metropolis driven by an inflated money economy and commod-
ity culture. Deploying a film "language" of imported and local vernacu-
lars, these early Chinese films made in Shanghai articulate a cinematic
Yangjingbang that is derived from the encounter between the city and
the world, the petty urbanites and a new mass medium.
The production of story films of varying length coincided with the
mushrooming of film exhibition venu(!'s in the city. The intertwining of
cinema and the city thus receives more salient expression in the physical
forms and social function of this novel kind of architecture. It includes
the teahouses, theater houses (which often featured the interlocking
film-dramatic play, or lianhuanxi), and increasingly the exclusive cine-
mas, which sprung up around the longtang residential areas in central
Shanghai and some outlying areas. While the theater houses were built
and owned by mostly Chinese concerns, the first movie houses were pre-
dominantly foreign establishments, such as the chain run by the famous
Spanish showman Antonio Ramos who started his career in the Qing-
liange Teahouse. Within a few years following Ramos's Hongkew The-
68 I ater, which was built on a skating rink at the intersection of Zhapu Road
and Raining Road in 1908, a number of cinemas quickly became new ur-
ban attractions. They included Victoria (Weiduoliya) at Sichuan Road
and Raining Road, Apollo (Aipuluo) on North Sichuan Road, Helen
(Ailun) at Haining Road and Bei Jiangxi Road, Olympic (Xialingpike,
later called Embassy) on Jing'ansi Road (Bubbling Well Road), Republic
(Gonghe) on Minguo Road, Isis (Shanghai) on Bei Sichuang Road, and
Willies at the intersection of Haining Road and Zhapu Road (fig. 2.11).64
While these foreign-owned establishments showed mostly imported
films, the large theater houses Gongwutai (Hubei Road and Hankou
Road) and Xinxin Wutai (Hubei Road and Jiujiang Road) provided pro-
visional screening space for Chinese films. 65 Incidentally, the early shorts
were mostly made by people involved in the theater circles (notably
Zheng Zhengqiu and his troupe) in their spare time. The Difficult Couple,
which is adapted from one of Zheng's plays, screened at Xinxin Wutai
Theater in September 1913 along with a documentary about the upris-
ing in Shanghai in the revolution, The War in Shan9hai (Shan9hai zhan-
zheng). 66 This venue also premiered a few Chinese productions in the en-
suing years, including Victims of Opium (Heji yuanhun, 1916), based on a
phenomenally successful play about the destruction of a family by opium
addiction, which had been staged in the same theater.6 7
1 69
2..11 A cirn,ma built in the 1920s: Willies Theatre.
The well-appointed purpose-built cinemas and the cinematic use of

large theater houses, as opposed to the more hybrid, cheaper teahouses
and amusement halls, significantly altered the landscape of the local film
culture; the venue changes signaled the emergence of narrative film and
also a certain gentrification of cinema. This trend was in part a reaction
to the encroachment of long foreign and serial films (such as Italian epic
costume dramas and Diva films, French film d'art, and the newly es-
tablished Hollywood narrative cinema). At the same time, this change
resulted from a domestic discourse and public debate centered on the on-
tology of cinema and the relationship between enlightenment and en-
tertainment, which will be discussed further in chapter 4.
Chapter Two
VISUAL AND OTHER MODERN PLEASURES
After the cinema became a legitimate cultural institution, widely ac-

cepted as a young #seventh sister" of the other established arts, the film
experience in Chinese cities, especially Shanghai, continued to be em-
bedded in and actively produced the polymorphous space of urban
modernity. Such an expanded experience involved a cluster of cultural
practices and venues beyond the confines of the theater. As elsewhere in
the world, the history of early Chinese film culture is emphatically also a
history of the moviegoing experience, ilnbricated with the larger sensor-
ial and libidinal economy of a modernizing society. It is also a history of
film-related publications including fan magazines, which, due to the lack
of a substantial number of extant films, provide the richest sources for
the understanding of early film culture. The illustrated newspapers had
inculcated in the reader an "optical unconscious" that prepared them for
the moving images and texts on the silver screen. The print culture sur-
rounding the booming film industry underwent a significant expansion
in the 1920s. New voluminous film magazines and other film-related
publications offered indispensable assistance to help viewers make sense
of the moving images and participate in an expansive film culture.
70 I In the first half of the 1920s, the print industry was also shifting en
masse tO standardized modern vernacular Chinese. The increase of the
vernacular press during the period was not simply an after-effect of the
vernacular movement initiated by May Fourth intellectuals in the late
191 Os. The vernacular press contributed to the movement in its own
right by providing concrete forums and tools for mass literacy, yet the ef-
fect disturbed radical May Fourth writers when the vernacular move-
ment inadvertently energized Butterfly-style literature and the film in-
dustry. The popular urban fiction provided not only raw material for
screen adaptations but also produced China's first generation of screen-
writers, which I will discuss more in chapter 5.
The rise of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies literature was inti-
mately related to the rise of Shanghai as a commercial and cultural cen-
ter in the late Qing and early Republican periods. The rather florid nick-
name accorded to the literature allegedly comes from a poetic couplet in
the late Qing courtesan novel Traces of Flower and Moon (Hua yue hen),
which recycles the poetic trope of paired Mandarin ducks and butterflies
as an allegory for sentimental relationships between scholars and courte-
sans. 68 Until the 1910s, Butterfly literature was written primarily in a
semiclassical language and included a large bulk of modified translations
of international urban fiction, including the Sherlock Holmes's detective
stories. It appealed to a reasonably well-educated urban middle-class
(consisting largely of the disenfranchised former rural gentry families

that moved to the city), partly because of the relatively expensive cost of
books, as modern print technology was still a novelty and implied luxury.
This picture was dramatically altered in the 1920s. The paradigmatic
shift in the literary market concurred with a radical reconfiguration of
readership, as Butterfly writers adopted and updated the old vernacular
style and produced more original stories instead of producing extrapo-
lated translations. The literature as a whole became commercially acces-
sible to a wider audience as the prices of books and magazines lowered.
Serialization in daily newspapers also increased affordability and access.
The new readership included a large segment of lower social groups-
readers who had acquired basic literacy through various institutions,
such as the new-style schools and evening classes. The visible conse-
quences brought by this surge in the vernacular trend to the urban scene
are not, however, merely limited to the expanded readership per se.
Rather, the restructured reading space and mode of reception carved out
a significant space for privacy and fantasy. In a fast-growing metropolis
like Shanghai, the constant stimuli and distractions corning from the
street, work, and marketplaces induced the desire in the urban dwellers
to retreat to the quietude at home and seek relief and comfort in books
and magazines. Perry Link reasons that this popularized need for privacy I 71
was part of the "general inward-turning tendency," though he stops short
<>f elaborating further. It is not surprising that this inward-turning took
place concomitantly with the gradual dissolution of a traditional vernac-
ular "reading" space, in which fiction, or xiaoshuo, was often performed
by storytellers and listened to by an Uliterate or semiliterate audience in
teahouses and marketplaces.69
The new interiorized reading space, however, was not a totally ho-
mogenized cocoon of isolation. In fact, a large number of "readers" also
found themselves enjoying Butterfly literature through forms of story-
telling such as films, comic books, stage plays, and drum-singing story-
telling.70 Popular fiction thus offered writers and readers a host of oppor-
tunities to take part in an increasingly commercialized vernacular space,
which in turn redefined privacy and interiority. In the 191 Os, a publisher
was content with a circulation of 3,000 copies· for a book or magazine in
order to cover production cost; in the 1920s, the multimedia dissemina-
tion of most popular Butterfly stories reached at least into the hundreds
of thousands, if not more than a million. 71 _The purpose-built cinema
emerged in this period was at once a visible public venue enacting But-
terfly literary sensibilities and an interiorized comfort zone for the more
isolated viewer. This spatial and cognitive reorientation in both the read-
ing and viewing experience effectively bridged private and public do-
Chapter Two
mains. In short, Butterfly fiction metamorphosed from a late Qing liter-
ary genre written for the amusement of the leisured and educated classes
into a lucrative multimedia business. It became a protean component
and catalyst of a modern vernacular culture, out of which early Chinese
cinema was born and in turn reshaped the literature substantially.
Verbal discourses on film previously only appeared sporadically in the
form of spontaneous reviews and translated articles in newspapers or
news magazines, and in the form of the so-called shadowplay story
(yingxi xiaoshuo) or film story (dianying xiaoshuo-summary plots of for-
eign films) in literary magazines orJbooklets.72 By the mid- l 920s discus-
sions of film had become an established mode of vernacular expression.
Readers of Butterfly fiction, many of whom would presumably also at-
tend films based on the literature as well, overlapped with those readers
of film publications, especially fan magazines and film programs. The two
comprehensive encyclopedia of the film world in China published in
1927, Cheng Shuren's China Film Yearbook and Xu Chiheng's Filmdom in
China, featured bibliographies of periodicals, popular books, early text-
books, and a "film beauty calendar." Cheng's book boasts a com_plete list
of special issues (tekan) on specific productions from twenty-one film
companies based in Shanghai, complete with mailing addresses. 73 Xu's
72 I book, on the other hand, gives an annotated introduction to a dozen film
publications including magazines, pictorials and Cheng's book as well. 74
In short, the expanded vernacular press provided a fertile ground for
the emergent film culture. At the same time, through the adaptation of
Butterfly literature onto the screen, early filmmakers were able to incor-
porate a vast portion of the reading public into the moviegoing enter-
prise. Although China's first film magazine had been published in l 921,75
it was not until some years later that a boom of film magazines and daily
newspaper columns on film appeared; at this point, a specifically film-re-
lated discourse began to play an influential role in shaping the film in-
dustry and the moviegoing experience. These film publications include
Yin9xi con9bao (Shadowplay Gazetteer, February 1921. Beijing), Dianying
zhoubao I Tiaowu shijie (Movie Weekly I The Dancing World, November
1921. Beijing). Yingxi zazhi (Film Magazine, December 1921. Shanghai),
and Chenxing (Morning Stars, 1922, Shanghai). Yin9xi zazhi was the first
full-fledged fan magazine devoted mostly to foreign films and Chenxing
committed itself to promoting Chinese films. The mid-l 920s saw the
publication of more film magazines, such as Dianying zazhi (Movie
Monthly). Yingxi chunqiu (Movie Weekly), Yingxi shijie (Motion Picture
World), and so on (figs. 2.12 and 2.13). 76 Between 1921 and 1926, there
were nearly thirty film magazines in print at one point or another. 77 Dur-
ing the 1930s, with cinema becoming a more widespread national pas-
2.12-13 Film magazines of the 1920s: Dianyin9 zazhi and Yin9xishijie.
time, far more film magazines appeared. Early in the decade. the left- I 73
wing playwrights and critics launched a concerted takeover of the film
and arts supplements of almost all the major newspapers in Shanghai. in-
cluding the widely circulated Shenbao. The colorful world of film publica-
tions catered to a diverse group of fan, and readers had varying knowl-
edge of and involvement in the film medium. Leading studios such as
Mingxing and Lianhua ran their own trade journals, while film buffs
with a literary or theater background would also occasionally spring onto
the scene with their individually colored magazines. Some magazines ca-
tered to laymen fans. others were designed mainly as publicity outlets,
and still others featured more sophisticated reviews and criticism.
Film publications were also a form of entertainment as well as a ver-
bal and visual extension of the moviegoing experience. Beside the regu-
lar magazines and topical books, studios produced special issues (tekan)
to promote specific releases, often sold in the theater lobby as a more au-
thoritative guide than regular theater program pamphlets (shuomin9shu).
Film magazines or trade journals, though often just as short-lived as the
many film companies that came and went, provided moviegoers with an
amplified film experience. The readers were grateful for a reading space
to linger in before or after seeing films. They could learn about plots, in-
stitutional organization of the industry, film technologies, biographies of
Chinese or foreign stars, directors. and even cinematographers. as well as
Chapter Two
forecasts of what films were in production. Through their active partici-

pation in the magazines, the readers also engaged in the shaping of the
broad film culture.
Dianying zhoubao (Saturday Screen News), published by the Morning
Society (Chenshe) in Shanghai, started a new edition in April 1925. The
editor-in-chief proudly justified the renumbering of the magazine:
The previous edition was only a one-page newspaper that hardly

satisfied the expectations of our readers. They sent in numerous
letters asking us to expand its volu~e and publish it as a magazine.
Now we are fulfilling their wishes. As regards the content and ed-
iting method, we have also made some changes. So we should not
be held accountable for being inconsistent. We are "setting up a
separate kitchen" [with the new edition], so why not have the
changes? 78
One of the eye-catching changes suggested by the editor was the adop-
tion of copperplate printing, which gave the magazine a colored cover
and other photo illustrations, making the publication more visually ap-
pealing. The large size and attractive appearance of the magazine, how-
74 I ever, was not meant to contradict the avowed seriousness of the editors.
The opening address of the new edition announced that the function of
the magazine was to promote the development of the domestic film in-
dustry, an important force in revitalizing the Chinese economy. For this
lofty mission, the magazine would limit the scope of the public discussion
to that of "film scholarship, history, and news," and exclude any sensa-
tional news about stars or groundless attacks on any specific persons.
With the third issue of the new edition, the magazine was already able to
demonstrate the successful implementation of its policy. A student sent in
a letter expressing his excitement at the appearance of the new edition:
I am a student who is very fond of going to the movies, and espe-

cially like to watch Chinese films. As soon as there is a Chinese film
showing somewhere, I will hurry to see it like a magnet attracted
to iron. Yet, I often found myself disappointed afterwards because
there were no adequate film publications to guide viewers like me.
He continued to say that, although there had been other publications,

they were either shabbily printed or often erroneous in content. He
found the new edition very "exquisite and beautiful" and hoped it would
adhere to its principles. As a responsive and responsible reader he even
made some specific suggestions, such as limiting the number of illustra-
tions of foreign films, opening a reader's debate corner, and avoiding in-
serting advertisements in the middle of an article because it obstructed
the reader's sight. 79 Instead of an American star, the cover girl of the next
issue featured the Chinese actress Zhang Meilie. She starred in several
hits in the mid-l 920s, including the knight-errant romance Love After
Robbery (Jiehouyuan, Lianhe, 1925), lavishly advertised in the same issue.
Not only did film magazines function as a public sphere for dissemi-
nating the films being shown in town, they were also the most strategic
sites for advertising commodities. Reading a film magazine simulated
both the moviegoing and window-shopping experience. The Apr.ii 1925
issue of Yin9xi chunqiu (Movie Weekly) carried a set of peculiar adver-
tisement5. Under the half-page advertisement for True Love (Zhen'ai, Xin
Dalu, 192 5)-the "first ever grand tragedy in China," based on a story
by the Butterfly writer Zhou Shoujuan-there is also an advertisement
for Dayou walnut snacks (fig. 2.14). The titillating caption reads: "Watch-
ing a shadowplay and eating Dayou's new walnuts product: isn't that
heaven!" The description is written in the format of a film program, de-
tailing its attractions and benefits for health. A similar advertisement for
the famous Guanshengyuan (located on Nanjing Road) candies appeared
1 1s
2.14 Ads for the film

Trite love (1925) (top)
a_nd for walnut snacks
(lower right) in
Yingxi Chunqiu.
2.15 "Window shopping" Lux soap (featuring the late Ruan Lingyu). The Chinese characters
on the Lop read Memorial Portmit (from Lit111h11t1 huabao, vol. 5, no. 2).
Worldly Shanghai. Metropolitan Spectators
everywhere in Yingxi shenghuo in the early 1930s: "Watching a shadow-

play and eating Guanshengyuan's candies. The taste as well as the fun are
beyond words." Through such juxtaposition, visual pleasure is collated
with the pleasure of the palate and the well-being of the body, and snack
concessions were already an integral part of the moviegoing experience.
In fact, the connection between moviegoing and eating as a combined
aesthetic pleasure surfaced most palpably in the Yangjingbang transliter-
ation of the word movie (muwei) which literally means the "taste of the
screen."
Film magazines also contributed directly to the formation of a star sys-
tem and its attendant mythology. The stars perceived themselves to be,
and were in turn also used as, icons for a modern lifestyle, especially
fashion. Certain advertisements skillfully exploit stars' fame by putting
them on the screen of the print advertisement to speak for manufactured
products. Lianhua huabao, published in the early 1930s, ran a prominent
advertisement for Lux fragrant soap (Lishi xiangzhao) In almost every is-
sue. Potential consumers are pictured as spectators sitting in a movie the-
ater and engaged in conversations about how beautiful a certain star on
the screen looks (for example, Chen Yanyan or Ruan Lingyu) and how
smooth her skin appears (fig. 2.15). The implied reason is, of course, that
she uses Lux soap. More intriguingly, the advertisement in each issue has I 77
a slightly different graphic format, and the star occupying the screen is
never the same. These serial ads also provide a glimpse of the actual au-
ditorium atmosphere, which-judging from the images of these talking
heads-was really not so quiet. Theaters were clearly spaces that inter-
laced with the urban lifestyle as a whole and allowed for polymorphous
identifications.
SILVERLAND AND SPORTS WORLD
While there was a heightened interest in narrative for the exclusive film
theater in the 1920s and 1930s, this picture of cinematic containment is
complicated by an intricate network of urban spaces that proliferated
during this time-sports venues, department stores, cafes, jazz bars, and
dance halls. The cross-fertilization of the cinematic and other urban ex-
periences, especially dancing and sports, is manifested in film magazines
as well. The amphibious Xin yinxing yu tiyu shijie (Silverland Sports World)
gives equal coverage to film and sports (fig. 2.16). 80 Another magazine
has an ingenious dual set -up, with one cover enti tied Dianying zazhi (Film
Magazine) and the other Tiaowu shijie (The World of Dancing), assuming
an overlapping readership consisted of moviegoers and dance-hall pa-
trons. One oJ the most famous movie-dance crossover stars is Liang
Chapter Two
Saizhen, whose fans followed her from movie theaters to the dance floor
inside the Dahu Dance Hall. In 1935, she and her three sisters, two of
whom also worked as dance hostesses, played themselves in Lianhua's
Four Sisters (Si zimei), a film about four dancing girls in fashionable Shang-
hai.81 As Gong Jianong wrote in his memoir, the favorite destination of
night outings for actors and actresses was the Carlton Dance Hall near the
Park Hotel, which also had a theater under the same name.s2 More than
mere leisure space for the movie stars, the dance hall and sports venues
also became ubiquitous spatial tropes in the films produced in the 1930s.
Queen of Sports ( 1934) was a sHent classic written and directed by Sun
Yu. As in many other contemporary films about a country girl going to-
and sometimes losing her way in-the urban jungle in Shanghai, it is
filled with typical tropes of metropolitan life. The rise and fall of the
queen of sports Lin Yin, played by Li Lili, parallels her zigzagging trajec-
tory between the stadium and the dance hall. While (good) sports were
represented as a means to discipline the body and nurture the mind, so-
cial dancing stood for excessive pleasure and decadence. The film opens
with a steamship arriving at a harbor on the Huangpu River. Using her
tree-climbing skills, the excited Lin gets to the top of the chimney to gain
a bird's eye view of the city. After disembarking, she rides in an open car
78 I with her relatives and admires the skyscrapers in downtown Shanghai.
Lin starts her new life as an aspiring athlete enrolled at a boarding sports
school for women. The school is cinematically rendered through a series
of scenes in which the girls go through rigorous training. From morning
exercises in bed to brushing teeth to taking showers to training in the
field to studying anatomy or the international history of sports in the
classroom, everything is executed in an efficient fashion. Lin Yin's skills
and diligence lead her to break several records at the National Sports
Games (Quanguo yundonghui). However, intoxicated by the success that
has made her a "Queen of Sports" in the press, Lin's lifestyle begins to
show signs of change (fig. 2.17). 83 She reads fan letters in the classroom
and wears high heels and sexy dresses; she also allows herself to be
courted by college playboys and attends dance parties. Lin learns a big
lesson at the National Trials for the Far East Games (Yuandong yuxuan
dahui): that the true spirit of sports lies in collective effort, not individual
glamour. The didactic message about the need to harness the individual
body-in particular, the female body-for nation building is not to be
missed. But the many hyperbolic scenes in which the girls flaunt their
youthful legs, either in the dormitory, on the running track or the dance
floor, forestall any facile moralist containment of the energy and moder-
nity embodied by the female athletes.
I 19
. l 6 Xin yinxing yu tiyu (Silver/and Sports !*rid)

Chapter Two
2.17 Queen of Sports (1934) with I.i I.iii (1915-2005). (Courtesy of the China .Film Archive)
The mass appeal of Queen of Sports is attributable to its fictional re-

so I working of a real sports event. The director Sun Yu wrote the script right
before the opening of the Fifth National Games held in Nanjing in Octo-
ber 1933. On the first day of the Games, shooting crews from three ma-
jor Shanghai studios-Mingxing, Tianyi, and Lianhua-were present at
the stadium. Sun and his crew members, representing Lianhua, tried to
shoot the film "on location,· but had to abandon the plan after a few days
because the authorities only allowed the shooting of documentaries. 84
Some footage the crew shot, however, was instantly shown in local the-
aters, and partially incorporated into the completed feature. Cheng Ying,
now an elderly Shanghai woman whom I interviewed, told me that she
was an avid moviegoer and dance aficionado, and for that reason she was
chosen as an extra in the film. According to Cheng a large part of the on-
location shooting took place in the newly finished Jiangwan Stadium,
built to host the Sixth National Games in 1935. The stadium was part of
the Great Shanghai Project (Da Shanghai jihua), an effort by the Nation-
alist government to create a separate Chinese-ruled Shanghai in the
northern suburbs of the semicolonial metropolis. Lin's roommates, who
displayed their muscular legs and white teeth in the dormitory, were
played by students (including my informant) from an actual wom-
en's sports college located near the studio. True to the conception of the
film as an intertext between fiction and documentary, or for that mat-
ter, the "silverland" and "sports world," Li Lili's fans entered the film to
play her partners. The girls were treated to an exclusive screening after
the film was finished. 85 Although Queen of Sports might be a rather par-
ticular case, it shows that a film cannot be simply treated as a closed rep-
resentational entity. As a cultural object, it is produced and circulates in
a complex network of cultural practices and reception. Between different
but frequently overlapping audiences or patrons-of film, sports, danc-
ing-who are part of the "games," the boundaries were never clearly
demarcated.
METROPOLITAN SOUND AND CINEMATIC WRITING
The advent of sound in the late 1920s and early 1930s not only aroused
intense public anxiety toward modern technology and the intrusion of
American talkies, it also drastically reordered the hierarchy of the senses.
To be sure, the movie theater in the silent period was never quiet:'In fact
there always existed a plethora of sound practices in the form of either
musical accompaniment (phonograph or orchestra) or the live speech of
an interpreter (like the benshi in Japan), for the benefit of the illiterate
and to generate a communal atmosphere of storytelling. The arrival of
sound, partly due to the high cost required for changing or upgrading
production and exhibition equipment. initially had very mixed effect on I 81
the moviegoing experience in China. The undubbed American talkies
were only embraced by a certain stratum of spectators who went to
watch and listen to them out of sheer curiosity or simply for the pleasure,
and in some instances under the pretense, of "understanding" a foreign
tongue. 86
It has almost become a diche that Chinese silent narrative film (espe-
cially the left-wing cinema) reached its golden age in the 1930s despite
the advent of sound. Reasons behind this are so complex that it would re-
quire a separate investigation beyond the space allowed here. As I will
discuss in considerable detail in chapter 8, the film scene of the golden
age was far from being homogeneously "silent"; nor was it aesthetically
or ideologically uniform. The slow transition to sound in China, roughly
between 1930 and 1936, was characterized by the cohabitation of differ-
ent temporalities as well as cultural imaginaries and practices. All-silent.
semisilent, partial-sound and total-sound films, which were produced
and projected with an array of technologies, coexisted. Metropolitan Scenes
(Dushifengguang, 1935), Lianhua Symphony (Lianhuajiaoxiangqu, I 937, an
omnibus production with eight films of varying length and technologies),
and Street Angel (Malu tianshi, 1937) were all Lianhua productions incor-
porating sound in various ways. These are only a few examples for the
kaleidoscopic multiplicity of this transition period. The advent of sound,
Chapter Two
in conjunction with other audiovisual entertainment forms such as the

radio and revue theater, definitely foregrounded aural enjoyment. The
dynamic but troubled coexistence of the visual register and sound track
in this protracted transition constantly reorganized the sensorial econ-
omy as well as the cultural and ideological hierarchy of technological
resources.
These polyphonic and multisensory events took place both inside and
outside the movie theaters. They were also prepared by or carried over
into film magazines. Increasingly we find song-sheets inserted in the
magazines, counterbalancing the ver}t,al and visual sections. The early
1930s was a time when film critics and writers of conflicting aesthetic
and ideological interests camped out in various film magazines or sup-
plements, generating a veritable polemical symphony on the social func-
tion and meaning of the cinema. In 1934, the left critics began to stage
an attack on the so-called soft cinema (ruanxing dianying) represented by
Liu Na'ou, Huang Jiamo. and others of the Yihua Company, with regard
to the relationship between technology (including the use of sound) and
ideology, aesthetics, and politics. The verbal battle culminated in 1936,
when the national distress reached a new point of crisis. The roots of the
llsoft" aesthetic, often condensed in the humorous sentence, #cinema is
82 I ice-cream for the eyes, and a sofa for the heart,ll must be traced back to
a slightly earlier moment. When Xiandai dianying (Modern Screen), a
film magazine edited by Huang and Liu, began to publish a series of ar-
ticles advocating the soft film aesthetic in 1933, the "New Sensationalist 0
(xinganjue pai) literature was reaching its full bloom.s7 The Chinese term
for New Sensationalism was directly borrowed from the Japanese
shinkankaku ha, which flourished as a literary school in 1924-27. Liu
Na'ou, who grew up in Japan, first translated shinkankaku ha writings
into Chinese.as This modernist group of writers clustered around a series
of journals: Wugui lieche (Trackless Train), Xin wenyi (La nouvelle litterature)
and Xiandai (Les contemporains) .89 A great deal of Chinese literary criticism
has been unleashed against the New Sensationalist petty-bourgeois sen-
sibility and decadence since the 1930s and onwards. It is noteworthy that
in the recosmopolitanized Shanghai at the end of the twentieth century,
New Sensationalist writing had not only received its due place in literary
history but has also been ghettoized in new urban genres, in particular,
the snapshot like dushi sanwen (urban jottings) and sensational autobio-
graphical fiction by llbeauty# writers such as Wei Hui (Shanghai Babe) and
Mianmian (Candy). However, critics remain reluctant to reevaluate the
soft cinema, because it would entail rewriting of Chinese film history as
a whole.
What I find most striking about the New Sensationalist writing is its
palpable texture, which seems to have largely derived from the cinema,
with its montage technique, mobile points of view, screenplay-like form,

and rhythmic "editing" style. Mu Shiyin's "Street Scenes" (.liejin9) and
"Shanghai Fox-trot" (Shanghai wubu), Shi Zhecun's "At the Paris Theatre"
(Zai Bali daxiyuan), and Liu Na'ou's "Flux" (Liu} and "Formula" (Fan9-
chengshi)-in fact, the entire collection of his Scene, or Dushi fen9jin9-
xian9o-are just a few titles from a body of texts that I call "cinematic
writings." Their work as a whole manifests a sustained fascination with
the relationship between vision and body, as well as with a wide spec-
trum of urban experiences suffused with sight and sound: speed, stimuli,
shock, trauma, heightened or frustrated material and sexual desire. This
body of writings also richly depicts the moviegoing experience in Shang::.
hai in the 1930s. In fact the city is often perceived as an enormous movie
theater, or a simulacrum, in which moviegoers also act out their own so- -
cial and gender roles in cinematic terms.
Shi Zhecun's short story, "At the Paris Theatre," invites us to vicari-
ously participate in the moviegoing experience at a real theater space as
the complex gender economy unfolds inside. The Paris Theatre (Bali
daxiyuan) is located on Xiafei Road (now Huaihai zhonglu) in the then-
French concession in Shanghai (fig. 2.18). The original theater (Dong-
hua) was built in 1926 during the cinema boom and was given the com-
1 s3
.··. <· ie···it m ;J;f.J.ii.,~ t~.'fiY
-·-···•---.•;•:·1t:iti:•1·'.s·••·i
-_· •.•nALcoNYs:riATtNG PLAN)·?
[t1,.,·,,,J2,,,iiiW~N1~· ..
'··· l1&l11tj1zj1oj.3![,!11lzl1i
<l201,,n11,INLl1Zl1olk lblJt.j2lq
< lzol;ij1bl11.lj1.2j1oltibl1tl2!F"i
licln j11;!11L!1i i10! &l io IN 121 Ii.
2.18 Interior of the Paris Theater. balcony seating plan. (Courtesy of Shanghai
Municipal Archive)
Chapter Two
paratively exotic name appropriate for its setting in 1930.91 The form of
the story is a prolonged neurotic monologue of a Shanghai flaneur in the
course of his movie date with his mistress, a young city girl. Set in a time
when sound film had only recently entered the urban scene in Shanghai,
the jarring stream-of-consciousness narration has the effect of a sound
track that is still searching for a way of articulating psychological interi-
ority and narrative cohesion. The reader has to negotiate constantly be-
tween the dissonant or even contrapuntal relationship between the
acoustic and the visual trajectories in the story, which unfolds like a film.
Temporally, the story takes place overjthe whole duration of a film. 92 Spa-
tially. it covers the trajectory of two lovers going to a movie theater on a
typical urban date: queuing up to buy the tickets, picking up a program
in the foyer, being ushered to the seats, watching the set of films offered
(we learn that the program contains a cartoon before a foreign feature),
experiencing body smells and intimacy inside the auditorium, comment-
ing on the plot and the actors, buying and eating snacks (chocolate ice-
cream) during the intermission. After more subtle interactions between
the couple, the lights come on. and finally the couple leaves the Paris
Theater.
This narrative itinerary, which provides a rare glimpse into the physi-
84 I cal layout of the theater interior, the program and its services, the multi-
sensory experience (with fragrance, ice cream, sexual arousal, and so on}
may seem routine. It reveals, though, that moviegoing as a social practice
is enacted within a concrete urban geography and physical theater space,
in which men and women interact rather than being completely pas-
sively interpellated by some invisible ideology emitted from the projec-
tion room. The liminal atmosphere of the space, the unstable and dilated
sensations (pleasure as well as displeasure) felt and lived out in and be-
tween the bodies of the spectators are portrayed as more central than the
film plot. The texture of the story as a whole acquires a multidimensional
quality. What is written down by Shi Zhecun, or for that matter, what
happens in the male character's head, is reflected by what's shown on the
screen (a European romance starring the Euro-Russian actor Morodin)
on one hand,9 3 and the couple's interaction, or lack thereof, in the the-
ater on the other. The limited first-person narration (or mumbling) does
not detail to us what the film is about, as the male spectator-narrator
"hardly glanced at it." All the while he has been trying to penetrate the
mind of his inscrutable girlfriend, an elusive Modern Girl. But the film
on the screen and the drama in the auditorium seem to intertwine, when
the man eventually experiences a moment of identification-which he
has been resisting (it was deemed unsophisticated for an educated man
like him to "sit glued to the screen all the way through")-he "talks" to
himself in a monologue:
Now what's happening on the screen? He's taken his former wife's
ring off and thrown it away in front of that woman, hasn't he? Mo-
rodin's got a fine expression on his face. Look how anguished he
looks! ... Isn't this my wedding ring? If I should throw away the
ring my wife gave me right now, what would be her [the mistress']
reaction? ... Right, I'll give it a try. It's coming off now. And now
I'm holding it between my finger and thumb.94
Then he hears a loud sigh coming from the audience, which seems to re-
act both to the heroine's act on the screen and to his awkward gesture.
Moreover, he suddenly finds his girlfriend gazing at him nervously grab-
bing the wedding ring in his hand. Up till that point, the man has been
watching her every move and expression, as if she embodied a film her·
self, in order to figure out whether or not she loves him. After all, he is a
married man with a wife-the "gentle and rather pitiable creature" -left
in the countryside. He has secretly scorned the girl for her lack of knowl-
edge about the UFA company, been baffled by her fascination with the
"stern and cold" male star ("If [he was] someone like Valentino, then per-
haps!"), and annoyed by her fickle attitudes toward him (including her
body language). His sustained attempt to understand this Modern Girl.
who seems even more enigmatic than the flickering images, remains un- I 85
successful. He could not understand why she refused to go for a snack
with him as couples usually did after a movie, "but instead flagged down
a taxi and went off by herself," thwarting his desire to "take her all the
way home." Yet she gives him a mixed signal before taking off: she offers
him a new date to go to a park the next day. What's the message? "I don't
understand," the man mumbles to himself. Thus ends the story and a
brief psychological confrontation that took place in a movie theater be-
tween a jlaneur who thought he knew it all but suffers from neurasthe-
nia, and ajlaneuse who resisted the self-absorbed male fantasy and staked
out her own terms for desire and pleasure.
The story illustrates what Shu-mei Shih calls a "textually mediated
cosmopolitanism" characteristic of the new sensationalist writers and an
emasculated or impoverished male subjectivity, which could not recon-
cile the difference between his imagined glamorous cosmopolitan iden-
tity and the uneven social and economical reality of a semicolonial city.95
But for my purposes the story demonstrates that a film is more than just
a printed (foreign) text that only the educated urbane male could appre-
ciate. Its power of embodiment and its popular appeal allowed a larger
audience to access these cosmopolitan products; the Modern Girl was not
required to know German or Russian to "meet" and fall for Morodin, af-
ter all. The movie theater proved to be a unique public space of social
intercourse-a stage for rehearsing emerging yet real metropolitan iden-
Chapter Two
tities. Its darkness and the sensorial stimuli transformed the medium
into a fertile ground for fostering "illegitimate" social and sexual dynam-
ics outside the more regimented and moralizing public world. It was a
space of shared, but never uniform, pleasures, where people of different
genders, ages, classes, and races (especially in a cosmopolitan city like
Shanghai) congregated and confronted each other's tastes and values.
The language of this story in particular and the New Sensationalist writ-
ing in general not only informs us about the everyday content of an in-
tense urban life, complete with its often evasive and inchoate details, but
is itself also actively constituted by the moviegoing experience. In other
words, it renders the representation as well as the actual form of urban
life increasingly cinematic, which, in turn, refashions the lived experi-
ence. In this sense, the fragmented montage surface of the New Sensa-
tionalist literature is a salient manifestation of a modern life mediated
and embodied by the cinema.
METROPOLE AND PERIPHERY

From the end of the nineteenth century to the high-modern 1930s, the
historical conditions present in Shanghai secured the city's role as the
86 I natural habitat for a local film industry and a cosmopolitan film culture.
It is important to bear in mind, however, that Shanghai was neither the
starting nor the end point of the film experience in China in this period.
The entry of the "Occidental shadowplay" to China took place first in the
port city of Hong Kong in early 1896.96 In fact, the traffic between Shang-
hai and Hong Kong, and between the film cultures in these two most
Westernized Chinese cities, remained consistent and strong throughout
the Republican period. 97 Hong Kong served as an indispensable relay
point for the Shanghai film industry to reach the vast Southeast Asian di-
aspora market. Early exhibitions by traveling foreign showmen also
quickly spread to a number of Chinese cities, including Beijing, Tianjin,
and Wuhan, and gradually, albeit with great difficulty, to the interior
provinces. 98 As noted earlier, the first film productions by Chinese al-
legedly began in Beijing, an ancient city but also the center of late Qing
reform, which was poised for modernity. It was, however, the combina-
tion of social, political, economic, and cultural circumstances that ulti-
mately allowed the new medium to find its home in the new city of
Shanghai.
This modern Chinese metropolis was less constrained by, though by
no means free from, the long history of traditional culture (as in Beijing)
or the complete colonial domination (as in Hong Kong). Unmistakably a
product of modern capitalism, Shanghai belongs to the international
family of those "great cities, Grosstadt, metropolis, even Weltstadt, [that]

were larger in population and in spatial coverage than any previous
cities." The cradle of modern life, the metropolis, through its exuberant
life of consumption, also differs fundamentally from a mere industrial
city (the seat of production). 99 Shanghai certainly befits this description.
It was and remains the most important center of industrial production in
China, but .it was really its energetic and sometimes unruly commercial
and cultural life that made it a metropolis. The city's ambiguous and am-
bivalent relationship to both the world and China, enhanced by its op-
portune geographic location and demographic syncretism, endowed this
former outlying county seat on the Eastern seaboard with a historical op-
portunity to play a major role in the shaping of a modern vernacular cul-
ture, including the cinema.
As a center for film production, exhibition, and distribution, the city
functioned as a nexus in the larger matrix of a national. regional and in-
ternational film culture. By virtue of its Janus-faced identity as a world-
class city on a par with other metropolitan centers in the world and an
entry port to a vastly underdeveloped country, Shanghai's position in the
geography of global modernity carries the characteristics of both the
metropole and the periphery. Shanghai was an ideal laboratory of global
modernity as well as an emblem of its glaring uneveness and contradic- I 87
tions. The external and internal configurations of geopolitical and cul-
tural relations render the city in general and its mass culture in particu-
lar an exemplary "heterotopia" or "site of alternate social ordering." As
"places of otherness" the heterotopia, according to Foucault's deployment
of the medical term, is composed of juxtaposed sites of radical contrasts
or incongruity within a social body or a text, always carrying with it
something excessive and unsettling. 100 The complex layering of Yangjing-
bang as a spatial, linguistic, and cultural repository and embodiment of
Shanghai's metropolitan identity, which gave rise to a worldly citizenship
of petty urbanites with complex stratification, amply testifies to the mul-
tifarious, excessive, and even grotesque character of its cosmopolitanism.
Shanghai film culture and its urban modernity did not exist within
the bounds of the city per se. Shanghai cosmopolitanism makes sense
only in relation to both foreign influences and Chinese interests (inside
the country as well as the diaspora). On the level of representation
Shanghai was, as Laikwan Pang aptly put it with specific reference to the
left-wing cinema of the 1930s, "a cultural space as well as a symbol." 10 1
In terms of production and marketing practices, the scarcity of Chinese-
owned theaters in Shanghai impelled major studios to systematically ex-
pand toward both the inland and Nanyang. Many cities in China emu-
lated Shanghai and participated in the dissemination of the metropolitan
Chapter Two
film culture on a national scale. While big Shanghai studios had their
sales offices in major cities, many local cinephile businessmen built their
own theaters, distribution networks, and sometimes even production
companies. By the mid-l 920s, the craze for film was so contagious that
small film companies also appeared in Bei,iing, Tianjin, Guangzhou,
Shantou, and Hangzhou, although most of them had only brief lives. 102
While most productions from Shanghai studios are about and made in
Shanghai, a significant number also dealt with the city-country connec-
tions and contrasts and were even shot on location in sites outside of
Shanghai, as the self-referential T'f'O Stars shows in vivid detail. Film
magazines published in Shanghai also constantly carried reports on local
film enterprises and the reception of Shanghai-produced films through-
out China.
The Jilin reader's letter to Yingxi shenghuo (Movie Life) about his view-
ing of Amorous History quoted in the introduction documents this double-
edged center-periphery interaction mediated through both film and
print. The dissemination of moving images from and about the metropo-
lis to the less-modernized interior was aided by lightweight film maga-
zines that traveled faster and cheaper than the movies in those days. The
provincial spectators in remote areas of China thus became petty urban-
88 I ites at large and took part in the construction of a domestic film industry
and a cosmopolitan film culture that was never simply about Shanghai.
CHAPTER THREE
TEAHOUSE, SHADOWPLAY,
AND LABORER'S LOVE
MOVIE GOING EMERGED as an important part of modern every- I 89

day life, and also quickly became imbricated in a larger film culture that
remapped urban geography, both physically and discursively. In this
chapter, I trace how a film experience embedded in a haptic teahouse
space gradually gave way to an interiorized experience with the spread of
the exclusive movie theater in the first half of the 1920s. At first film was
seen as a form of play (youxi) and part of variety shows offered to a mixed
and participatory audience at teahouses. This transformation coincided
with the founding and consolidation of Mingxing in 1922, the first full-
fledged Chinese film enterprise. It also overlapped with the emergence of
a broad film world (yingxi shijie, or yingjie) consisting of a great number of
studios of varying size, distribution agencies, movie theaters, film schools,
film publications, and other related institutions.
This multifaceted film culture paralleled, intersected, and diverged
considerably from the May Fourth cultural movement. Early Chinese
filmmakers, exhibitors, and especially critics, who aspired to use the cin-
ema as a means of vernacular education by way of entertainment, em-
braced a modern mass medium. The intellectuals, however, despised and
dismissed it as the "vulgar" dregs of the petty urbanites. Even Lu Xun, the
revered writer, joined the crusade against popular Chinese cinema. 1 The
May Fourth writers busily engaged themselves with the print medium to
urewrite Chinese" from the classical language to a modern vernacular
Chapter Three
and to promote a loftier literary and ideological episteme for the more
educated. 2 The nascent film industry on the other hand sought a more
heterogeneous audience among the teahouse and theater visitors, as well
as students and other new urban subjects. The early filmmakers and
exhibitors-many with experience in the theater-aspired to use the
movie theater as a pedagogical space for transmitting modern knowledge
and values to the public at large. However, market pressure and chang-
ing tastes of the audience constantly placed demands on the production
sector, complicating its effort to create a cinema of "business plus con-
science (yingye jia liangxin), a slogan ccpned by Zheng Zhengqiu, Mingx-
ing Company's cofounder, and widely considered the "father" of Chinese
cinema. In the process, the filmmakers were compelled to reconcile the
tension between enlightenment and entertainment by seeking a film lan-
guage for storytelling largely centered on family melodrama. Meanwhile,
the filmmakers and critics also set out to define the ontological as well as
cultural implications of the Occidental shadowplay, an effort that in effect
constituted an incipient film theory and film criticism in China. Instead
of the antitraditional radicalism and iconoclasm advocated by the May
Fourth ideology, the popular storytelling cinema, and the porous ver-
nacular culture that surrounded it, then tried to create a more malleable
90 I and inclusive public sphere. The latter allowed not only the negotiation
of conflicting values and ideas but also the processing of fractured expe-
riences of modernity, not to mention projections of the good life for both
the society and the individual. The tension between entertainment and
enlightenment was to persist during the silent and early sound period
and certainly continued as a leitmotif in the Chinese film history as a
whole.
LABORER'S LOVE IN CONTEXT
Laborer's Love (Laogong zhi aiqing, a.k.a. Zhiguo yuan, 1922) is allegedly the
earliest complete extant Chinese film. A silent film with bilingual inter-
titles (Chinese and English), this thirty-minute short comedy is one of
more than a hundred films made by two pioneers of Chinese cinema: di-
rector Zhang Shichuan and screenwriter Zheng Zhengqiu. 3 The film is a
plebeian story about how a carpenter-turned-fruit vendor wins the hand
of an old doctor's daughter, and was among the few short comedies made
by Mingxing in 1922. These shorts reportedly failed to become box office
hits, which subsequently impelled the company to manufacture more
"long films and serious dramas" (changpian zhengju) in order to make up
financial loss."' It is surprising that such a noncanonical work, deemed
"frivolous or vulgar," 5 should have survived the ravages of history to
Teahouse, Shadowplay, and laborer's love
stand now as the "beginning" of Chinese cinema. It has_toured around

the world as the "earliest extant Chinese narrative film." 6 To what extent
can this accidental residue or leftover from Chinese film history help crit-
ics today reimagine the cultural "chronotope" of early Chinese cinema? 7
And how can we situate the genesis of this particular cinema-or at least
this particular film-in the field of early cinema as a cultural as well as
critical category? I do not intend to use Laborer's Love here as an all-pur-
pose text to answer these large historical and theoretical questions,
which are inevitably interrelated; the film serves rather as an intersection
where a number of contextual meanings traffic through and collide. This
singular film acts upon film history even though it was long relegated to
oblivion. Precisely because the film was not seen as exceptional in main-
stream Chinese film history, its vivid details and rich cultural context
may actually offer us a compelling glimpse of early Shanghai cinema and
its complexity.
Laborer's Love is a romantic comedy that provides an explicit caricature
of traditional arranged marriage. The film thus suggests that early Chi-
nese cinema was not entirely divorced from the May Fourth cultural
movement for which free love was a central theme in its narrative of
emancipating the individual from the shackles of feudalism. For the first
time the film created a screen image of a "laborer" (lao9on9 was a mod- I 91
em term for the emerging urban working class) in Chinese film history.8
This film was in fact a prelude to a profusion of films released in the first
half of the 1920s, mostly derived from the popular Mandarin Ducks and
Butterfly urban fiction that centered on questions of love, family, and
ethics in a rapidly modernizing society. Overlapping some May Fourth
ideas on similar issues, this early narrative cinema, with its melodramatic
excess and sensational appeal, searched for an effective and affective
mode of storytelling to account for the impact of urban modernity.
Until recently, many film scholars of the West with an eye on non-
Western cinemas had been particularly enamored with Japanese cin-
ema. A central concern fueling this passion seems to be the possibility
that a non-Western cinema, in this case, the Japanese one, could offer a
counter-Hollywood or alternative cinematic discourse. Noel Burch's To
the Distant Observer is typical of how Japan became the vehicle for this aca-
demic radicalism. Burch aims to identify prewar Japanese cinema as the
"only national cinema to derive fundamentally from a non-European
culture," hence distinctly and radically differing from the "standard
'Hollywood style' of shooting and editing adopted by the industries of
Europe and the U.S., as well as by colonized nations." 9 In other words,
Japan simply became a convenient metaphor in a political project chal-
lenging the hegemony of Hollywood cinema. The second related reason,
Chapter Three
according to Burch, for the originality or purity of the Japanese case is lo-
cated in Japan's avoidance of the "colonial stage" in the late nineteenth
century. The former great civilizations, such as India, China, and Egypt,
Burch laments, were colonized or infiltrated by Western powers and have
failed to fully develop indigenous original modes of filmic representation.
Consequently, he argues, they have failed to produce masterpieces" as
0
Japan has. For Burch, the muddiness of inauthenticity of film that is

not radically different from Hollywood cinema, complicates his clean-cut
program of buttressing Western theory by means of non-Hollywood
practice. Quoting some figures from JayLeyda's Before Hollywood: Turn of
the Century Films from American Archives, Burch finds early Chinese cinema
to be a hybrid existence enslaved by American cinema, from film stock
and cameramen w visual sty!e. 10 In other words, the formative period of
Chinese cinema was characterized as infantile dependence and mimicry.
Burch all too hastily draws pessimistic conclusions about early Chi-
nese cinema based upon Leyda's statistical figures. Early Chinese cinema
was largely produced and consumed in Shanghai in the early decades of
the twentieth century. If American films comprised 90 percent of the
films shown in China in 1929, that does not mean that China did not
have a film industry of its own. Nor can one conclude that before and
92 I after this low ebb in the late 1920s, due to the onslaught of American
sound cinema, Chinese film production failed to attract a Chinese audi-
ence. In fact, the 1920s were an enormously lively and complex time in
Chinese film history. It was a period marked by the consolidation of the
Chinese film industry as well as the transformation from a "cinema of at-
tractions" to longer narrative features early in the decade and the difficult
transition to sound at the threshold of the 1930s. Although only a hand-
ful of films from the 1920s are extant today, more than 500 films were
produced. The number of registered film companies around 1925 was
179, of which 142 were in Shanghai. 11 Though many quickly went out
of business, some 40 companies actually produced films, and many oth-
ers were presumably involved in film distribution and exhibition in some
way. 12 The wide variety of films produced in this period includes box-
office successes: Ren Pengnian's gory crime story Yan Ruisheng (Zhongguo
yingxi, 192 l ), Zhang and Zheng's moral tale Orphan Rescues Grandfather
(Gu'er jiu zuji; Mingxing, 1923), Hou Yao's women's rights advocacy film
The Abandoned Wife (Qifu; Changcheng, 1924), and Wen Yimin's martial
arts adventure Red Heroine (Hong xia; Youlian, 1929) featuring a female
protagonist. These films' successes reveal interesting aspects of early Chi·
nese cinema: (1) the thematic and stylistic obsession with traditional arts;
(2) the propensity for theatrical adaptations; (3) the tendency to address
modern issues. The film stock and cameras used to produce these films
Teahouse, Shadowpl~. and laborer's Love
were imported from Europe or America, and the majority of film pro-
duction was concentrated in the westernized concessions of Shanghai.
Nevertheless, these films were Chinese productions preoccupied with at-
tracting urban, and to some extent, rural audiences still largely immersed
in the traditional and theatrical performing arts. Far from being thor-
oughly westernized or colonized, early Chinese cinema long lingered in
a different mode of perception and presentation while strenuously try-
ing to accommodate an entirely new visual apparatus imported from
the West.
It would, however, be erroneous to draw the conclusion that Chinese
cinema-deeply indebted to indigenous forms of presentation and rep-
resentation-was also essentially or radically different from the Holly-
wood style. Given the particular quasi-colonial context of the city, the .
uneven industrial development in China, the international circulation of
the film medium, and the diverse styles of individual filmmakers, there
was certainly no such thing as a purely "original" Chinese cinema. At the
same time, to conceive of early Chinese cinema in terms of total depen-
dence and mimicry-(as opposed to the "autonomy" of the Japanese
case in about the same period)-is even more removed from the com-
plex cultural context to which Laborer's Love now stands as a compelling,
albeit silent witness. I 93
A return to the beginning of Chinese cinema can provide some in-
sights into a highly syncretic Chinese film culture. However, generaliza-
tions are a risk when revising a chaotic historical period, which began
with a brief, accidental slapstick comedy. My challenge here concerns the
status of the individual text in any theoretical and historical analysis of
cultural production. In his article, #Film History and Film Analysis: The
Individual Film in the Course of Time," Tom Gunning attempts to rescue
film history from the tyranny of theory, in particular, the brand rooted
in linguistic structuralism and Lacanian-Althusserian theory of subject
positioning that has dominated film studies until recently. Yet he also
cautions against any confusion of a historical approach with naive mis-
conception of history as a "chaos of facts drawn out in an endless chain
and the endless round of predictable recycling." 13 Analysis of the indi-
vidual film, argues Gunning, "provides a sort of laboratory for testing the
relation between history and theory," as the individual text often reveals
the #stress points in each as they attempt to deal with the scandal of the
actuality of a single work as opposed to the rationality of a system." Cer-
tain "transitional texts" that #contain a conflict between older and more
recent modes of address" are instances that manifest the interplay and in-
terpenetration between the "synchronic slice" and the #diachronic axis"
in a given situation.14
Chapter Three
My analysis of Laborer's Love as such a #transitional text" will be an ex-

ercise in historical textual analysis that aims to reveal the "complex
transaction that takes place between text and context, so that one never
simply functions as an allegory of the other.n 15 In the following I will
demonstrate how some historical data may be mobilized as part of a
larger textual field, rather than being relegated to "historical back-
ground" or simply providing prehistory of the narrative cinema that fol-
lowed in various versions of Chinese film history. In such a field, a
confluence of cinematic experiences of production, exhibition, and spec-
tatorship is woven into the individual/film, which is seen treading the
tightrope between different aesthetic and cultural norms, thereby trans-
forming spectatorial expectations. Situating the film in this broad histor-
ical scenario, I argue that this short comedy made in 1922 has a long
story to tell us about the transition from a "cinema of attractions" to a
Ncinema of narrative integration." and the changing configuration of pro-
duction. exhibition, and consumption modes as well as the emergence of
a mass audience. My reading of the film is thus anchored in a particular
vernacular scene, the teahouse. Embodying the Yangjingbang-style ar-
chitecture situated in an urban culture, its transformation is crucial to
our understanding of early Chinese cinema as a product of a vibrant, ten-
94 I sion-ridden modernizing urban culture and vernacular experience.
SHADOWPLAY AT TEAHOUSES
Cinema arrived in China only months after the Lumiere brothers' show
in the basement of the Grand Cafe in Paris on December 28, 1895. On
August 11, 1896, the allegedly first projection by some French showmen
took place in the Xu Yuan teahouse in Shanghai which usually featured
traditional operas, magicians, firecrackers, and acrobats. The film pro-
gram was integrated into the live shows and attracted a large audience.
In the next few years, a number of European and American showmen
entered the trading port to exhibit films at teahouses such as Tianhua,
Tongqing, and Shengping.1 6 American showman James Ricalton's show-
ings of Edison films received an enthusiastic review, entitled "Watching
American Shadowplay," in the Youxibao (Leisure and Entertainment) in
Shanghai on September 5, 1897. This first printed piece of Chinese writ-
ing on film beams with excitement and wonder at the arrival of cinema:
Recently, there are [shows of] American electric shadowplay,

which seems to be made in the form of shadow lantern yet can
make wondrous changes totally unexpectedly. Last night, in the
cool of the evening following a shower of rain, I went to the Qi
.
Teahouse, Shadowplay, and Laborer's Love
[teahouse] garden with my friends to see a show. After the audi-

ence gathered, the lights were put out and the performance began.
On the screen before us we saw a picture-two occidental girls
dancing, with puffed-up yellow hair, looking rather lovely. Then
another scene, two occidental men boxing. Then a woman bathing
in a tub .... In another scene a man puts out the light and goes to
bed, but he is disturbed by a bug. To catch it he throws off all the
bedding, and when he finally puts it in the chamber pot, he looks
very funny....
One wonderful scene, which was repeated, is a bicycle race. One
man rides in from the east, another from the west. They collide,
one man falls down and when the other tries to help, he falls
down, too. Suddenly many bicycles come in and all fall down,
making the audience clap their hands and laugh out loud ....
Another scene is an American street [Fifth Avenue] with tall
street lamps, carriages going to and fro, and pedestrians in great
numbers walking along. The spectators feel as though they are
actually present, and this is exhilarating. Suddenly the lights come
on again and all the images vanish. It was indeed a miraculous
spectacle .17
I gs
This peculiar mode of exhibition, that is, the coexistence of the foreign
shadowplay (xiyang yingxi) and indigenous popular performances in a va-
riety show venue, continued well beyond 1908 when Antonio Ramos
built Hongkew Theatre, a simple sheet iron structure boasting 250 seats
and the first movie house in Shanghai.Is
The teahouse was a significant spatial trope in Chinese urban culture
around the rum of the twentieth-century and figured strongly in the his-
tory of early Chinese cinema. It was not, as typically representing in the
exotic imagination, as a place where Chinese scholars in long gowns dis-
cussed intellectual matters over cups of green tea. In many cases tea-
house (chayuan) and playhouse (xiyuan) were interchangeable terms for
entertainment establishments where traditional opera pieces and other
popular variety shows were offered, along with tea, snacks, and cold tow-
els for refreshment. The typical traditional teahouse I playhouse, with a
maximum seating capacity of 1000, is a square or rectangular enclosed
space with an ornately decorated stage (usually flanked by wooden pil-
lars and railings) that takes up one entire wall and protrudes onto the
main floor. The walls on either side and opposite the stage are lined with
two-story seating compartments or balconies, usually reserved for aristo-
crats, officials, and rich merchants.1 9 The old playhouse inside restaurants
and later teahouses was popular in Beijing since the early eighteenth
Chapter Three
century, but it took on pronounced modern features when it spread to

the South. Concentrated in the concessions, in particular near the Yang-
jingbang area, the teahouses I playhouses in Shanghai installed electric
lights (replacing paper lanterns) and mechanical devices (such as the ro-
tating stage) years before Beijing. Instead of the vertical placement of
tables and chairs, Shanghai theaters opted for horizontal placement
allowing viewers to face the stage directly. The crowded main floor, tra-
ditionally reserved for poorer patrons who could not afford (or were not
allowed to book) the high-rated seats on the sides and balconies, was
made into the most desirable seating ari;a. Another visible social change
was that these venues began to allow women, although in many in-
stances separate entrances and seating arrangement were made to ensure
gender hierarchy and propriety. 20 In the 1910s the more traditional hy-
brid teahouse I playhouse began to give way to, or compete with, mod-
ern theaters with mirror-frame style Uingkuangshi) stage and num-
0 0
bered seating after the New Stage (Xin wutai) was built in Shanghai in
1908. 21 The ·teahouse I playhouse tradition and its modern manifesta-
tions created cultural and material conditions for reception of the Occi-
dental shadowplay.
At the same time, multifunctional gardens (such as Zhang Yuan, Xi
96 I Yuan, Yu Yuan), roof-top gardens on top of department stores, and
amusement halls, were also venues for a wide selection of both tradi-
tional and modern forms of mass entertainment. For instance, fireworks,
magic shows and electric shadowplay were reportedly the main attrac-
tions of Xi Yuan, which was lit with hundreds of electric bulbs at night.
Some larger establishments were also notorious sites for gambling, pros-
titution, and gangster activities, such as the Qingliange on Simalu (now
Fuzhou Road), where Antonio Ramos made his projection debut in a
rented booth (fig. 3.l).l2 Even the more refined teahouse Wenming yaji
(literally, Uthe civilized and elegant gathering place) on Second Avenue
(now Jiujiang Road), where calligraphers and painters used to gather,
once featured a wax figure show and a simulated train ride show accom-
panied by landscape films similar to the popular "Hale's Tours" in Amer-
ican amusement parks. 2 ;
Before cinema's arrival other screen practices existed, including the
modern slide show (fig. 3.2). Qian Huafo, a theater actor at the time,
reminisced that leather puppet shadowplay and slide shows were "pre-
ludes of the films. He saw a slide show by Wu Zhihui, who was to be·
0
come a prominent educator and had just returned from France with
slides of Chinese students there. Qian also describes the primitive condi-
tion of the Huanxian Theater, which had only a makeshift ceiling, a
muddy floor, and some wooden benches. The films shown there included
3.1 The Qingliange Teahouse.
1 97
3.2 Slide-show as shadowplay (as written on the hanging lanterns) in a teahouse

(Dianshizhai huabao).
Chapter Three
a newsreel about the Empress Dowager Cixi's funeral. Following the

films variety shows were often staged. 24 Zheng Junli, a famous 1930s
actor and director who wrote the first theoretically informed account
of early Chinese cinema, considered Huanxian the first nickelodeon iri
China.25
Significantly, before and even after Western cinema's arrival in China,
the teahouse served as a venue for many kinds of shadowplays. The
leather puppet show in particular, staged behind a screen illuminated by
gaslight, has generally been CClnsidered by Chinese film historians to be
the bedrock of the Chinese cinematic;/ (un)conscious. The age of this
shadowplay has been the subject of controversy,u, though most claim the
earliest record came from a Song dynasty source that describes Em-
peror Wu of Han Dynasty's (reigned 141-87 BC) experience of a staged
shadowplay to meet the soul of his deceased wife (fig. 3.3). Other forms
of shadowplay such as the "horse-riding lantern" (zoumadeng) and "hand
shadowplay" (shouying) have been considered part of the genealogy of
this indigenous art form. 27 One should, of course, be mindful of the
risk involved in any such attempt to fix an original moment or a self-
contained trajectory of a cultural category. The overlap of the puppet
shadowplay and Occidental shadowplay in the late Qing and the early
98 I Republican period nevertheless deserves critical attention, if one consid-
ers cinema both an international and culturally specific practice.
Most existing accounts describe the flat shadowplay puppets as made
from donkey skin painted with vivid colors. The performances consisted
of a white cloth screen dividing the spectators from the puppeteers, who
narrated and sang while manipulating the puppets behind the screen and
in front of the light source. Usually Chinese orchestras accompanied the
shows. 28 Although themes and styles differed according to troupes' ge-
nealogical and geographical particularities, the common repertoire con-
sisted of popularized versions of classical tales, vernacular stories, reli-
gious legends, and adaptations from various local operas. The shows also
varied from collections of unrelated vignettes to serialized long dramas.
While some puppeteers read from scripts, others relied on memory and
improvisation. Beijing alone had two major schools. One dominated the
eastern part of the city (Dongcheng) and used scripts; the other, which did
not use scripts, flourished in the western part (Xicheng) of the city.2 9
Leather puppet shadowplay also flourished in Shanghai, 30 and as late as
the mid- l 930s, some venues featured nonelectric shadowplay as a staple
program.
Until the early 1930s, cinema in Chinese was predominantly called
yingxi (shadowplay), especially in the South, before the term electric shad-
ows (dianying) gradually became more standardized. The term yingxi .in-
Teahouse. Shadowplay, and Laborer's Love
irn_ ,
m···
;~
:#:·
3.3 Han Wu Di meets his deceased wife through a shadowplay (drawing by Zhang
Zhengyu, ca. 1927, from Xu Chiheng's Filmdom in China).
dicates its umbilical tie to the puppet show and other old and new the-
atrical arts, in particular the modern stage drama, the civilized play (wen-
mingxi). Wenming, a loan word from Japanese (bummei, a key banner of I 99
Meiji Restoration), was a popular term referring to anything modern or
new, including modern-style wedding (wenmingjiehun) and women's un-
bound feet (wenmingjiao). It is noteworthy that many pioneers of mod-
ern spoken drama, like Ouyang Yuqian, had a background in Peking
opera. While studying in Japan. they were inspired by the Japanese ver-
sion of Western drama (shimpai geki) and began to perform it in Chinese.
Wenmingxi is a folk term for this new type of drama (xinju). 31 Advocates
and practitioners of a truly #modern" and progressive spoken drama
(huaju) distanced themselves from wenmingxi, as the latter retained many
vestiges of traditional theater and catered to an urban audience who
sought pleasure and entertainmerit more than didacticism or refined art.
Though it departed significantly from the traditional opera in that it is
mainly "spoken" in the vernacular, it retained many features of old Chi-
nese drama.32
The emphasis on play rather than shadow-in other words, the play
(xi) as the end and shadow (ying) as means-has, according to the film
historian Zhong Dafeng, been the kernel of Chinese cinematic experi-
ence.n As the pioneers of Chinese cinema were deeply immersed intra-
ditional Chinese theater while also enthusiastically espousing the trans-
planted modern spoken drama, the notion of xi became, if unconsciously,
the guiding principle in their film practice. Some of the earliest Chinese
Chapter Three
films are recordings of Peking opera performance (featuring opera stars

such as Tan Xinpei and Mei Lanfang) and adaptations from wenmingxi
plays. This illustrates not only a thematic predilection for xi but also at-
tests to the shooting style that foregrounds the frontal, tableau effect of
stage performance. Such a visual style is certainly congenial to the stagy
aesthetic of early cinema before Hollywood-that is, before the onset of
a diegetically absorbed cinema. The persistence of the Hcinema of theater
people" (xiren dianying) in China and its attendant stylistic strategies (in-
cluding the prevalence of medium-long shot, nonperspectival spatial re-
lations) requires, however, a consideration of its specific cultural tex-
ture.34 This theatrical proclivity by no means signifies "tradition" in a
rigid sense; in other words, early Chinese cinema cannot be simply seen
as a process of Westernization of Chinese culture or Sinicization of West-
ern technology. The modern spoken drama played a significant part in
negotiating "play" and "shadow" in Shanghai's syntTetic urban culture.
The first successful commercial films, such as Victims of Opium (1916) and
Yan Ruisheng ( 1921 ), were adapted from sensational wenmingxi plays. Yet
the awareness of the film camera as a visual apparatus and of the cinema
as a far more complex modern commercial practice than the theater, also
impelled the early filmmakers to explore the "shadowy" side of film's
100 l potential.
Laborer's Love is very much a product of this nascent aspect of the ur-
ban culture and of a confluence of discourses and practices of shadow-
play in Shanghai. Before they established Mingxing Company in 1921,
the creators of the film, Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu, had col-
laborated eight years earlier to make some Chinese films for the Asia
Company, a small joint venture with two American businessmen. Zhang
and Zheng had been directly involved with other forms of mass culture
before their accidental encounter with cinema in 1913, shortly after the
revolution that abolished the ancient imperial rule. As mentioned earlier,
Zhang had been a manager at the entertainment complex the New World
located at the heart of the city.J5 Zheng, on the other hand, was already
making a name in news supplements as a Peking opera critic, and was
well connected in theater circles. The two embraced the new medium
simply "out of curiosity," Zhang later recalled. "Because it is about shoot-
ing shadow-'play,' I naturally thought of old Chinese theatrical 'plays.' 36H
"Xinmin New Theater Research Society" and "Asia Shadowplay Co.," two
signs in front of their makeshift "studio" located near the Bund in the in-
ternational settlement, signify a marriage of the modern Chinese play
and Occidental shadow (fig. 3 .4} .37 Their first film, The Difficult Couple was
a parody of feudal arranged marriage "scripted" by Zheng and "directed"
by Zhang with all the enthusiasm of .innovation. With stage actors of their
acquaintance and a static camera running until the end of the reel, the
Teahouse, Shadowplay, and Laborer's love
3.4 The Asia Shadowplay Co.: Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu on the set 1 101
four-reel film had a discernible narrative (but hardly a narrative struc-

ture} and has been hailed as the beginning of China's "narrative" cin-
ema.38 This early attempt at using the cinematic medium to expose the
absurdity of arranged marriage predated the publication of the play A
Lifetime Affair (Zhongshen dashi) about the same issue by Hu Shi, the "fa-
ther" of the new vernacular literature, in New Youth (Xin qingnian) six
years later in 1919. Far from lagging behind or being divorced from the
New Culture movement, the early cinema proved to be a unique medium
in disseminating ideas about social reform and modern life while enter-
taining its audience.
After this film Zheng left the company to form his own civilized play
troupe; Zhang continued to film a number of short subjects, mostly
comedies without sustained narrative and didactic concerns that catered
to the "petty urbanites.a Standard Chinese film historiography tends to
dismiss these films as frivolous, vulgar, and in bad taste; they are often
considered merely shoddy and nonprogressive interludes at drama per-
formances. Zhang had to cease filming when World War I cut off the
supply of film stock from Germany, but after a new American film
stock source was secured, Zhang's new film company, Huanxian (Dream
Fairy), along with other companies turned out a wide array of short and
long films. Their range encompassed actualities, travelogues, comedies,
Chapter Three
educational films, adaptations of Peking opera, and true crime detective

films. Most were all-Chinese productions, and with them Chinese cin-
ema as a domestic culture industry seemed to have come of age.
The early 1920s saw an unprecedented cinema craze in China. After
a stock market crash, many speculators turned to investing in the nascent
film industry. As mentioned in chapter 2, this was also a booming era for
Chinese journalism and popular literature, which had great impact on
film production. In particular, the popular romance genre of Butterfly lit-
erature, which was mostly serialized in literary supplements and maga-
zines, provided ready-made stories for tt,e screen. Butterfly literature
originally derived from traditional vernacular fiction sentimentalizing
the romances of, usually, a poor young scholar and a beauty willing to
sacrifice her wealth or family name for love. In the early twentieth cen-
tury, however, the genre diversified and included detective stories,
muck-racking reportage, martial arts romance, and some ghost fiction.
This literary phenomenon's popularity reached its heyday in the 1920s
and had a definitive impact on the emergence of a narrative cinema in
the same period. Many popular fiction writers, seeing the new medium's
potential, also began to write Nshadowplay" scripts. But the link between
popular fiction and cinema, as scholars have noted, was largely filtered
102 I through civilized clay, which first adapted successful Butterfly literature
for the stage, often with major editorial changes. 39 Such mediation en-
hanced theatrical effect in the cinema at the expense of narrative coher-
ence and closure.
It was in this sizzling ambiance that Zhang and Zheng began their sec-
ond collaborative venture, this time with a larger budget and greater am-
bition. Instead of the open-air, mud-floored tiny studio where they
filmed The Difficult Couple in 1913 with rudimentary filmic control, the
new company, now named Mingxing, was housed in Zhang's former
stock market company building and had a sizable staff. From the very
start, they also established the Mingxing Shadowplay School to train pro-
fessional actors and actresses. The company was no longer just an ama-
teur artisan workshop experimenting with rendering stage drama into
electric shadowplay; it was a business serious about its ability to produce
popular and profitable films.
What was happening to Mingxing in particular and the Chinese film
industry in general at that time may be conceived in terms of a gradual
and tension-ridden transformation from what Tom Gunning termed the
cinema of attractions to narrative integration, characterized by changing
dynamics of spectatorial pleasure. Gunning argues that early cinema, in
"its ability to show something, is an exhibitionist" cinema, contrasted to
N N
the voyeuristic tendency in later narrative cinema. 40 The institutional

ambition of Mingxing and its growing narrative impulse stemmed from a

similar epistemological shift in cinematic perception. An increasing
awareness of the electric apparatus behind the shadowplay and its com-
mercial power, coupled with the consolidation of a drastically different
mode of exhibition and spectatorship, forced Chinese film production
to be conscious of a more varied audience and a less predictable market.
No longer confined to the customers of Shanghai teahouses or theater
houses, the film industry had to consider far larger potential audiences
patronizing the more sophisticated but also less noisy and spontaneous
film theaters-audiences in the interior cities, rural areas, and diasporic
Chinese communities. Together they constituted a veritable cosmopoli-
tan audience for Chinese cinema.
This transformation, however, was less apparent and more gradual
than any retroactive conceptualization tends to suggest. As discussed in
chapter 2, the demographic and social makeup of Shanghai citizenship
formed the backbone of a film spectatorship heavily informed by the
petty urbanites' worldviews and viewing habits. Their changing cultural
tastes in turn impressed upon the aesthetic and social orientation of early
Chinese cinema. The emergence of this spectatorship paralleled the ex-
pansion of this social body in number as well as in its commercial and
social power. These viewers not only contributed to the construct.ion of I 103
the city as a "kaleidoscopic world" (huahua shijie) but also became avid
consumers of this world's offerings. Cinema-as moving images as well
as public spaces-came to occupy a significant place in this cultural and
commercial enterprise. The technology of cinema not only allowed the
petty urbanites and other urban constituents to experience the world and
modern life in a dramatic new way but also created a sensory-reflexive
horizon through which their metropolitan identity was articulated. Sim-
ilar to but more effective than the illustrated press or amusement halls,
cinema facilitated the formation of a distinctive public sphere through
the constitution of a metropolitan audience, an uneven yet composite
public body. Moreover, this public sphere was engaged in dialogue with
but not necessarily conforming to the ideas and programs of the New Cul-
ture movement. The film circles-the producers as well as the audi-
ences-began to exhibit a growing awareness of cinema as a powerful
medium for raising social consciousness and for possible personal and col-
lective transformation (jiaohua) in the age of mechanical reproduction.
SCREENING SENSATIONAL REALISM
Several early Chinese ·feature-length" productions from mid-1910s to

the cusp of the 1920s tested such changing spectatorial expectations, at-
Chapter Three
3.5 Victim,· o[Opi11111, a popular civilized play staged in 1910.
104 I
tempting to reconcile and transcend the seemingly contradictory com-
mercial and cultural (and even political) concerns. Based on sensational
stage productions on contemporary urban issues (opium addiction, pros-
titution, and murder), these films addressed the persistence of a worldly
or sensational taste of the petty urbanites as well as a sense of social im-
mediacy and participation. This preoccupation with shocking "reality"
carried over the petty urbanite's taste for reality and live attractions as a
detached viewer (or kanke, a paying audience member) in the amuse-
ment halls and teahouses. Yet it also underscored the importance of im-
minence and novelty as the loci ol' urban modernity in forming (or re-
cruiting) the mass spectator as a unified collective subject. In the process,
the taste for sensational melodrama gave way to an acquired ability to ap-
preciate melodramatic realism and accept it as a chief mode of cinematic
representation.
The significance of Victims of Opium, an adaptation of a popular civi-
lized play of great social impact, had less to do with its length (nearly
two hours) than with the contemporary nature of the subject matter
(fig. 3.5). 41 It also intimated the drive toward the so-called long and
serious drama, a socially concerned melodramatic form advocated by
Zheng Zhengqiu in the 1920s. After the loss of the Opium Wars, addic-
tion wrecked havoc on millions of Chinese families, which explains the
Teahouse, Shadowplay, and laborer's Love
great success of the play. The screen adaptation revolves around the at-
tempt of a wealthy man Zeng Huodu (in Shanghaiese, true fool) to pre-
vent his son Zeng Baijia (true family destroyer) from becoming a philan-
thropist (hence family wealth destroyer) by turning him into an opium
addict. He figures his son will stay home that way, away from the cor-
ruption of the city. Of course, misery ensues. Zeng Huodu dies of regret
and anger, followed by his grandson's accidental death from swallowing
some raw opium. Baijia's wife drowns herself, unable to change her hus-
band's habit or tolerate his abuse, and their daughter Zhenzhen (true and
true) is sold by unfaithful servants Bu Yaolian (the shamless one) and
Mei Zhishi (the ill-educated one) to a brothel. Eventually the father and
daughter reunite by chance when Zhenzhen goes out on call-out service
finds her decrepit rickshaw puller is none other than her father. The
brothel owner takes Zhenzhen away while Baijia dies at the city gate. 42
The film was made mostly out of commercial interest: the popularity
of the play ensured profit because a film print could do away with the ex-
pense and contingencies of multiple live performances. Inadvertently,
the film laid the ground for a kind of family ethic melodrama that would
become the staple repertoire of Chinese cinema (and TV soap opera) in
years to come. More importantly, in its mass appeal to the petty urban-
ites as a broad social base, the film signaled the emergence of a cinema I 105
that would create and gratify a set of particular spectatorial expectations.
Entertaining (through familiar theatricality and comic antics), educa-
tional (through overt or covert didacticism and moralizing), and cathar-
tic (through the motif of retribution and solicitation of identification and
sympathy), this play-film processed some emblematic and painful so-
ciopolitical experiences caused by the contradictions of modernity since
the Opium Wars.
The move from sensationalism toward realism was punctuated with
trials and tribulations. After a hiatus during World War I, local produc-
tions of long films were resumed. The biggest box-office hit among them
was Yan Ruisheng, a ten-reel docudrama that aspired to "reflect" reality 43
(fig. 3.6). This film was also based on a hit civilized play, which in turn
was inspired by a real crime that shocked the city. In June 1920, Yan
Ruisheng, a playboy working at a foreign company, devised a plan to rob
a famous prostitute in order to pay his gambling debts. He lured the pros-
titute for a drive to the country with the help of his friends. They drugged
and strangled her before fleeing Shanghai with the stolen jewelry. Yan
was caught at the train station of a provincial city and taken back to
Shanghai where he was promptly executed. After Xinxin Theater's suc-
cess, numerous copycats appeared in teahouses, theater houses, amuse-
ment halls, and storytelling courts, forming a citywide craze. 44
Chapter Three
3.6 Ad for Yan Ruishm9 ( 1921 ). (Courtesy ol the China Film Archive)
106 I
Again, a provisional association called Shanghai Shadowplay Research

Society set up shop in a lane off Nanjing Road before embarking on the
project of developing a cinematic rnise-en-scene. The main cast consisted
of members of the Society who turned out to be closely related to the ac-
tual people involved in the case. Wang Caiyun, a reformed prostitute
who happened t<> have the same surname as the murdered prostitute,
Wang Lianyin, became the first Shanghai woman to appear on the silver
screen. According to the advertisement published in Shenbao, the film
was a product superior to the theatrical version because of its urealness,"
respectability, and narrative "economy." Literally going where the the-
ater production could not, the film canvassed and inventoried the entire
metropolitan landscape-from the center to the suburbs and beyond-
and recreated an urban geography on the screen:
The play Yan Ruisheng as staged in many theaters is very loose and
extended; it requires two to three evenings to see the whole play.
The theater patron [kanke) has to sit for long hours; when his or
her back and legs begin to hurt the play is only halfway through.
We have deployed the most economical "methods" [or tricks-fazi]
to make this shadowplay. It takes only one time to watch the whole
thing. Besides, the seats are more comfortable. The audiences will
surely feel satisfied.
The main actors are young men with high education. Moreover,
the actors who play Yan Ruisheng and Wang Lianyin bear striking
resemblance to the characters. This makes the film all the more
unusual.
The various locations include: Baihuali, Fuyuli, Wang Dechang
Teahouse, Horse Racing Court, Yipingxiang [Restaurant], Wheat
Fields, Sheshan Hill [Church], Xuzhou Train Station, Longhua Mil-
itary Police Station and so on. They are all real locations, very dif-
ferent from painted backdrops. 45
This advertisement also indicates that ticket prices ranged from 1 yuan
for main floor of the auditorium and 1.5 yuan for balcony seats. These
rates were considerably more expensive than admissions to the amuse-
ment halls and low-ranking theater houses. Nonetheless, the film pre-
miered at the Olympic Theater on July l, 1921 to a packed house. The
daily box-office receipts amounted to more than 1300 silver yuan, and
the week's profit reached more than 4000 yuan, an unprecedented rec-
ord for a domestic production. "Afterwards, the fact that Chinese pro-
duction could also generate profit began to be impressed on the minds of I 107
Chinese audience."46
The film's appeal can largely be attributed to the sensational nature of
the story in particular and the penchant for modern fads and stimuli
among the Shanghai petty urbanites in general. As an expose film
(baolupian) set in the "ten miles of foreign field," the authenticity (zhen-
shixing) of Yan Ruisheng hinges more on the capitalization on social news
(shehui xinwen) and its reality effect than on critical or social realism. The
ideological efficacy of the latter, which gained increasing influence in the
1930s, thrived on fictional representation and psychological interioriza-
tion of the characters as well as the spectators. Yet precisely as the opti-
cal unconscious exposed the life world, the film re-created a lived expe-
rience shared by the city as a whole. Yan Ruisheng revealed the embodied
nature of photographic "true realism" through the exposure of the cor-
rupt metropolis as a public and private space, a playground and a crime
scene. 47 Such a photographic realism, according to Andre Bazin, consti-
tutes the ontology of cinema in "its power to lay bare the realities." 48 lf
Bazin had in mind the surrealist intervention in deploying photography
for revolutionizing the perception of the objective world, Yan Ruisheng
unwittingly became the first hyperrealist work in Chinese film history.
What distinguished Yan Ruisheng from most Chinese films is its glaring
modernity, which both delights and disgusts just like the "sin city" of
Chapter Three
Shanghai itself. Through a concoction of realist and hyperbolic objects

and gestures, sincere yet ironic perspectives this compelling film wit-
nessed, recorded and offered a "reverse" ifanmian) lesson in the man-
ner of the distortion mirrors so ubiquitous in amusement halls. The
images refracted from such mirrors are at once real and monstrous, in-
dexical and representational. Unlike the mirrors, however, the film dem-
onstrated its uncanny capacity to "embalm" bodies and time, reproduc-
ing a perpetual present through "an impassive mechanic process." 49
What made this kind of early venture in filmmaking more remarkable
was its amateur nature. The Research Society was modeled on the the-
ater fan club (piaoyouhui) often associated with the stage performance
world, as were many other short-lived companies that came before and
after it. Such practice carried over the interactive spirit of the amusement
halls and put on hold, however briefly, the professionalization of the cin-
ema as a cultural institution and organized capitalist production. Even af-
ter the formation of a fully functioning domestic film industry in the mid -
1920s, the mushrooming of small family or fan-made companies often
disrupted the monopoly of big companies like Mingxing and Tianyi
(which later became the Shaw Empire).
10a 1
THE BRICOLEUR FROM NANYANG
The rise of Mingxing Company is inseparable from this tortuous prehis-

tory of the Shanghai studio era. The newly established Mingxing retained
many vestiges of the earlier cottage industry. In fact, it took nearly a de-
cade to establish a full-fledged studio (comparable to those in Hollywood,
Europe, or Japan); Mingxing produced the first Chinese sound film in
1931. Its first four productions, Laborer's Love among them, continued the
spirit of earlier attractions, short or long. Two comedies featured a local
incarnation of Chaplin, and another longer film, Zhang Xinsheng ( 1923 ),
was based on an actual crime story first adapted as a civilized play and
similar to Yan Ruishen9 in its exploitation of journalistic sources and hy-
perrealist gory details. 50 In addition, Mingxing also produced five news-
reels on sports events and public ceremonies, including a funeral. These
films are largely products of Zhang's production philosophy, which cen-
tered on experiment (changshi), entertainment, and instant mass appeal:
"Always pursue the current attractions and tastes, in order to bring out
merry laughter from the people" (chuchu wei xin9qu shishang, yiji boren yi-
can).51 But these short films of "attractions and tastes" failed to produce
large returns for the company. Mingxing soon found itself following
Zheng's line of thought to make more long films and serious dramas. This
strategy not only answered the market demand in a timely fashion but
also seemed better suited to a politically turbulent and culturally frag-

menting China in the early l 920s.; 2
Laborer's Love, the only extant film of these early Mingxing produc-
tions, is a peculiar film in that it combines presentational and represen-
tational impulses-in other words, theatrical and cinematic practices. Its
stylistic features tend to oscillate between those of a cinema of attractions
and a cinema of narrative integration. If the latter is often marked by a
certain representational closure, or, in Thomas Elsaesser's term, interior-
ization, the film Laborer's Love still shows its stubborn exaltation of the-
atrical and performative exteriority while flirting with narrative inte-
riority. For Elsaesser, interiorization refers to the shift from the diverse
practices of early cinema to streamlined Western narrative cinema in the
late 1910s, coterminous with the emergence of an increasingly institu-
tionalized (and isolated) spectatorship in the wake of the establishment
of picture palaces and other fixed exhibition outlets. He writes, "For the
very pressure towards longer narratives coming from the exhibition sec-
tor meant that the struggle for control once more shifted away from the
mode of presentation to the mode of representation, though defined by
the new commodity-form embodied in the multi-reel film, which re-
quired self-sufficient fictional narratives. n In other words, the stress on
N
interiority and the segregation of audiences the picture palaces are linked I 109
to new forms of closure and the "interiorization of the narrative in-
stance" in film production.
The narrative trajectory of Laborer's Love is dear, but the film is less
concerned with the internal psychology of the characters than with their
actions, which often amounts to a show that disrupts any incipient die-
getic absorption. While the film skillfully uses cross-cutting and temporal
continuity for the sake of narrative cohesion, the emphasis on mechanical
movement and optical experiment often foreground the cinematic appa-
ratus, betraying a sustained fascination with the medium that had first
brought Zhang and Zheng to cinema nearly a decade before. This obses-
sion with movement and optical play is inscribed in the seemingly harm-
less story of a romance between a fruit vendor and a doctor's daughter.
The story is in fact a frivolous commentary on the question of social mo-
bility, implicitly mocking the feudal and patriarchal codes regulating
marriage and family. The film also serves as a commentary on the early
1920s film culture, and on a cinematic perception and spectatorship in
transformation.
Laborer's Love is staged between two kinds of spaces: the exterior and
the interior, the theatrical and the cinematic. Moreover, its setting evokes
an unmistakable but changing teahouse milieu. The three.reel film can
be divided into three parts. The first establishes thebasic pattern for a
Chapter Three
narrative "exchange": the vendor desires the doctor's daughter and pro-
poses marriage. The second part describes how the vendor arrives at the
idea of turning a nightclub's clients into the doctor's patients to win his
approval. The last part simply executes the vendor's idea, which leads to
the predictable happy ending.
The first part, with exclusively exterior, frontal tableau shots, weaves
the dynamics of desire between the fruit shop, the doctor's shop, and the
hot-water shop (laohuzao). 54 The first shot of the film, an introductory in-
tertitle, tells the audience that carpenter Zheng returned from overseas
(Nanyang, or the South Seas-referringio Southeast Asia) and changed
his profession, becoming a fruit vendor. The following tableau shot
shows the fruit vendor cutting melons and peeling sugarcanes with his
carpentry tools. Next to his stand is the teashop where some local hooli-
gans hang out. The old doctor (played by Zheng Zhengqiu), nearsighted
and clad in his long robe, practices traditional Chinese medicine in his
shop located opposite the fruit shop and the teashop. The mise-en-scene
of the doctor's open shop, which consists of a Chinese calligraphic cou-
plet and antique furniture, is clearly established as a stage of spectacle,
framing his young daughter as object of desire for the vendor and the
hooligans at the teashop alike. We are told the doctor is in dire financial
110 I straits, with no patients visiting his shop. His daughter mends his gown
in public, betraying the deteriorating situation of a traditionally elite
class.
The vendor's business, however, is booming. He looks longingly at the
girl doing embroidery in the left corner of the shop, and uses a rope to
swing his ink marker box filled with frnit over to her-a mechanical ma-
neuver attributable to his carpentry skill. This ·sending over" (through
alternating shots) links the two opposite shop spaces, injecting a pleasur-
able movement (of desire) into an otherwise static frontal framing. By
using a string, the movement also invokes a traditional Chinese motif for
love and marriage, hence the other name of the film, Zhi9uoyuan, liter-
ally, "fruit-throwing love connection," which is derived from a folktale.
One of the hooligans at the teashop gets jealous and walks across the
street to tease the daughter. She quickly sends back the box, alerting the
vendor to her situation. The vendor throws an apple at the hooligan. He
moans and the doctor mistakes the hooligan for a patient, as all the ex-
changes have escaped his nearsighted notice.
The same movement of desire in relation to vision is repeated when
the doctor tries to find an auspicious date in the fortune-telling calendar
to pray for his dwindling business. He takes off his spectacles and unwit-
tingly puts them in the box, sent by the vendor for the second time. Un-
aware of this, the daughter sends back the box, along with a handker-
Teahouse, Shadowplay, and laborer's love
chief (again, a classical motif for "pledging love through an object," or
yiwu chuanqing} and the spectacles. The vendor delightedly smells the
kerchief but is confounded by the spectacles. As he puts them on, a point
of view shot shows an unfocused world. The vendor's altered vision
ceases to relay any voyeuristic desire, and the smoothness of the narra-
tive is suddenly halted: there is nothing to see but the frame of the spec-
tacle(s). The doctor, standing on the other side of the street deprived of
his glasses, also becomes confused and disoriented. Thus, in her unwit·
tingly mischievous gesture, the daughter momentarily disrupts both
men's visual pleasure.
In the remaining half of the first part of the film, the pattern of desire
moves from staging to acting. After the "denial" of male vision, the
daughter takes the initiative. She crosses the street to buy hot water from
the teashop. The hooligan once again tries to make advances, but she
walks instead to the fruit shop to chat with the vendor. By intruding
upon both sites of male desire and showing her preference for the ven-
dor, she asserts her role as a subject of desire rather than simply remain-
ing a desirable living prop in her father's shop. The vendor shyly proposes
to her and she advises him to go talk to the doctor-she still has to ob-
serve the "time-honored" patriarchal codes regarding matrimony. The
vendor brings melons and sugarcane over to her father to make a pro- I 111
posal. Here the mockery of traditional arranged marriage could not be
more obvious. The Chinese educated elite has always harbored a deep
contempt for the mercantile class. In a previous time, when social hier-
archy was more rigorously observed, it would have been unthinkable for
a petty vendor to propose to a doctor's daughter with only fresh fruit as
gifts. But the poor doctor is desperate as his vision is failing him and tra-
ditional medicine seems increasingly out of fashion. He will allow the
marriage only if the vendor will make his business prosper. Feeling de-
jected the vendor closes his shop and goes inside to rest.
The second part of the film shifts into a primarily interior space with
more sophisticated filmic control. As we have seen, the treatment of
space in the first segment remains largely theatrical, characterized by
frontal framing and presentational performance. This part, shot mostly in
the vendor's bedroom and the nightclub upstairs, experiments with such
cinematic techniques as superimposition, cross-cutting, and editing (for
instance, between close-ups and long shots} to articulate narrative logic,
movement, and development. First we find the vendor in his room again
in a frontal shot, drinking water and smelling the girl's handkerchief.
But quickly the film surprises the viewer with two dream-balloon shots
showing the vendor's daydreams of the girl and the doctor's stern face.
The vendor's interiority, or subjectivity, is thus "contained" within the
Chapter Three
3.7 Laborer~ Love: 1111erior of the Teahouse All-Night Club. (Courtesy of the China
.Film Archive)
112 I
narrative frame. In the next shot, the vendor looks at the table dock, and
a following point of view shot shows the dock at 9:47. The vendor yawns
and goes to bed. This sequence is intercut with the staircase outside lead-
ing to the club. The cross-cutting thus links temporal and spatial move-
ment, the interior and exterior space.
The nightclub is the interior extension and elaboration of the open
teashop (fig. 3.7). Unlike its "primitive" form, which serves merely hot
water, tea, and a view of the street, the All Night Club (Quanye julebu)
signifies an interiorized spatial figure of modern urban entertainment,
particularly in the more sophisticated large film theaters that thrived on
exclusivity and closure. The transition from the vendor's bedroom to the
interior of the club is accomplished through a mini sequence of mahjong
playing. A close-up of the mahjong table with hands mixing the tiles sig-
nals the emergence of a different space, and the following long shot
brings the club into full view. Two subsequent medium and close-up
shots refocus the attention of both the diegetic and filmic viewer onto the
mahjong game: someone wins, everyone in the room stretches to see.
Two hooligans fight over a seat next to a girl, and the slapstick wakes the
vendor downstairs. Another point of view shot of the clock: 2: 56 a.m.
The elliptical editing here is smooth and convincing. As he hears some
clients descend the staircase, the annoyed vendor gets an idea. But he
puts a finger on his lips, gesturing to the camera-that is, the spectator-
to keep the secret for him. As a whole this segment demonstrates a clean
and cinematic handling of narrative progression. The interioriied narra-
tive and subjective space becomes subtly analogous with a cinematic
space. Yet, as my analysis has noted, a number of theatrical elemerits per-
sisted: the slapstick fight resonates with the earlier fight at the teashop,
and the final shot of the vendor gesturing at the spectator breaks· the
fairly tight diegetic space cultivated up until that point. ·
The two kinds of spaces are juxtaposed and integrated in the last part
of the film. The morning after his sleepless night, the vendor visits the
doctor's shop and strikes a deal with him: the doctor will have many pa-
tients, and the vendor will marry the daughter. While customers keep as-
cending the stalrcase to the club, the vendor makes a trick staircase to re-
place the original one. In the next exterior shot, he fixes every step in the
staircase onto his device and tests it. By pulling the device, he can turn
the stairs into a slide. By pushing, the slide will reconfigure as stairs.
Meanwhile, a reconciliatory banquet goes on upstairs, presided over by
an old man who admonishes the young playboys and hooligans against
infighting. He exits, only to become the first victim of the trick stairs. As
the banquet reaches its end, more people exit the club and make their
repetitive "fall," an unequivocal reference to the comic "slide effect." 55 In
this sequence, the editing alternates between the interior of the dub and
long shots of the entire slide scenario and medium shots of the moaning
victims at the bottom of the staircase. The long shots of the scene clearly
retain the virtuosity of a theatrical space: with the magic staircase diago-
nally dividing the screen, the vendor on the left side and under the stair
is kept "invisible" to the victims on the right side of the frame. As some
Chinese critics point out, such a "hypothetical plane space" renders the
causality of action visible to the viewer by placing both cause and effect
within a single frame. 56 This treatment of a haptic space effects a kind of
internal cutting within the same frame; the exposure of cause and effect
renders at once linear progression redundant. The vendor's secret is truly
an open one, since the audience is in on his trick.
This scene is also crucial to my view of the film as a celebration of so-
cial mobility as well as a commentary on a transitional cinema. On the
one hand, the film satirizes through the literal sliding of the leisure class
the thriving but also often chaotic teahouse culture in modern urban
space. 57 The fall of his victims in tum becomes the stepping stone leading
to the vendor's climbing the social ladder. The old man who first slides
down the staircase can be seen as a double of the doctor whose social and
physical decline places him at the same level as that of the vendor; what
the viewer witnesses here is thus also a dramatic transformation of the ex-
Chapter Three
3.8 Laborer~ I.ove: The fruit-vendor cum carpenter makes a trick sliding staircase.
(Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
114 1
isting social hierarchy. After being mobilized by the carpenter-vendor's

mechanical intervention, the magic stair turns squared-off, static steps
into a smooth slide. This play with movement, based on the erasure of
the fixed repetition of steps, paradoxically precipitates the multiplication
of bodies. The vendor repeats the act of pulling the steps into a slide many
times, so that finally the entire crowd from the nightclub is turned into a
mass of injured bodies on the street (fig. 3.8).
The excess of the vendor's (and our) perverse pleasure becomes as
overwhelming as the excess movement caused by the loss of equilibrium;
the downward sliding proves far more dizzying than the theatrical hori-
zontal crossing in the first part of the film, hence the intensification of
movement at the end of the film. The partying crowd, now the potential
dientele of the doctor, swarms to the doctor's shop for treatment. Silver
coins are piled into the money tray one after another in close-up shots as
the patients fill the shop only to receive cursory mechanical treatment for
their wounds. The doctor handles the bodies in a fashion similar to the
way the vendor handles the fruit and the stairs. Seeing the doctor over-
loaded with work, the vendor comes over and volunteers to help, thus lit-
erally joining the social rank of the doctor. In a frenzied acceleration of
screen action the two #doctors" twist heads and limbs. knock chests and
spines as if on an assembly line. The identities of the patients are blurred

and the whole scene spins out of control. This optical confusion recalls
the previous gag featuring the loss of sight triggered by the displacement
of the spectacles, only now the blurry vision is saturated with an over-
investment of head-spinning movement and a polymorphously perverse
pleasure rather than the male scopophilic pleasure centered on the body
of the daughter.
Both instances exemplify, hyperbolically, the kind of fascination and
ambivalence with which the earliest generation of Chinese filmmakers
regarded cinema as a modern perceptual and communicative medium.
The carpenter-vendor character may be viewed as an on-screen repre-
sentative figure of this emerging "cinematic bricoleur," a term Thomas El-
saesser employs to describe the makers of the Weimar cinema of the
l 920s. 58 The latter are said to be preoccupied with the "Edisonian imag-
inary," or a realization of the technological and epistemological potential
and risk the cinema brings. Elsaesser locates the "Edisonian imaginary"
in the "'defective' narratives of the Weimar cinema, their undecidability,
their peculiar articulation of time and space, and their resulting prob-
lematic relation to visual pleasure and the look, all [of which] point to a
form of perception that is neither altogether voyeuristic-fetishist nor an
imitation of 'normal vision."' 59 His overvaluation of the status of the "au- I 115
teur" (though more a composite form than a single director) over the
"spectator" in discussing the historical and perceptual genesis of Weimar
cinema is certainly problematic. The concept of the "cinematic bricoleur"
is, however, useful to the understanding of Laborer's Love and other films
produced in the early 1920s by Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu.
They still treated cinema as a curious, if not "Edisonian," imaginary be-
fore launching longer narrative moral dramas.
The problematization, albeit with a jocular overtone, of narrative and
visual pleasure in Laborer's Love is anchored in the specific cultural milieu
of early Chinese cinema. The oscillation between and the imbrication of
the theatrical and cinematic spaces in the film-that is, its hesitancy to
inscribe voyeuristic-fetishist pleasure or to embrace "an imitation of 'nor-
mal vision'" -have to be understood in relation to the "undecidable" po-
sition of the first generation of Chinese filmmakers. In a sense, the car-
penter-vendor in Laborer's Love is a bricoleur par excellence. The magic
staircase is his quintessential mise-en-scene, linking the theatrical and
the cinematic, exterior and interior spaces. The professional and the so-
cial status of this bricoleur remains ambiguous throughout the film, al-
though he is consistently referred to as "Carpenter Zheng." (As Zheng is
the last name of both male actors, and one of them is the "screenwriter,"
this self-referentiality underscores the identification between the car-
Chapter Three
penter-vendor and the cinematic bricoleur.} 60 Yet he is no longer prac-

ticing traditional artisanship, especially after his return from Nanyang,
one of the most popular destinations of Chinese emigration since the
nineteenth century. 61
The allusion to Nanyang or Southeast Asia is significant, as it obliquely
underscores the importance of what was the biggest market for Chinese
films from this period.62 Historically and stereotypically, overseas Chinese
of Nanyang have always been associated with commercial skills in the
colonial or semicolonial Southeast Asian countries. Carpenter Zheng is
presented as a worldly-wise man who returns to his hometown to be-
come a businessman, engaging in exchange rather than production. But
instead of abandoning his past altogether, he adapts his carpentry skills
to vending fmit (an allusion to the tropical Nanyang, of course). And
when his desire is at stake, this skill is also utilized in courting and bridg-
ing a social gap between his fruit shop and the doctor's place. In other
words, he transcends the old mechanical role of carpenter and mas-
ters both production and exchange at once. And while the vendor sells
flawed bodies to the doctor in exchange for the daughter, the cinematic
bricoleur manufactures and mobilizes an incipient narrative of desire.
This narrative economy, however, remains defective or complicated in
116 I two respects. The first has to do with the bricoleur's ambivalence toward
interiority. He never enters the interior of the club where we have ob-
served the most cinematic moment (in the classical sense) of the film, in
the mahjong playing. Although he is granted a couple point-of-view
shots of the clock and two dream-balloons, the film is at pains to perform
his secret desire and his carpentry magic in the theatrical open space. La-
borer's Love is thus very much a "last echo of an early cinema," at once
embodying and challenging Zhang Shichuan's faith in "attractions and
tastes." 6 3 The second "defectiveness" is related to the displacement or
blurring of visual pleasure discussed above. The configurations of vision
and desire in the film are resonant with Miriam Hansen's remark on the
spectatorship of early cinema in relation to a gendered public sphere:
"The polymorphously perverse energies that animated the cinema of at-
tractions were not yet channeled into the regime of the keyhole, the one-
way street of classical voyeurism which has led feminist theorists to de-
scribe the place of the female spectator as a 'locus of impossibility.'"64
In the film, before the doctor's daughter denies the male vision in the
scene of the spectacles, she had already glanced directly into the camera
in her first appearance. Facing the street working on her embroidery, she
is a spectator of, as well as a participant in, public life. The desire that mo-
tivates the narrative as well as gender performance is hardly a "one-way
street" as she crosses the street to express her equal infatuation with the
vendor, and tacitly agrees to be the future proprietress of the fruit shop.
This exchange underscores not so much the theme of social mobility as a
simple reversal of social hierarchy to a more democratized distribution of
labor. The more fluid social mobility and gender relations thus includes
demographic and spatial changes in trade, migration, and immigration.
The insistence on the double identity of the carpenter-vendor is very
much an insistence on bricolage. While the film delights in an incipient
form of filmic narration, it also passionately adheres to the formal con-
ventions and themes derived from traditional and modern theater, pop-
ular literature, and folklore. Momentarily flirting with the NEdisonian
imaginary, Laborer's Love nevertheless refuses to be absorbed completely
N
by the magic power of the apparatus. The final words are given to the hu-
man heart and hand, as indicated in the calligraphic couplet hung in the
doctor's shop: NA benevolent heart saves the world I A magic hand can
bring back springN (Renxin zai jishi, miaoshou ke huichun). The cliche is
given new meaning at the end of the film.
The film as a whole frankly acknowledges the presence of film tech-
nology and the impact that mechanical reproduction had on traditional
cultural practices (e.g., Chinese medicine and calligraphy). The humor-
ous image of the bricoleur as a versatile filmmaker, who uses his hands
as much as his entrepreneurial skills, represents the struggle of the first I 117
generation of Chinese filmmakers to balance between art and profit,
craftsmanship and modern technology, tactile and haptic cinema and
psychological narration. The cinematic bricoleur who rebuilt the stair-
case and rearranged both the cinematic and social space, as we shall see
in the next chapter, would be compelled to build a larger and more
dearly defined "film world" beyond that of the New World or Great
World amusement complexes. The bricoleur strove to entertain and ed-
ucate on a far larger scale, searching for readers, students, consumers,
and spectators to inhabit that brave new world.
CHAPTER FOUR
BUILDING A FILM WORLD

DISTRACTION VERSUS EDUCATION
I
118 I I HAVE SUGGESTED that the institutional and aesthetic transfor.

mation from a cinema of attractions to a cinema of narrative integration
in the early 1920s largely corresponded to and, to some extent, was con·
stituted by a spatial and architectural reconfiguration. The teahouse mi-
lieu, though never completely uprooted, was dramatically superseded by
the onset of large and ostensible cinematic venues. By the mid- l 920s, the
electric shadowplay had taken root not only in Shanghai-which was
being inundated by a tide of luxury movie theaters-but in the hinter-
lands, too, where a network of distribution agencies and exhibition out·
lets were bringing film to the rural population. Based on information
from U.S. trade commissioners stationed in major cities all over China,
including Shanghai, Canton, Peking, Hankou, Harbin, Yunnanfu [Kun-
ming], Changsha, Dalian, Tianjin, Jinan. and Xiamen [Amoy], an Amer-
ican diplomat compiled a report on the wide distribution of film. The re-
port opens with a description of how cinema finally reached a small town
in Shanxi province. "about 900 miles distant from Shanghai," in 1922.1
This inward turn, both in terms of a more interiorized film-viewing
experience and the opening of an interior market (paralleling the ex-
pansion of the Nanyang diaspora market), demanded the supply of long
features. The narrative features were believed to be able to sustain profit-
able exhibition programs and offset the costs of shipping and the con·
struction and maintenance of purpose-built cinemas. To understand this
Building a Film World: Distraction versus Education
situation we have to take into account that American narrative cinema,

especially the serial wild west and detective films, had begun to assert a
pronounced presence in China after World War I cut off film stock sup-
plies essential for domestic production. European countries, in particu-
lar France and Germany, exerted cultural influence as well. The report
cited above indicates that "whereas in 1913 only about 190,000 feet of
American films were sent to China, this amount has increased to about
3,000,000 feet in 1926." i Also significantly, the shrinking delay before
new American releases reached the Chinese market signaled that the
Chinese urban film market was becoming nearly synchronous with and
implicated .in the international scene at large. The local film industry was
compelled to produce feature-length films in order to compete with for-
eign imports and gain access to foreign-owned first-run theaters. Chinese
producers and distributors realized the importance of exhibition venues
and began to take over foreign-owned establishments and build new
ones. This effort, a cultural war indeed, went hand in hand with other
projects to create building blocks for a legitimate and viable domestic film
industry, including the establishment of film schools and discourses to
train both film professionals and spectators.
1 119
A CINEMA IN SEARCH OF A HOME
Within only a few years in the early 1920s, the cinema craze mirrored
the stock exchange craze. In both instances, the anxiety of surplus gen-
erated intense instability. The initial stock exchange craze was largely
conditioned by urban development in Shanghai. After World War I, do-
mestic industries were overpowered by the dumping of Western goods
and foreign manufacturers' return to Shanghai; Chinese investors then
turned to more fluid sectors that could generate fast returns without long
commitment. Real estate, bonds, and currency trading were among the
lucrative options in a city under rapid spatial and demographic expan-
sion. Yet, the unstable economical situation (including the poor regula-
tion of stock exchange) was exacerbated by social fragmentation as a re-
sult of the incessant feuding between the warlords, ultimately causing
the stock market to crash. The large-scale transfer of Chinese capital to
cinema was a peculiar phenomenon. While the nascent Chinese indus-
tries were thirsty for capital, a large surplus of cash wandered around
desperately searching for a material body to manifest its magic power.
The sensational success of the three long story films, each made by a
one-film company (yipian gongsi) .in 1921-22-the murder case-inspired
Yan Ruisheng. the ultra modern romance The Sea Oath, and the detective
thriller Red Beauty and Skeleton-offered a timely solution for the imbal-
Chapter Four
ance between growing capital and lean output. Despite the growing in-
vestment and popular interest in Chinese cinema. however, there were
still a shortage of the exhibition venues. The former stock speculators,
who had reinvented themselves as film producers, suddenly realized that
film was a peculiar brand of "stock." It would not generate returns with-
out the endorsement of spectators; the shimmering moving images'
value had to be converted into a fully embodied commodity before box
offices could yield meaningful profits. Without this mediation, reels of
film were superfluous, which explains why numerous small companies,
unable to find exhibition venues, quickly v/nished from the scene.
Up until the early 1920s, film distribution and exhibition in China
was predominantly controlled by Western companies and their Chinese
agents. During World War I, Hollywood cinema, along with American
film stock and equipment, made rapid inroads in Asian markets. It was
reported that "an average of about 75 per cent of the motion pictures
shown in China are of American origin." In Kunming and Fuzhou where
French influence was stronger, American film showings accounted for
only half of the total. but in cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and
Dalian nearly 90 percent of all films shown were American. 3
This statistic, however, cannot be taken at face value. Michael Walsh's
120 I meticulous study of the troubled mission of United Artist's Far East De-
partment between 1922 and 1929 reveals some deep-seated tensions in
the American presence in East Asia. United Artists (UA) had originally
chosen Shanghai as the center for its Asian operations: in the free trad-
ing port the company could be protected by U.S. law in the International
Settlement. Instead, the company settled in Tokyo. Japan had a compar-
atively higher standard of living, and there American films "enjoyed a
popularity that was not restricted primarily to colonialist foreigners, as
was the case in other Asian markets such as the Chinese treaty ports and
the Dutch East Indies." The attempt to attract a wider audience in those
regions was also complicated by the problem of subtitling and the high
degree of illiteracy. 4 Indeed, as most imported films were not translated
or subtitled into Chinese, the language issue was a key obstacle for for-
eign films seeking to gain a local audience. 5 The Chinese war and revo-
lution in the 1920s, the boycott of Japanese goods, and the Japanese fi-
nancial crash in 1927, in addition to the high rental price for American
film and outrageous expense of maintaining American personnel abroad,
steadily undermined UA's commercial ambition. Until the advent of
sound, the enterprise proved "too brittle" 6-a losing game resulting in
mounting deficits.
One important effect of this volatile American presence is the 'room it
created "for local productions which could operate on a smaller margin
exploiting smaller and subsequent second- or third run houses, the larger
indigenous base, and longer release patterns employing rural centers as
well." 7 The Chinese producers in the 1910s and early 1920s mainly re-
sorted to the guerrilla strategies described by Walsh. Most films made in
this period still adhered to the principles of attractions; some were direct
stage adaptations. As such they were very much at home in the teahouse
milieu, although Chinese studios occasionally rented foreign-owned cin-
emas for major releases, such as Yan Ruishen9 and Red Beauty and Skeleton.
By the mid-l 920s, however, the rising number of film companies and
long features created intense competition. Not only did Chinese produc-
ers need increased access to the upscale and better-equipped foreign
owned first-run theaters, but they also sought to form their own distri-
bution networks and acquire exhibition venues.
An imminent sense of danger descended on the booming film indus-
try in 1925. That year, the April issue of Movie Weekly, primed three bold-
faced warnings (jin99ao) in oversized characters to alert the Chinese film
world:
Warning l: All Chinese film producers unite! Resist a certain

country's sabotage and monopoly!
Warning 2: With only studios and no distributors, even if we 1 121
shoot thousands of yards of film every day, there will not be a
single inch of space for exhibition. Alas, this is no way to sur-
vive! The greatest crisis!
Warning 3: Friends! Wake up! Don't think only of shooting films!
Open your eyes and see: Where can you show your film when
it's finished?s
The "certain" country referred to in warning 1 was undoubtedly the

United States. But a closer scrutiny of that issue of the magazine reveals
that the main trigger for this outrage was the purported buyout of small
or second-run movie theaters by the British-American Tobacco Com-
pany, which also had a film department. The opening page of the issue
carried an editorial explicitly exposing the Tobacco Company's plot to en-
gage small theaters by showing "foreign serialized detective films" to the
"middle-lower society so as to promote the sale of their tobacco." The ed-
itor claimed that if this strategy succeeded then Chinese films would lose
their only venues and their "investment money earned with blood and
sweat [xueben] would not be salvaged." The only "way of survival," he de-
clared, was to "form a Chinese film producers' association and collect
funds to build a theater of its own." 9 Another column in the same issue,
entitled "Painful Words on Shadowplay," also lamented the fact that Chi-
Chapter Four
nese films were already at the mercy of foreign-owned theaters. With

small Chinese-owned theaters being co-opted by the Tobacco Company,
Chinese films were running into an obvious impasse.1° Metaphors of
claustrophobia, bodily pain, and blood loss permeated the discourse at a
moment of excessive production and fierce competition, but there would
soon be a major turn-around.
In 1926 Shanghai Cinemas Company (Zhongyang yingxi gongsi) took
over a number of theaters owned by Ramos-the most pivotal event in
the city's film scene at the time. Shanghai Cinemas Company was owned
by none other than Mingxing managet Zhang Shichuan and Pathe
Shanghai manager Zhang Changfu.11 We recall that Ramos set up the
first cinema in a roller-skating rink in 1908 and subsequently made him-
self the city's foremost film exhibition mogul. In 1925 Zhang Shichuan
and Zhang Changfu bought Shenjiangyi Theater (Shenjiangyi dawutai)
and turned it into Central Theater (Zhongyang daxiyuan} to exhibit Ming-
xing's and other domestic productions. This was a concrete and speedy
answer-barely twenty days later-to the outcry in Movie Weekly. The
theater that had been an important forum for the civilized play and
modern-style Peking opera performances was now converted to and
crowned the Palace of Chinese Cinema (guopian zhi gong). A witness de-
scribes the "gorgeous and pleasing-to-the-eye" look of the renovated the-
ater and the extravagant inauguration ceremony attended by more than
a thousand people. The ceremony consisted of speeches by Zhou Jianyun
(chair of Shanghai Cinemas Company and financial manager of Ming-
xing), among others, a vaudeville program, and a film screening (inci-
dentally, not a Chinese film).12 Orchid in the Empty Valley (I<onggu Ian;
Mingxing, 1925), a film adapted by Bao Tianxiao from his translation of
a Japanese novel. broke the box-office record for a Chinese silent film in
February 1926, drastically elevating the status of Chinese-made films in
a market dominated by foreign films.13 Ramos's retirement back to Spain
presented a golden opportunity for Chinese producers to form their own
distribution and exhibition network. Through this buyout, the Shanghai
Cinemas Company secured seven major theaters as a stronghold for the
"exclusive engagement" of Chinese productions. 14 The event marked the
end of foreign monopoly over exhibition.
Although there were a number of other Chinese-owned cinemas-'-
many of them also serving as distribution agents-participating in the
promotion of Chinese films, the market in the city alone proved to be
limited. At an extraordinary pace, modern theaters were erected one
after another in Beijing, Tianjin, Hankou, Quanzhou, Chongqing, and
Kunming. "With this market expansion, film was finally popularized all
over China." 15 At the same time, the Nanyang market also grew and con-
solidated, with many Nanyang distributors setting up offices in Shanghai

to keep pace with, and sometimes to influence, the production sector. In
turn, film producers and distributors were stimulated by news from the
Philippines, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies where Chinese films
received enthusiastic reception by local Chinese communities. 16
The pressure to exhibit and produce a cinema of narrative integration
goes hand in hand with the demand for a new kind of exhibition space
that would provide more bodily comfort and allow more psychological
absorption. The first half of the 1920s witnessed the opening of more
than fifty large luxury theaters in Shanghai alone, such as Empire (Song-
shan, opened in 1921), Carlton (Changjiang, opened in 1923), Odeon
(Audi'an, opened in 1924), and Peking (opened in 1926).17 Among them,
Odeon was perhaps the "most pretentious," "a new half-million dollar
theater located on the North Szechuen [Sichuan] Road extension."
It took approximately fourteen months to build this theater, and

now that it is finished it makes an imposing addition to Shanghai's
amusement places, and indeed, is probably the best picture house
in all China. No expense has been spared to make it modern in
every respect, and the result embodies the latest in theater archi-
tecture .... The theater has a seating capacity of l,440. The seats I 123
on the lower floor are of modern design, and those in the balcony
heavily upholstered ....
The inside of the theater is finished in light blue and cream and
prettily decorated .... A smoking room has been provided for ladies
as well as for men. Both the ladies' and the men's smoking rooms
and the bar are commodious and well furnished.1 8
Unlike the more casual and open teahouse venues where film attrac-
tions were shown in a variety program (which continued to exist in a
lesser degree), these standardized movie theaters were promoted as self-
contained art sanctuaries and architectural wonderlands. The facades
and interior designs of the teahouses, despite their hybrid functions,
were largely traditionally Chinese and furnished with carved furniture
and Chinese porcelain tea service. The new breed of movie theaters took
pride in international design and modern equipment, in addition, of
course, to a large seating capacity. Interestingly, these new theaters were,
following the existing theater houses, mostly called NGrand TheaterN (da
xiyuan). The emphasis on large size is obvious. However, the retention of
the element xi (play/drama) in these names suggests the persistent
influence of theatrical art (including shadowplay).
Beyond the sheer scale and luxury, theaters also highlighted other
*
Chapter Four
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4.1 Ad for the Peking Theater (from Xu Chiheng's Filmdom in China)
124 1
features that contributed to the viewing experience. China's first com-

prehensive film encyclopedia, Filmdom in China, published in Shanghai
in 1927, carries an enticing advertisement for the Peking Theater located
at the corner of Peking Road and Guizhou Road in central Shanghai
(fig. 4.1). Under the pompous rubric "Newest Architecture, Grand Scale,
Unique Shadowplay Theater in China," the advertisement lists ten lucr-
ative features categorized according to transportation, architecture, in-
terior design, seating, lighting, projection, film selection, hygiene, price,
and service. Beside the boastful remarks on its accessibility and magnifi-
cent facade, it is noteworthy that most other selling points are exclusive
to opulent modern interior and the quality of the viewing experience.
The well-being of the spectator's (motionless) body and his or her un-
obstructed sight were the theater owner and designer's chief concerns.
Some of the features in the ad deserve full translation here, as they
vividly illustrate what Kracauer called the lloptical fairyland," the picture
palaces "aimed at the masses": 19
Architecture: Magnificent, solid, and modern. Moreover, there 1s no

single pillar inside the theater obstructing the spectator's view. The vast
size of the lobby also eliminates the queuing crowd at the box
office.
Decoration: All done uniquely by specially commissioned art de-

signers, as lavish and luxurious as they can execute. From the
combination of colors to lighting fixtures, everything is artistically
conceived and may be regarded as the best in the Far East.
Seating: Carefully arranged, felicitous in size and height. Regard-
less of distance, all lines of vision are directed [to the screen]. Yet the
space is large and comfortable.
Aisle lighting: The newest kind of lamp is installed to provide con-
venience to the spectators, yet it in no way obstructs the viewers'
sight.
Projection brightness: Equipped with two American ~rojectors of
the latest model whose lenses are very clear. Empowered by a
large-size generator to produce sufficient electricity, the effect of
projection is extra bright and clear.
Hygiene: The air in the theater is well ventilated. There is adequate
equipment to provide appropriate temperature comfortable to the
body either in _harsh winter or steaming summer. (emphasis mine)
The ad also professes to select films that are of "special value" with
"noble-minded" plots. Finally, as if to reconcile its commercial interest
with noble features of the cinema palace, the price category promises I 125
that, "as film is for the service of social education, in order to popularize
it, the theater has set the ticket price especially low." 20 The "cult of dis-
traction" embodied in the "surface splendor" and physical externality is
also paradoxically "raised to the level of culture." 21 The theater owners
aim to attract and create a specific audience that expects to be condi-
tioned by sensorial indulgence and exposure to the larger, utopian world
on screen.
The Peking Theater, owned by a Chinese show businessman He Tin-
gran, opened on November 29, 1926. It was but one of a dozen or so
grand and ambitious theaters inaugurated in Shanghai in the mid-l 920s
to outshine the preexisting theaters and teahouses. 22 The city was sud-
denly turning into a big cinema wonderland, not only by the sheer num-
ber of the theaters densely dotting the urban geography but also by their
"magnificent" and "artistic" design that prioritized visual "attention." 23
These theaters further enhanced their lofty prominence with promises to
serve as pedagogical spaces for mass spectators. He Tingran, a former
schoolteacher, was considered a vanguard in carrying out this mission.
Another full-page, illustrated advertisement in Filmdom in China,
graphically framed in a theater facade, features for the World Theater
(Shijie daxiyuan) located in the mostly working class district of Zhabei,
north of the Suzhou River (fig. 4.2). Not only is the address of the the-
ater printed on the theater's two columns but a couplet also spells out the
126 1
4.2 Ad for the Shijie (World) Theater (from Xu Chiheng's Filmdom in China)
management's goals: "Revitalizing Business in Zhabei, Popularizing So-

cial Education." A lengthy caption states that the theater was constructed
with reinforced concrete and had two stories with 600 seats. Modeled af-
ter the "new-style" theaters in the United States and Europe, the World
Theater was equipped with electric fans, radiators, and ventilators. The
silver screen, purchased from a foreign company, could display film im-
ages with maximum clarity. However, as the pictures in the advertise-
ment show, this auditorium still had a few pillars that might have ob-
structed the viewer's line of vision. The theater also boasted that, despite
a considerable loss at the box office, it abided by the principle of showing
"top-notch" domestic and foreign films for the purpose of promoting lo-
cal business and universal education. The advertisement showcases a
mixture of aspirations for high quality films (and their projection qi.1al-
ity) presented in a modern theater with classy interior design; and forat-
tracting and educating ordinary people by selling affordable tickets. The
aesthetic and social function of this new breed of theaters is emblematic
of the cinematic experience in China during this period of major expan-
sion and transformation. Elements of the previous teahouse mode of per-
ception, and along with it, the attractions, were absorbed into an institu-
tionally well-designed and expanded film ~orld. .. · •.. · ·.·
The success of several early feature-length Mingx:ing films e;empUfies I 127
the tension in the conception of cinema asboth a commodity form and
a pedagogical tool for social betterment. After the less-than-satisfactory
performance of Laborer's Love and other films, Mingxing's seventh pro-
duction, Orphan Rescues Grandfather ( 1923 ), was a "serious. king inoral
drama· that has been described as the Hfirst narrative feature" in standard
Chinese film history. What distinguished this film, accordirig to Zhou
Jianyun (manager of Mingxing) was its reliance on emotions rather than
laugher-fictional realism rather than hyperbolic comedy.::._for soliciting
audience sympathy. Notably, it was also the first film made without for-
eign involvement. 24 In the film, a pregnant widow (played by Wang Han-
lun) is driven out of her father-in-law's (played by Zheng Zhegu) house
due to an evil relative's plotting. Impoverished, she gives birth to ,(son
(played by the director's own son Zheng Xiaoqiu) who later attends a
charity school founded by the grandfather he has never met (fig. 4.3).
In an unexpected turn of events, the orphan rescues the old man from
danger. At the end, the estranged family is reunited. 25 The film, which
premiered at the Apollo Theater (Aipuluo), was a big hit. Its success was
overwhelmingly measured in commercial terms: "The day after [the
opening], distributors ordered film copies at high prices. (A Nanyang
dealer even paid eight to nine thousand yuan for projection rights.) The
turnover was several times more than expected." 26 The fascination with
Chapter Four
4.3 Orphan Rescues Gnmdfather ( l 923) (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
12s 1
4.4 Orchid in the Bmpty Valley ( 1925) (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
numbers was emblematic of a post-stock craze era of an inflated number

of companies and fierce competition. Between 1924-26, Mingxing re-
leased twenty-four films in all. As with Orphan Rescues Grandfather, most
of them were long films and serious dramas. Among them, Jade Pear Spirit
and Orchid in the Empty Valley continued the saga of success with similar
melodramatic tales about public education for the poor (pingmin jiaoyu)
and moral retribution that appealed to the mass audience (fig. 4.4).
The enlarged market and theaters simultaneously reshaped the mech-

anism of production and reception of cinema, both as an institutfonal
practice and as a perceptual experience. A growing obsession With gi-
gantism and ornamentation pervades this structural reorientation. Anx-
ieties about the loss of blood" were soothed _by an aggrandized sense of
0
triumph in taking over foreign-owned theaters and building new; re~

splendent modern ones. The most successful studios began drawing
up blueprints for technical upgrades and institutional sophistication on
par with Western studios. The Great Wall Company (Changcheng), irans-
planted to Shanghai from Brooklyn, New York by a group of American-
educated students, boasted a 3000-square-yard glass studio where three
films could be shot simultaneously (fig. 4.5-6). The company planned to
relocate again to the suburbs in order to build a large steel-structure stu-
dio, which would contain at least five film sets at once," and, its own
0
office building and dormitories for its employees. Among Great Wall's
more sophisticated projects was establishing a film school to train direc-
tors, actors, and skilled technicians. Emulating vertical integration in the
United States, the studio also planned to build its own theater, especially
0
because of the large population and hence large number of movie-goers

in Shanghai. 270
An adequate explanation of these fascinations with large-scale, solid I 129

metal structures, and with ownership and professionalism requires for-
ays into territories beyond the industrial history delineated thus far. The
4.5 The Great Wall Company, founded in Brooklyn, New York. (Courtesy of the China
Film Archive)
Chapter Four
4.6 Th.e Great Wall Company's staff and equipment. (Courtesy of th.e China Film Archive)
architectural space of the film world, transformed by the modern look of

130 I the magnificent" theater facade, ornamental art deco motifs, and color-
0
ful light displays promised spectators something more than glittering, dis-
tracting surfaces. As the advertisements for Peking Theater and World
Theater illustrate, the dimly lit, hygienic interiors and the films being
shown were what counted. Simultaneously indulging the viewer's body
and creating a psychologically attentive spectator proved a task too com-
plex to be tackled at the theater alone. In this sense the expanded theater
is writ large in a broader vernacular scene of cinema, which constantly
vacillated between education and distraction, social reform and commer-
cial interest.
DISCIPLINING ELECTRIC SHADOWPLAY
The cinema, an intermedial cultural form and forum, increasingly came

to be viewed and used as a vernacular school for modern life and social
transformation. Early film schools, though often short-lived, supplied the
first group of professionals for the film industry and, more importantly,
developed the cinema as an avenue for social mobility and an emblem of
modernity.
As early as 1919, the late Qing reformist and industrialist Zhang Jizhi,
who was a top graduate (zhuangyuan) of the imperial examination sys-
tem before the collapse of the Qing dynasty, established an actor's school
(lin9on9 xuexiao) in Nantong, a small city north of Shanghai. This was

done in collaboration with the China Film Production Company, Ltd.
(Zhon99uo yin9pian zhizao 9ufen9 youxian9on9si). The acting school, in con·
junction with the Gengsu Theater owned by Zhang functioned mainly
to train young Peking opera actors, typically coming from poor back·
grounds. Instructors included Ouyang Yuqian, a prominent playwright;
actor, and director, who later also became involved with cinema. Under
Ouyang's direction, several students acted in the filming of Villa9e of Four
Heroes (Sijie cun, 1919), a Peking opera episode full of eye-catching mar-
tial arts action. 28 In his memoir Ouyang recalls that a key part of the cur-
riculum of the acting school was teaching students reading, writing, and
llbasic social knowledge. This included giving them May Fourth journals
ll
such as New Youth and New Tide. His reform agenda also involved setting
up strict regulations on the morale inside Gengsu Theater. Not only did
the theater have acoustics that surpassed those of major Shanghai the·
aters, the management also took pains to insure that seating was num-
bered, that noise, spitting, and garbage were outlawed, that ushers were
uniformed, and that actors were not allowed to sit in the auditorium. His
ambition to transform the old-style acting training (keban) into a modern
professional school was met with much resistance, although his program
for changing the teahouse environment into a disciplined performance I 131
space centered on dramatic representation had considerable success. 29
Several other attempts were made to establish acting schools in the
early 1920s. When Mingxing was founded in 1922, it briefly also ran an
acting school. The more rigorous China Film School (Zhon9hua yingye
xuexiao) run by Shanghai Theater (Shanghai da xiyuan) manager Zeng
Huantang and taught by several noted artists attracted two thousand ap-
plicants in 1924. Among them was the future llQueen of the Cinemall Hu
Die, who saw a newspaper advertisement for admissions by chance. The
program would last half a year and the tuition was minimal. Although it
was mainly an acting school, the students had to study several subjects
on administration. drama history, cinematography, screenwriting, and
studio shooting and directing. Twice a week, there were also free screen-
ings of foreign films for "emulation." As the teachers were volunteers and
most students had day jobs, the classes met from seven to ten in the eve-
ning. The school ended operation after only one term due to a lack of
funds and other administrative problems. 3o Such a short-term experi-
ment was typical of a nascent film world in which many projects had
ample aspirations and talents but not enough institutional and finan-
cial backing. Public enthusiasm for film education, however, persisted in
multiple forms. The film magazine quickly became a unique medium for
education. One reader even wrote to the editors of Movie Weekly asking
Chapter Four
the magazine to open a film school.3 1 Another reader (an art student)
who claimed to have acted parts in films but felt disenchanted by the cor-
ruption in the studios wrote to the editor asking for advice about film
schools in France. The editor replied by directing the reader to a relevant
answer in an earlier issue and asking him to wait for a response from Xu
Hu, a cinematographer trained in Paris.3-2
The public desire for the dissemination of technical film knowledge
went hand in hand with the intellectual attempt to probe the ontological
status of cinema in Chinese culture. This necessarily involved an inquiry
into the medium's relationship to other atts, especially drama and litera-
ture. In linking the mass-mediated experience of cinema to the larger
arena of vernacular culture-especially with regard to its social effi-
cacy-this incipient film theory gave cinema a heightened social and
cultural profile for the first time in public.
The first comprehensive correspondence film school, complete with
published textbooks and a core faculty (including former students of the
China Film School), appeared in 1924. Wang Xuchang was head of the
school, and faculty members included Hong Shen, Zhou Jianyun, and
Cheng Bugao. Located in a lane on Xinzha Road in the International Set-
tlement, the school promised to mail reading materials to students on a
132 I weekly basis. 33 Its formality and commitment were manifested in the
publication of a set of textbooks, The Teaching Materials of the Changming
Correspondence School for Film (Changming hanshou yingxi xuexiao jiangyi).
According to an advertisement in the August IO issue of Shanghai's
biggest newspaper, Shenbao, the school opened on July 10. The ad also
included an outline of its first course in An Introduction to Shadowplay:
l. The definition of shadowplay

2. The origin of shadowplay
3. The history of shadowplay
4. The ontology of shadowplay
5. The purpose of shadow
6. The function of shadowplay
7. The classification of shadowplay
8. The two grave shortcomings of shadowplay
9. The national character of shadowplay
10. The future of Chinese shadowplay
The course was to be taught in eight sessions, and its content was de-
scribed as "erudite and detailed, explaining many previously unknown
things." The student body was very large, and even included students
from Japan, the Philippines, and other Nanyang islands. 34 Three subse-
quent courses, projected to be more specific, focused on directing, script
writing, and cinematography. The whole program had ambitions to sys-

tematize and popularize film knowledge, as well as to endow the Chinese
practice of electric shadowplay with a theoretical aura that would legit-
imize its international standing and its modern professional status. As the
Introduction was the first comprehensive Chinese text that tried to sys-
tematically define the aesthetic and pedagogy of cinema, a close exami-
nation of it will illuminate the intellectual reception of the medium un-
dergoing a structural change.
Introduction was written by Zhou Jianyun and Wang Xuchang, illus-
trating the extent to which the production sector eagerly engaged in the
public discourse on cinema. Zhou cofounded Mingxing and its manage-
ment miracle; he was also an active editor and writer for early film mag-
azines, especially Mingxing's own trade journals. Wang studied at Ecole
du Cinema in France. After returning to China, he was hired as director
of cinematography at Mingxing. In 1924 he established Changming Cor-
respondence Film School with Xu Hu, who had also studied film in Paris.
The same year, they and several others founded the Shenzhou Film Com-
pany, which produced a number of "social films" (shehui pian) aimed at
using artistically executed films to "exert a subtle influence on people's
thinking (qianyi mohua)." 3 s
In Introduction Zhou and Wang trace the genealogy of shadowplay in I 133
both Chinese and international contexts. Although cinema, or motion pic-
ture, had regionally disparate equivalents in Chinese (yingxi, dianying,
huodong yinghua, etc.), the authors argued in favor of the term shadowplay
(yingxi):
(S]hadowplay is made of drama performances, and not painted

pictures ... Huodong yinghua [literally, motion pictures] is both too
long and beyond the point ... , to be concise, we should adhere ei-
ther to shadowplay or electric shadow. However, considering the fact
that action and expression in shadowplay are even more delicate
and natural than in stage drama, how can we ignore the crucial
function of Drama [English in original]? For the purpose of consis-
tency in naming, and for the ease of recalling the meaning when
we look at the name [guming siyi], let us use shadowplay. 36
Having set the name straight, the authors justify, in broad strokes, their
insistence on the "dramatic" quality of cinema. The family tree they
sketch covers several thousand years of arts, culminating in shadowplay.
Opera was traced back to poetry and folk song, and modern expressive
drama was connected to dance drama and puppet shows, which in turn
were supposedly evolved from spontaneous and later choreographed
dance. Similarly, the roots of shadowplay could be found in slide shows,
Chapter Four
photography, various hand-shadows, lantern-shadows, and other similar

shadow-based screen practices. They emphatically state that shadowplay
is linked to all these arts except for song, as (silent) film is soundless.37
This theoretical effort to give cinema a historical depth and ontological
complexity is laid out in an elaborate chart that places shadowplay as the
synthesis of historical confluences: 38
Dance - Dance d r a m a ~
Expressive d r a m a )
Puppet drama - Vernacular drama I
Shadowplay
Hand shadowplay - Hldea-sketching"?ainting
Slide show
Lantem-shadowplay - Photography
For all its evolutionist overtones, the chart demonstrates a dialectical un-
derstanding of the history of aesthetics, as it rests the complexity of shad-
owplay on a simultaneously diachronic and synchronic axis. Rather than
simply restricting the Chinese practice of shadowplay to a self-contained
cultural repertoire, the cinema as conceived here is an intermedial and
134 I culturally cross-fertilized product, a mosaic of the multiple crossings be-
tween play and shadow, embodiment and representation.
This genealogy, however, is insufficient to account for the more pro-
tean form that the actual electric shadowplay would take in the modern
theater. When it comes to the original matter (yuanzhi) of shadowplay,
the wr.iters enumerate literature, science, psychology, sociology, tech-
nique, and fine arts as its basic components. This systematic exposition
contains some obvious debts to Gu Kengfu's famous opening address in
the first issue of China's earliest film magazine, Yingxi zazhi, published in
1921. But it is striking that Zhou and Wang not only added psychology,
sociology, and the fine arts to Gu 's essay but also reversed the order of the
categories.
Let us examine Gu Kengfu's essay briefly. His inaugural editorial for
the magazine is commonly regarded as the first "theoretical" treatise on
the definition and function of electric shadowplay. It is much less formal
and programmatic, yet outlines some issues that have proven to be foun-
dational in early film discourse in China.'9 Gu regards shadowplay as a
kind of drama that best achieves verisimilitude (bizhen) yet remains quite
modest about the prospect of this "genre," suggesting "whether or not
[it] will play an important role in the future is hard to know." He consid-
ers technique (that is, the art of acting), literature, and science the three
basic components of shadowplay. Using Peking opera as a reference
point, he stresses that "shadowplay has only zuo [stylized bodily move~
ment or action] and no singing or speech, therefore its technique lays

weight mostly on facial expression and movement." 4° For him the per-
formance in shadowplay is "life-sketching" (xiesheng shi) whereas Peking
opera is "patterned" or stylized (tu'an shi). So shadowplay must serve as
a model for reforming Chinese drama. Gu contends that, although drama
was a "sharp instrument for exalting cultural tradition and extending ed-
ucation [to the masses]," shadowplay is superior in carrying out these
missions.
As for literature, Gu sees the script as a subgenre of literary fiction that
originated in the "hands and pens of famous writers." The crucial anal-
ogy between the script and filmed shadowplay is their shared economy
Uingji) in words and images, which creates lively movement instead of
the "dead" stage's static effect and artificial set designs. Shadowplay, un-
like drama or literature, can be staged "everywhere'' in "natural" settings.
Clearly, in drawing analogies to existing cultural forms, Gu was adamant
about the uniqueness of the cinematic medium and its capacity to repro-
duce living situations. 41
The section on science in his essay further highlights the phenome-
nological specificity of shadowplay and its efficacy as a mass medium. Gu
first briefly focuses on the optical nature of shadowplay and its embed-
dedness in modern science; he then comments on its efficiency in prop- I 135
agating scientific knowledge and eradicating superstition, thereby baring
the influence of enlightenment ideology. He emphasizes the vividness
and simultaneity of the cinematic perception: "When the spectators
watch science films, it is as though they are watching teachers carry out
experiments in the laboratory." In the same way, commercials for factory
products could function as special "educational" films. Shadowplay, ac-
cording to this logic, could replace slides for the doctors and hygiene spe-
cialists to demonstrate the causes of diseases more captivatingly. The "sci-
entific" quality of shadowplay ultimately boils down to economics again.
Compared to ordinary drama performance, shadowplay is advantageous
in the following respects:
1. In terms of expense (without the costs of transportation and

food for a whole traveling troupe);
2. In time (with rapid train transportation and multiple prints of
the same film shown simultaneously in different cities);
3. In price (saving big salaries for theater stars like Mei Lanfang,
"for a couple of silver dimes, we can see an American star who
earns tens of thousands of dollars a month");
4. In reprise (as films are never "dead," whereas big theater stars
are irreplaceable);
s. In the [increased] number of spectators.
Chapter Four
The last point anticipated the race toward the expanded movie theater.
The author underscored the crucial difference between sensorial econo-
mies involved in drama and film reception respectively:
The shadowplay theater building can be constructed larger than

the normal theater. Because light-waves are transmitted farther
and faster than soundwaves, even viewers seated far [from the
screen} can still see dearly. In a normal theater, if you sit too far
away [from the stage], then you can hear nothing. And if you can't
hear anything, what's the point of seeing a pVciy?" 4 2
Despite his utopian enthusiasm for the medium, Gu's overall observation
on the significance of shadowplay for "education" remains largely on the
level of scientific and medical experimentation as attraction, if not simply
for the purpose of disseminating information or providing consumer
guides. This is hardly surprising given that the essay was written almost
two years before Mingxing decided to formally adopt Zheng Zhengqiu's
"long film and serious drama" principle both as a commercial strategy
and pedagogical intervention. Gu's essay in particular and his film mag-
azine in general nevertheless inaugurated the beginning of a public
136 I discourse on film in China. His ideas on the appeal of democracy and
science were clearly in dialogue with the May Fourth ideology, albeit pre-
senting them from a perspective specific to the cinematic experience.
While aspiring to raise the social and aesthetic bar of the new medium,
Gu remained committed to its mass appeal and entertainment value.
The Changming school textbook greatly amplified Gu's vernacular
film theory but prioritized literature first, science second, (acting) tech-
nique next to last. The literary section literally copies Gu's essay, stress-
ing mimesis and the "economy" of words and images as the common
ground for literature and shadowplay. The science section was written;
however, like an exuberant futurist manifesto on the power of material
civilization (wuzhi wenmin9), especially with respect to optics, chemistry,
and electric engineering. It even cites the recent invention and exhibition
of sound cinema in Germany as evidence of technology's mighty impact
on cinema. The book cites a Shanghai YMCA screening of a film on Bin- .· ·
stein's theory of relativity to demonstrate that "profound axioms that are
hard to explain in language can be easily grasped through film show-
ings." The interesting twist at the end of this otherwise material deter- .Y
minist manifesto arrives in a dialectical reversal: Although shadowplay \
0
is a product of science, the latter also relies on the former for develop-<:
ment." This technophilic impulse and the attempt to inscribe film within\\
it were no doubt in tune with the May Fourth exaltation of enlighten{(:
ment and modern science. But unlike the latter's lofty intellectual pro-
gram, which was primarily confined to verbal discourses, the film school
teachers grasped that the moving image was the best vehicle for not only
transmitting but also transforming popular science. While the modern
aura of science considerably divested shadowplay of the low status tradi-
tionally accorded theater people in China, the more cinematic appeal (as-
sociated with optics and chemistry) of the profession also granted the
new trade the potential to confer respectable modern subjectivities. The
film school, if nothing else, at least taught its students how to make and
view films more intelligently as initiated Ninsiders."
PSYCHOLOGICAL ORGANS AND

SOCIOLOGICAL PERFORMANCE
The parts on psychology and sociology in the introduction manifests

an investment in the subjective interiority of both the spectator and the
cinematic representation. The particular section starts with some Chinese
proverbial wisdom on the interconnection between physiognomy and
personality, surface and interior. But the vocabulary soon slips into one
of modern neurological psychology, emphasizing the effect of age and
sex differences and the importance of the circulatory structure of the hu- I 137
man body in relation to sense perception, memory, and imagination. 43
The nervous system is most susceptible to sensorial impressions and stim-
uli. Connecting the brain cortex, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and mus-
cle while mediating contact between the organic body and external
forces, its "perceptual" nerves transmit external perceptions to the inside,
and are dependent on any slight change in the sensorium. However, the
nmotor" nerves, mainly manipulating the muscles upon receiving com-
mands from the brain, will relay internal feeling to the body's surface.
This description resonates strikingly with Georg Simmel's portrayal of
the "mental life" in the modern urban milieu. For Simmel, "the psycho-
logical foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected,
is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous
shift of external and internal stimuli." The individual molds a "protective
organ" as a shield against the constant assault of these stimuli. 44 If Sim-
mel is concerned with the general profile of the "metropolitan type" in
the wake of urban modernization, the Chinese shadowplay pedagogues
directly conceived of this urban subject through the figure of the film
spectator. The "enlarged individual horizon" set against the expanding
backdrop of physical urban space and population that Simmel described
can also be grasped synechdochically. It could be linked to the enlarged
movie theaters rising in major urban centers in China and elsewhere in
Chapter Four
the world, not least Weimar Berlin, on which Simmel carried out his so-
ciological anatomy in the same period.
Carefully working through the mass spectator's body, from its outer
shell to inner psychology, the authors of the Changming textbook were
able to differentiate emotion from perception, reordering the relation
between the two. Moreover, they introduced a third category, mood
(qingxu), to negotiate the dualism between interiority and externality.
While emotion is seen as subjective and volatile, and perception is seen
as originating in exteriority, mood is a "complex mechanism due to a
combination of several kinds of emotiony." It is also intimately linked to
perception and memory, which in turn facilitate the mental faculties of
expectation and imagination prone to speedy change. In other words,
"mood" is a manifestation of the chimerical link between exterior stim-
uli and interior reactions. This formulation is akin to the "protective or-
gan" diagnosed by Simmel, which is a psychosomatic bodily extension or
a sensory product of reaction-formation. The Chinese writers assert:
"If someone has a dull perception, his/her mood must be very underde-
veloped." As an "intermediate" activity, "mood" is essential in establish-
ing communication between the actor and the spectator. They fur-
ther single out vision as the privileged site of this identification, or
138 I "correspondence":
Shadowplay is after all a kind of drama that depicts human moods.

Recent shadowplay works. due to the improved [skills] of actors,
have come to focus on "interior acting" [neixin biaoyan], which
works basically, through facial expressions, by bringing out the
mood hidden inside the heart which moves the spectator deeply.
Therefore the highest artistic acting is not only concentrated on the
face, but ultimately in the eyes. If the actor does not completely un-
derstand the human individual character and personality, and if
the actor does not know something about psychology, how can
he/she act out those expressions? 4 5
These cinematically reproduced and enhanced eyes could be seen as the

organs of mood," linking the external stimuli and interior emotion, sur-
0
face and depth, the body and the psyche. In this sense, the eye stands out
as the organ of tactility," an exegesis the anthropologist Michael Taussig
0
has offered of Benjamin's famous notion of the "optical unconscious." 46

The expressiveness of film actors' eyes was certainly enhanced by cine-
matographic techniques such as close-up and editing that came to be
widely used in narratively integrated cinema by this time. Director Chen
Shouying complained that, although the actors had learned not to "look
at the camera," most of them had yet to learn how to "act to the camera."
If they failed to act to or "register" (English original) their performances

on the camera, they subsequently failed to "act for the spectator." 47 This
clearly indicates the recognition of the power imbued in cinema's "opti-
cal organ" and of .its relation to the spectator's interiority. But this ten-
dency toward imeriorization does not necessarily have to be understood
as internalization. It is rather a process of giving a palpable materiality to
the psychological experience of both the actor and the spectator. Mood
thus functions as a sensitive glue between the "feeling" on screen and in
the auditorium, which is subject to the rapid change of both shadowplay
and the urban life it captures.
As if conscious of the potential pitfalls of exclusive individuality im-
plied by psychology, ·sociology" is then deployed to situate the interior-
ized spectator and the "nerve system'' of shadowplay in a large social sys-
tem. Within the larger social realm countless modern "problems" (such
as the "labor problem," the "women's problem," the "divorce problem."
the "family problem/ and the "child problem") await solutions. A tinge
of elitism is detectable in Zhou and Wang's sociological concerns when
they pictured the "masses" as essentially "blind" and lacking "discerning
power.• It would be a few intellectuals' task to intervene and lead in this
crucial "transitional period" and shadowplay, the epitome of modern so-
ciety, would be most befitting for "performing" (biaoyan) social reality. I 139
Among all kinds of shadowplay, the "social drama" was considered the
most viable as it "contains suggestions as how to solve the problems, and
leaves impressions on spectators that are deep enough to compensate for
what cannot be achieved by writing books or making speeches." 48
The sociological mission accorded shadowplay also places a higher de-
mand on technique-an aspect alluded to in the psychology section. The
writers here denounce the civilized play's prevalent tendency to uncriti-
cally borrow from various existing performances, such as the "playthings
in the amusement hall," instead of cultivating "facial expression" and
"movement." They criticize such playthings as "off the point" and as
merely "low (or obscene} circus tricks" to win the "mere laughter of the
spectator." The object of this self-righteous critique is obviously Zhang
Shichuan's earlier production that was philosophically centered on at-
tractions rather than psychology. However, the cultivation of the psy-
chologized performance is not to be understood as passivity and immo-
bility. By highlighting the distinction between stage performance and
screen acting, the writers emphasize the inherently fragmented, yet mo-
bile, nature of cinema:
While on the stage performances are consistent and continuous,

the expression and movement on the screen is fragmented and di-
vided into parts. On the stage there is speech as a tool to assist [per-
Chapter Four
formance] whereas on the screen it is pure performance that de-

livers meaning. Seen from this perspective, the acting techniques
of stage actors and shadowplay actors, though similar on the sur-
face, are actually different in nature. When the two are compared,
of course, a more complicated shadowplay is also more meticulous
and refined:111
Such complexity and refinement also include modern skills of dancing,

driving a car, flying an airplane, or even steering a hot-air balloon. And
the authors caution aspiring actors that 'icommonsensical" bodily tech-
niques are acquired through careful observation and practice in real life,
not taught in any film school or studio. 50 Resorting to the university of
everyday life and modern trends, the pedagogy adopted here is radically
different from traditional ways of learning to read or act, be it a school
practice dominated by book copying and memorization or an appren-
ticeship in a theater troupe governed by disciplined repetition.
As though these ways to perfect the performance and reception of
shadowplay were not complex enough, the last item in the list for the
"original matter" of shadowplay uses "art" as a culminating category for
setting the standards of shadowplay. This is a programmatic aesthetic
140 I statement of which "beauty" is the buzzword with "truth" (or authentic-
ity) and "goodness" as foils. Here "art" is an amalgamate category that
includes the "beauty" of script, sets, acting, costume, lighting, intertitles,
and camera work. It is an art of comprehensiveness and structure "be-
cause shadowplay is an art of division and cooperation, not something
that can be independently done by a few people." 51 In other words, in or-
der to attain the respectable status of art shadowplay has to be divested
of its reputation as a mere trick or plaything in the teahouse or amuse-
ment hall. Film production is recognized as large-scale collaboration,
rather than the cottage-industry that characterized earlier film making.
It has to be perfectly coordinated without erasing the professional dis-
tinctions of each filmic component.
There are some apparent contradictions in these theoretical attempts
to define the multifarious ontology of shadowplay. One chief paradox lies
in the effort to endow shadowplay with a more distinctly cinematic, artis-
tic aura, and perhaps also an institutional grandeur. At the same time the
authors continue to cling to some aesthetic aspects of drama, seeking in
it an organic Nspirit" that would bring "electric shadows" to life-or to
give life-content to the "empty," almost ghostly, form of film. In this re-
gard, the "spirit" also stands in for flesh and blood, as a displaced form of
embodiment. This phantom body, at once metaphysical and materialized,
serves not only as a metaphor for the cinematic body but also as a con-
crete site for contending external and internal forces, perception and
emotion, the psychic and the social, the diachronic and the synchronic,
the individual and the collective. This paradox is related to the tension
between the lofty "artistic" ideal about the kinds of film that ought to be
made and a populist impulse to replace the traditionally privileged writ-
ing system with this visual Esperanto.
Before moving on to elucidate the more practical "function of shad-
owplay," the writers find it necessary to remind their students of the
"national character" of shadowplay. Until the "world has become truly
universalized" (shijie daton9), they contend, shadowplay is necessarily a
national project charged with the mission to "propagate and represent"
national history, culture, character, customs, industry, and crafts. They
advise the spectator not to blindly worship foreign films and see through
their racial discrimination. This brief patriotic discourse stops short of be-
ing schematic and rhetorical. s2 A lengthier meditation on the popular, yet
hardly "low," quality of the medium, steers the discursive flow back to
the pedagogical track tinged with a utopian universalism.
ATTRACTIVE NARRATION
In the section on the "function of shadowplay," the authors deal more ex- I 141
plicitly with cinematic modernity. The first and foremost function of
shadowplay is its "entertainment spirit." Harking back to the arguments
on psychology, the authors prescribe shadowplay as a panacea for mod-
ern subjects who labor long hours and suffer from nervous exhaustion.
If people do not have access to "appropriate (zhen9dan9) entertainment,
they may go morally astray or become dejected and suicidal. Although
there are many kinds of "low-class" folk entertainment forms available,
those are regarded as poisonous to the body and the heart. Music, art,
and drama are "adequate" forms of entertainment but are too "pure" or
one-dimensional. Only shadowplay, with its rich assortment of genres. is
the most appropriate and comprehensive form of entertainment that
satisfies all kinds of needs and pleasures. For a low price, it can "mold a
person's temperament and benefit the body and the heart." 53
"Appropriate" entertainment is necessarily "popular education." It
should guide society and become people's friend and teacher. The writ·
ers compare shadowplay to other existing forms of entertainment, argu-
ing that only shadowplay is capable of both entertaining and edifying.
Various traditional opera forms are either too highbrow (e.g., the kunqu
opera) or too restricted by regional and dialectical specificity. They also
tend to be overly stylized in their use of elaborate lyrics, music, masks,
and props, not to mention the "magic-ghost plot, deafening gongs and
Chapter Four
drums, and supernatural martial-art episodes." The vernacular spoken

drama may be seen as a form of popular education, "but some of the ac-
tors, instead of standing in front of the people, only follow behind them;
they cater to the society rather than try to correct it. Some have become
Peking operalike while others turned to low amusing games-neither
donkey nor horse. As a whole they keep declining." 54 In stark contrast to
this degrading mishmash, shadowplay is absolutely "close to truth" and
"complete with a beginning and an end." Not only is it capable of reflect-
ing the human condition and shifting the audience's mood, it can also
have an impact on social progress. For thfse reasons, shadowp!ay appeals
to all social groups regardless of age, gender, or level of education-ex-
erting imperceptible influence and ultimately transforming their minds.
This experience of enlightenment does not, however, have to be pe-
dantic and passive. A powerful aspect of educational moviegoing is its
ability to induce vicarious kinesthetic sensations of traveling all over the
world. The spectator can "go" anywhere and see anything via the silver
screen: from the ancient ruins of Egypt and Rome to the modern scenes
of New York and Paris, from African wild animals to the Great Wall-all
the sites and things that "our ears have heard so much about but our eyes
haven't seen." Confined as we are by our jobs and our small income,
142 I shadowplay take us "on the scene in person" (shenlin qijing), far beyond
what newspapers could offer. The writers cannot help citing, and trans·
planting, some proverbial sayings here:
People say reading a travelogue makes one "travel while lying

down (woyou)"; seated in the movie theater watching newsreels
and landscape films then amounts to "traveling while sitting down
(zuoyou)." There is an ancient saying: "A scholar knows the affairs
of the world without leaving his study." I would change it to:
"Everybody can know the affairs of the world without going out of
the door." 5 5
The analogy of "traveling while sitting down" reminds us of simulated

landscape travel films or the "phantom ride" shows at teahouse venues.
The remarkable thing is that the authors, having privileged social drama
and artistic aura in the section on shadowplay's ontology, are indulging
here in travelogue films that generate bodily sensation and vernacular
knowledge rather than moral edification and purgation. As in the earlier
illustration of cinema's comprehensive quality, travelogue, newsreel.
comedy, detective stories, and social drama are enumerated equally for
their distinctive entertainment and educational values.
It is possible to speculate that, in making the transition to a more nar 0
ratively integrated cinema and its attendant viewing protocols, early Chi·
nese film theorists and producers were not necessarily advocating an
exclusive narrative cinema targeted at a homogenous audience. Their
critique of early Chinese shadowplay's parasitic relationship to tradi·
tional performance, vernacular spoken drama, and other forms of en·
tertainment was at times belligerent but usually reserved and ambiguous.
Rather than turning the theater into a thoroughly psychologized space
of narrative absorption, they wanted the cinematic interiority to be an·
chored in, if not superimposed onto, the public world at large. The pref-
erence for photographic "verisimilitude,· or realism, as manifested in Yan
Ruisheng and Zhan9 Xinsheng, suggests a persistent interest in the cinema
of attractions, instead of a dosed fictional world. There is little indica-
tion that film viewing should be entirely intradiegetic, either. Therefore,
forms such as the educational lecture (yanshuo), aided by film projection,
are deemed highly commendable as an integrated film experience. The
educational purpose can be accomplished by repetitively showing or
"demonstrating" the same film, replacing clumsy and costly laboratory
equipment. The powerful camera lens can also expose microscopic views
of plants and bacteria that the naked eye cannot see.
To the extent that the cinematic attractions are mobilized to aid a
wide-reaching public education of modern science, this utopian project I 143
is nothing short of a search for what I will call a cinema of "attractive nar-
ration." While continuously regarded as immanently appealing to the
senses, the cinema of attractive narration presents film as an object of
knowledge and presupposes a viewing subject conscious of but not com-
pletely surrendering to its didactic function. This desire to use the inher-
ently sensuous medium as a visual vernacular for disseminating sci·
entific knowledge underscores the conception of the medium as an
eminent vehicle for affective knowledge. Thus using the movie theater as
a public school for this informed pleasure is not so much about discipline
and representation as about staging a "living tableau" of the everyday
experience. 56
Toward the end of Introduction, the authors express their affirmative
view of film as the best museum of history-or rather, reservoir of mern·
ory-in a world full of transient happenings and novel curiosities. To in-
voke Bazin again, because the body "embalmed" in shadowplay outlasts
any mortal body, film can preserve ancestral images and the unparalleled
art of famous actors for future generations. The authors mention the art
of Yu Jusheng and Tan Xinpei, two leading Peking opera actors, as best
candidates for "eternal preservation" through film.' 7 Had photography
been invented long ago, the authors claim, it would have been much
more effective to study history by viewing films than by reading a history
Chapter Four
book that is easily forgotten. The exaltation of a filmed body's indestruc-

tibility is thus not reserved for great names and their "everlasting" art
only; it is extended to the plebian universe as well. "Even an ordinary
person's life may be filmed in order to be remembered by that person
himself and provide a model for his offspring." Due to its liveliness, dura-
bility, reproducibility, and, above all, democratic appeal, the filmic image
is regarded as the optimal medium for the embodiment and representa-
tion of history of all ages.
Ultimately, the shadowplay's reproducibility and affordability could
aid in reaching a wider audience than lit9Tature and drama-forms priv-
ileged by classical aesthetics. The authors seem to have plagiarized Gu
Kengfu wholesale on this point. But a notable addition is the term min-
zhong hua (popular orientation, or popularization) juxtaposed to pubian
xing (universal nature). Thus the emphasis is not simply on the numeri-
cal size of the audience per se but rather on the broad social base of spec-
tators and their potential mobilization for social change. The Shenzhou
Company, which Wang Xuchang helped establish, sought to make films
about "common knowledge" and take them to rural areas to show "ordi-
nary women and children" (yibanfuren ruzi) for free. 56 In this way, they
might open their eyes a bit to the outside world. 59 More crucially, shad-
144 I owplay could also, without resorting to conventional education, impart
basic knowledge that the "citizens of a twentieth-century republic" ought
to possess. If this plan were to succeed, it would immensely benefit the
"ignorant mob" (yumang). This utopian and largely elitist intellectual vi-
sion did not immediately materialize, as the company had to compete
with both domestic and foreign rivals in a market that craved narra-
tive features with commercial value. Modeled after Mingxing's practice,
Shengzhou made several long and serious films. Their elaborate tech-
nique in storytelling and attention to "artistic appeal" (such as embel-
lished intertitles) became known as Shenzhou style (Shenzhou pai)."6°
The pursuit of stylistic sophistication and psychological complexity, how-
ever, limited the appeal of its films primarily to students and intellectu-
als in the cities, a result far from its initial intention to use shadowplay to
enlighten the massive population in China's vast rural interior.
CENTERING THE SPECTATOR
The Changming Correspondence Film School's pedagogical ambitions to

employ shadowplay as a paraeducational medium of mass communica-
tion, knowledge dissemination, and moral guidance were shared by many
filmmakers and critics at the time. 61 Such a mass-oriented ontology of
the cinema increasingly placed the spectator at the center of the exclu-
sive theater space as well as the larger social space of the film experience.
The mid- l 920s was a high time for Zheng Zhengqiu, comaker of Laborer's
Love and the foremost ideologue of the long film and serious drama. His
homespun production philosophy-"business plus conscience, 'ism'
combined with popular taste" -was being materialized in numerous
Mingxing productions and was widely adopted by other studios after the
success of Orphan Rescues Grandfather in 1923.
It is significant that the chief mise-en-scene in Orphan Rescues Grand-
father is a public school funded by the rich grandfather to provide free ed-
ucation to poor children. The disinherited grandson is a studious pupil
there who aspires to become a "refined and courteous, smart and witty"
educated person despite his "humble" origins. The old man does not
know the model student is his own grandson until after its revelation. Af-
ter the happy reunion, the widowed mother is convinced that the school
was the key to the solution of the "gross injustice" inflicted upon her
family. She decides to invest her retrieved wealth in opening more char-
ity schools so that "poor children who could not afford normal schools
might get the education necessary for life." 62
The education of the "orphan" saved his grandfather's life and averted
a financial disaster for the family, while the sensational commercial sue- I 145
cess of the film steered Mingxing out of difficult financial straits. More
importantly, the film attracted a mass audience, both domestically and in
the Nanyang diaspora, that was to last for a long time to come. Although
the traditional family was still the centerpiece in this first long film and
serious drama, its redemption hinged upon the modern-style public
school that materialized the reformist vision for a more egalitarian soci-
ety. The widow is not only welcomed back to the family but is given the
ownership and management of its entire property, which effectively
makes her a matriarch. The grandfather, embodying the disintegrating
traditional order, has to abandon the old house and make the charity
school his home as a premise for the reunion of the family, which in the
end becomes an expanded educational community. An analogy can be
drawn between this expansion of the school in the film as the fruition of
private yet ethically motivated investment and the expansion of the film
world as a potential vernacular school at large. The film indeed exem-
plifies Zheng's conviction of the theater as the most effective school:
"Theater is the laboratory for social education while actors are good
teachers imparting this education." 6 3 If Mingxing's early nondidactic
ventures failed to create a stable pedagogical situation in the teahouse
milieu, Orphan Rescues Grandfather's success and the consolidation of
Chapter Four
long film and serious drama marked the emergence of a broad but
more unified spectatorship in the enlarged theater, both physically and
socially.
Amid a profusion of film discourses in the mid-1920s, Zheng once
again proved to be a provocative voice in the spectator's central position.
Unlike many Western-educated critics and filmmakers, Zheng has had a
direct and intimate relationship with his audience, the petty urbanites,
beginning when he wrote theater reviews and initiated the revival of the
civilized play. Although he was instrumental in pushing Chinese cinema
toward a more narratively integrated cinehla, he refused to be carried
away by the crazes for the full-fledged film script (and hence diminished
importance of improvisation) and for turning shadowplay into "art"
alone. In his seminal essay, "My Expectations of the Audience," Zheng
urges filmmakers and critics to focus on the audience and their needs. He
opens his argument in a polemic tone:
As regards whether or not the future of drama will be good, and

whether or not a theater house or a film company will be prosper-
ous, many readers seem to agree that the real power rests in the
hands of the screenwriter. In my opinion, however, most of the
146 I power rests with the spectators, because even the screenwriter of-
ten has to change his mind due to the inclinations of the audience.
Old theater houses were like that; new drama is like that. Today
film companies, I am afraid, have to follow suit as well. 64
He nevertheless agrees with the Changming textbook writers that any

piece of drama (or shadowplay) has to convey some message of social cri-
tique in order to make the audience aware of the problems surrounding
them. Responding to provocations to make "pure" art films, he proudly
states that he is not ashamed of what he has been doing. Zheng confesses
that he has made countless experiments to achieve prevalent artistic
standards. The results, however, have been that "either the financial
sponsors find the films too 'high' [to accept] or women viewers and
people in the world of commerce are totally baffled." What he has found
more rewarding for both filmmakers and audiences is adding one or two
artistic elements at a time in a film, which as a whole should still cater to
the audience's general tastes. This is because shadowplay producers are
not subsidized by the state, and for the purpose of staying in business; it·
is natural for them to cater to the psychology of the spectators (9uanzhon9. ·
xinli). In other words, it is through the enactment of interactive commu~
nication or a symbiotic relationship between the sender and the receiver
that the medium will "imperceptibly embark on the path of art." "Art" .··.
here represents more an intersubjective process of establishing formal

conventions than an abstract aesthetic ideal. Only then "will my taste
and that of the audience improve," writes Zheng. "Taste" is clearly re-
garded as product of a cultural habitat and historical process.
Zheng was a firm believer in individual and collective transformation
through cathartic storytelling. For Zheng, who abandoned the traditional
path of social ascendance (i.e., the imperial examinations) as a youth to
willingly sink into the theater world's lower depths, the theater space was
the most effective school of life. In this public space meaningful social
and ethical lessons can be delivered through the time-honored pedagog-
ical method of "good systematic guidance with skill and patience" (xun-
xun shanyou), which will eventually lead to enlightenment and transfor-
mation in an ethical project rather than an ideological one. The model of
Zheng's ideal cinematic school is thus a bricolage of traditional drama and
teahouse practice, Confucian ethics and modern style education, which
Orphan Rescues Grandfather helped to visualize.
Published after the media uproar over the planned buy-out of the
British-American Tobacco Company's small theaters and the May Thirti-
eth incident in 1925, 65 Zheng's essay was not oblivious to the political po-
tential of the film audience. Although Zheng is reserved about the "artis-
tic" vogue or bourgeois trend among film critics and well-educated urban I 147
spectators responding to the rise of art cinema (or "pure cinema") in Eu-
rope and Japan, he is adamant about the need for Chinese-made films to
survive and succeed in a competitive market. In closing, he asks that the
spectators give something in return: to tell relatives and friends not to at-
tend the showing of foreign films that do not benefit the country; and to
bear with Chinese films, even though each film may have only one com-
mendable aspect or may seem less stimulating technically. Audiences can
promote good films by word of mouth, which is more effective than writ-
ing. When they find films that are inappropriate to the "national condi-
tion," they should write letters to caution the filmmakers, and if that
proves ineffective, they should compose essays to attack them until film-
makers make amends. In short, Zhe;g expected the Chinese moviegoers
to be involved in the public sphere at large. Public opinion, according to
Zheng, had the power to improve the Chinese film enterprise at a time
when quantity overshadowed quality but when it also had a golden op~
portunity to grow in the market. Zheng Zhengqiu's motto "business plus ·
conscience" crystallizes a balanced integration of his long-term partner
Zhang Shichuan's inclination for attractions and commercial profit on the
one hand and his own penchant for socioethical education through
dramaturgy and storytelling on the other.
To recapitulate, the film world in the first part of the 1920s was an ex-
Chapter Four
panded architectural and social space created by different participants of

an emerging public sphere-architects, theater owners, distributors, pro-
ducers, directors, writers, technicians, critics, actors, and, most impor-
tantly, spectators. It functioned as a forum for a host of perspectives.
Within it, many critics and filmmakers attempted, if often with deep am-
bivalence, to reconcile business and art, high-brow and low-brow taste,
enlightenment and entertainment, modernist impulses and traditional
ethos. The Central Theater and its exhibition chain was a synecdoche of
a vibrant and rapidly expanding film culture in Shanghai and other ur-
ban centers. This massive reorientation iot only required the recruit-
ment of a far larger audience than that of the previous teahouse envi-
ronment, but also placed substantial pressure on the filmmakers and
theater owners to take into account a changing mode of visual percep-
tion and consumption. The corollary between the theater's spatial interi-
ority and the socialized spectatorial psychology reflects some tension in
the social engineering of the isolated individual spectator within a com-
munal cinematic experience. This tension was articulated in the incipient
discourse on the ontology and social efficacy of the cinema. The mass
production of long films and serious dramas, or popular melodramas
about families, social ethics, and mass education proved to be commer·
148 I dally viable in this period of rapid urbanization. More significantly, the
commercial interest was intertwined with a conscious moral invest-
ment-hence Zheng Zhengqiu's slogan "business plus conscience." The
cinema was as a democratic medium imbued with the potential for social
transformation. Inasmuch as this moral and artistic conscience was often
conveyed through sensational plots and melodramatic excess endowed
with social purpose, the narrative integration of this cinema remained
unsettled, or rather, open to more possibilities in a constantly evolving
film world.
PART TWO
COMPETING MODERNS
i
CHAPTER FIVE
SCREENWRITING,
TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY, AND
MELODRAMATIC RETRIBUTION
THE FILM WORLD in Shanghai of the 1920s was crowded with I 151
a great number of companies, films, and a profusion of cinematic dis-
courses. In this period long narrative films bloomed and diversified. Or-
phan Rescues Grandfather not only saved Mingxing from a financial crisis
but also provided the film industry as a whole with the impetus to move
toward institutionalization and industrialization. One critic praised the
film for departing significantly from formulaic stage art: "The whole film
is redolent of a shadowplay ambiance. The New Drama-like acting is di-
minished.n 1 This remark anticipated a broad discussion that tried to sys-
tematically define cinema vis-a-vis drama-especially the civilized play.
The textbooks of the Changming Correspondence Film School discussed
in chapter 4 were but part of this impulse to endow the film profession
with social and artistic legitimacy. At the same time, the notion and prac-
tice of the film script as a new form of modern, vernacular writing began
to occupy a prominent place in both cinematic discourse and practice.
In this chapter I chart the complex genealogy and cultural geography
of a melodramatic mode of cinematic storytelling and its variations in the
mid- l 920s. Rather than offering an exhaustive account of that dynamic
period, I will instead focus on the rise of, and resistance to, the film script
and the related question of cultural translation. The increasing impor-
tance of the script, while effectively bridging the verbal conception of a
film and its visible manifestation on the screen, generated anxieties over
Chapter Five
the ontological status of the cinematic medium and its social and ethical
implications. I begin with a discussion of the art of screenwriting as con-
ceived by Hou Yao (1903-42) and Xu Zhuodai (1881-1958), who were
at once filmmakers, screenwriters, and critics. Xu's fascination with trick
cinematography also calls for an inquiry into the contemporary discourse
on and practice of photography with regard to the "composition" of the
modern subject in China. This places the film experience within a larger
field of experimental cultural vision as still images were mobilized to em-
body the playful and mobile yet anxiety-ridJ1en modernizing process.
Then I turn to two rather distinct films about pearls: A Strine of Pearls
(Yichuan zhenzhu, Changcheng, 1926), the earliest extant narrative film
written by Hou, and Lustrous Pearls ( Ye minezhu: Huaju, 192 7). Both lib-
erally draw upon foreign and indigenous sources and point to the het-
erogeneous aesthetic and social orientations characteristic of the period
Zheng .Junli called the "booming era" of Chinese cinema. The two pearl-
centered films related differently to the ascendance of the script (or,
screenwriting, in a quite graphic sense), and to a particular storytelling
mode heavily reliant upon the notion of retribution (baoyine}. In ver-
nacular usage, retribution suggests repetition and balancing of moral or
economical debts across time and space, including the boundary be-
152 I tween life and the afterlife. The cinematic adoptions of the Buddhism-
influenced concept and other traditional notions permeating Chinese
everyday life are complicated because the medium, as a mechanical
mimetic machine, gives new shapes and meanings to the human soul
and body. The circulation of pearls and, indeed, the circular narrative tra-
jectory bound to them can be viewed as materialization of retribution
undergoing stressful transformation-at times quite literally.
Both films contain explicit elements related to retribution. A String of
Pearls, meticulously scripted by Hou Yao for the patriotic Changcheng
Company and based on Guy de Maupassant's short story HThe Diamond
Necklace," seamlessly harnesses those elements to create a cautionary
tale about female vainglory and a moral allegory of urban modernity's
corruptibility. The cycle of exchange in the film, while continuing to
bring back the specter of the commodity fetish embodied by the neck~
lace, is also suggestive of a gender relation in a state of upheaval. By con-
trast, Lustrous Pearl~. scripted by and starring Zhang Huirnin, a self-styled
film entrepreneur and a Shanghai local hero (as a famous fire-brigade
chief), freely mixes elements of folktale and the American "serial-queen
drama" series which were quite popular in China. Lu~·trous Pearls may not
seem to originate in any elaborate dramaturgy or film theory, as did k
Strine of Pearls. I am inclined, however, to view the film as an extension
of a film aesthetic and practice rooted in the earlier teahouse mode ol
Screenwriting, Trick Photography, and Melodramatic Retribution
production and presentation, which emphasized spontaneity and physi-

cal action over artful realism and psychological absorption. In Zhang's
action-packed film, a group of athletic male and female characters stage
adventurous acts in a wild landscape-a far cry from Hou's interiorized
urban theater and family drama.
The films' different narratives can also be understood allegorically in
relation to the intense competition in the Shanghai film scene at the
time. The disparities reveal the plural approaches in the search for a lan-
guage of storytelling, particularly the melodramatic form (or forms),
within a fast-developing film industry and market. Together they repre-
sent a historical moment laden with translated ideas, competing life-
styles, and polymorphous gender roles-a cultural landscape permeated
with new possibilities and residues of a lingering past. My analysis of the
two films thus serves in part to contrast the different narrative models
available to Shanghai filmmakers at the time, especially with regard to
their uses of existing storytelling conventions and modes of.address.
SCREENWRITING AS °COMPOSITION"
As examined in chapter 3, no systematic distinctions were made between

the "director" and the "screenwriter" in the teahouse mode of film pro- I 153
duction. Up until the early 1920s, the bulk of the Chinese cinema of at-
tractions consisted of actualities, travelogues, short physical comedies,
and filmed sensational civilized plays. The early short story films such as
Laborer's Love had a lean outline but a shooting script was unheard of. The
sketchy scenario outline, derived from the mubiao practice of the civilized
play, 2 served as a production's haphazard reference point rather than a
rigorous blueprint. With the onset of the long story film, however, a syn-
opsis was no longer adequate for a cinema that relied on a sustained plot
and dramatic conflict. The increased number of characters also required
sophisticated dialogue and other intertitles to convincingly help the nar-
rative unfold. For the silent cinema, this increased verbality created a
heightened importance for the written word.
This new trend attracted a number of fiction writers, particularly the
Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school, including Bao Tianxiao, Shen
Zhengya, Zhu Shouju, and Zhou Shoujuan. Many of these writers began
to get directly involved in cinema in a period when Butterfly literature it-
self adopted the vernacular and gained an unprecedented mass appeal.
The May Fourth writers such as Lu Xun, however, relentlessly attacked
this literature on the grounds that it catered to the "feudal" taste of the
petty urbanites and indulged a leisure-seeking readership. 3
In Bao Tianxiao's memoir, he vividly recalled the first time he ven-
Chapter Five
tured into film as a screenwriter. In 1924, the booming Mingxing Com-

pany was suddenly beset by a serious shortage of scripts Uuben huang), as
it was no longer possible or desirable to rapidly churn out skeletal mubiao
for long films. One day, Zheng Zhengqiu called upon his friend Bao, then
an editor at the newspaper Shibao, with a request: Mingxing wanted to
engage him to write a script based on his widely popular novel Orchid in
the Empty Valley. The novel had been successfully adapted into a civilized
play by Bao and Zheng ten years earlier. Bao, knowing nothing about the
film business, humbly replied, "You are really asking a blind man for di-
rections. I don't know anything about scieenwriting, and have never
seen a script. How can I start writing oner Zheng replied that it would
be simple enough-Bao only needed to concoct a plot with complicated
twists and turns plus some tragicomic elements, and the company would
then expand and divide it into scenes and acts (fenchangfenmu). Bao had
always considered himself a believer in Hu Shi's pragmatic "experimen-
talism," willing to try any new literary form or medium. Beside immense
curiosity, another factor that motivated him was the lucrative payment: a
hundred yuan for the script. Compared to the meager rate of two yuan
per thousand characters for his serialized fiction, the screenwriter's job
would give every written word much more value, not to mention glam-
154 I our. When the film turned out to be a big hit, the veteran writer, seeing
his name on the screen as the screenwriter (bianju), was a bit ashamed as
he knew the finished film was rather far from his "script." 4
What made this earlier screenwriting practice peculiar was the indis-
pensable role played by the writer of intertitles, the shuoming (explica-
tor)-a title may have derived from the oral announcer or interpreter in
early exhibition practice. Generally in the credits, the name of the expli-
cator was juxtaposed with the screenwriter. In the strictest sense of the
word, screenwriting was a composite act performed in production and
during exhibition. 5 The prominence offered to Bao Tianxiao was likely a
ploy to capitalize on his popularity and turn his vast number of readers
into film audience members. Although the intertitles bear some visible
traces of the original story, the script had little to do with the film. For Or-
chid in the Empty Valley, Zheng Zhengqiu assumed the role of the explica-
tor, masterfully rendering the soul of Bao's script into a visible body. The
cinematic vocabulary (such as framing and editing}, however, was largely
left to the director.
This doubled-up screenwriting process was further complicated by the
diversity of writing forms that separated the verbal and the visual. The
synopsis and intertitles for the third-person narration were mostly writ-
ten in a semidassical language quite similar to the early Butterflies liter-
ature, whereas the dialogue titles were in the contemporary vernacular
prose. In The Science ofScreenwriting," 6 a Changming textbook, the authors

offered some explanations for this hierarchy of writings:
In Chinese shadowplay, the main intertitles (zong shuoming) should

be written in the simplified classical language while the minor in-
tertitles (fen shuomin9) should be in the vernacular. This is a very·
good division. The intertitles in a shadowplay should avoid the use
of abstruse words, especially unfamiliar allusions, because within a
short time, the glances of the spectator pass quickly and there is no time for
elaborate thinking. Some people suggest that the intertitles should
use only unrefined language, and that it is not necessary oo pay at-
tention to the literary value. This is really a shallow man's su-
perficial view and the crazy talk of the uneducated! If a very val-
ued literary work will be used as the material for adaptation, how
can you use a vulgar language in intertitles to trample on the men
of letters and spoil the canon? 7
Authors took pains to balance the distance between the loftier status of
major literary works and the vernacular taste of the mass audience, be-
cause the popular nature of the film experience leaves little room or time
for recondite learning in the classical language. It also reveals some of the I 155
fundamental contradictions of the vernacular movement. The teaching
resonates with Hu Shi's "eight do not-ism" manifesto, in which he called
for a literary language that would, among other things, be free of classi-
cal allusions. By upholding the canons' "literary value" yet acknowledg-
ing cinema's vernacular appeal the writers exposed the ambivalent rela-
tionship between popular cinema and the vernacular movement. In spite
of its democratic intentions, the movement quickly evolved from a mass-
oriented project into a "neoclassical language as criticized by the Marx-
ist critic Qu Qiubai.
However, the situation with cinema was arguably different because
the written word was only part of its experience. In a pragmatic sense,
the task of the filmmakers and critics was to negotiate between the di-
verse cultural resources and interests that gave rise to this new cinematic
trend. The cohabitation of classical and vernacular, written and spoken
languages created a shared space for disparate cultural sensibilities and
temporalities. 8 This composite method provided an innovative means
for inventing screenwriting at a time when the cinema was deeply en-
meshed in a multitude of cultural practices and representational forms.
More importantly, it resonated with the host of languages, including
their inflections and accents, heard or seen in the streets, the newspa-
pers, and the theaters in Shanghai and elsewhere.
Chapter Five
While Chinese silent cinema was heavily indebted to the rich reper-
toire of old and new vernacular literature, a number of attempts were
made to adapt world literature to the Chinese screen for both local and
diasporic audiences. In part these adaptations derived from the highly in-
stitutionalized practice of translating world literature into Chinese, which
had flourished since the late Qing period. Existing filmographies indicate
a few dozen or so foreign adaptations, which comprised a persistent
strand of Chinese silent cinema from the early 191 Os through the early
1930s.
In her study of the "composition" of the 1ew Woman in late Qing
China, Hu Ying finds that this highly gendered image appeared in trans-
lation as a collective production of the modern imaginary. The Chinese
New Woman was an imported cosmopolitan product bearing resem-
blance to La dame aux camellias, Sophia Perovskaia, and Madame Roland
de la Platiere. Yet, as she was being composed in(to) Chinese, she took on
features and behaviors of her would-be literary ancestors and sisters in
the Chinese literary tradition. Thus it was not surprising to find a revolu-
tionary who was also a filial daughter, or a chaste widow who recited a
poem from Romeo and Juliet-in short, a composite figure that was nei-
ther ''original" nor "coherent." 9 Ru's study demonstrates that translation,
156 I just as with the creation of the Chinese New Woman, "bristles with im-
plications about the difficulties in presuming either 'fidelity' of transla-
tion or adequacy in representing cross-cultural experience." Translation
as such, beyond the literal and literary domains, is thus "a tension ridden
'contact zone."' 10
I have identified approximately thirty films that are apparent adapta-
tions, including A String of Pearls, although some original sources remain
obscure. I say "apparent" because, as Hu Ying's example of Jade Pear Spirit
(a popular novel second-handedly based on La Dame aux camellias) shows,
there are often opaque translations and derivatives that do not corre-
spond directly to their sources. Not surprisingly, the screen adaptation of
Shen Zhengya's novel, a text in classical prose derived from the Camellia
story, was a box-office hit in 1924. Shen's serialized story was a far cry
from the French original, which had been first translated into classical
Chinese by Lin Shu in 1898. Shen transfigured the famous Parisian cour-
tesan into a Chinese widow who, painstakingly trying to obey the Con-
fucian codes of chastity, renounces her desire for her own child's teacher,
a young handsome scholar, only to die of depression and melancholy.
As a comprehensive aesthetic and cultural form, the cinematic expe-
rience was deeply implicated in the translation and domestication of
Western technology and ideas. Early film exhibition more often than not
involved the instrumental presence of a simultaneous "interpreter" or
explicator. Their commentaries could be very far from what the images
"intended" to say and often served as means of mediation between for-
eign sights and local tastes. In the process, the exotic images were infused
with a set of new meanings and became, to use Hu's wording in a cine-
matic sense, a "composition." Their "translingual practice" 11 not only
crossed the linguistic barriers but medial and cultural thresholds as well.
SOULS TO THOSE SHADOWS
Xu Zhuodai, 12 author of The Science of Shadow-play (1924), and Hou Yao,

author of Techniques of Writing Shadowplay Scripts ( 1925, hereafter Tech-
niques),13 were two prominent film personalities who uniquely repre-
sented the energetic small companies in the colorful film world of the
1920s. At the outset, Xu and Hou seem to have embraced two opposite
positions on cinema's relationship to drama. Xu explicitly argued for the
singularity of shadow (ying) in the cinematic experience, whereas Hou
persistently adhered to play (xi) as the foundation of cinema. Yet Xu said
elsewhere that "shadowplay is really about play." 14 Obviously, xi has two
meanings here. It represents serious "drama" for Hou Yao, whereas for
Xu xi is derived from youxi, or play (and playfulness} that is not neces-
sarily confined to the theater space. Both shared an obsession with the I 157
soul (linghun) of shadowplay. For Hou, this soul has recourse to a new
form of verbal art, the film script. For Xu, who was known for his versa-
tility as both a comedian and a popular writer, however, the shadowy
"soul" was found in the unstable identity of the photographed body.
Despite their different and even contrary ideological and aesthetic per-
suasions, each harbored a dramatist and, to some extent, pedagogical zest
for ethical education, now mediated through the magic of cinema. While
Hou was serious about creating a film language for dramatizing tragedy
and his disenchantment with the May Fourth enlightenment, Xu was
committed to carrying over the spirit of comic relief and quotidian enter-
tainment into the cinematic venture. Hou's ambivalence toward cinema
stemmed from his adherence to a naturalist dramaturgy that emphasized
mimetic representation and .its social function. By contrast Xu embraced
cinema as a new form of mass entertainment and found in cinematogra-
phy the potential for a playful embodiment of modern subjectivity.
During this period, the space of the movie theater was structurally
transforming to condition spectators physically and psychologically for a
cinema of narrative integration and moral edification. Thus the attempt
to inscribe the "soul" of shadowplay underscores a desire to establish an
organic and more stable connection between the spectator and cinema.
The script could endow the electric shadows with traces of tangible sub-
Chapter Five
stance, pacifying the anxiety over the ontological status of the medium.
The institutionalization of the script not only incorporated popular But-
terfly literature writers into the film world but also attracted progressive
spoken drama playwrights including Hou Yao, Hong Shen, and Tian Han
(1898-1968) to write for the silver screen. With cinema becoming pop-
ular and commercially viable in a booming urban culture, the question
whether or not cinema had a distinguished, authorial soul behind or
transcending the flat screen suddenly acquired urgency.
In the preface to his Techniques, Hou states that the #script is the soul
of a film." In the book, however, he cons{stently views the cinema as a
new form of drama. To be sure, soul was hardly a novel category in Chi-
nese dramaturgy. For centuries, the Chinese theater, deeply embedded in
folk religions, has been, among other things, the familiar habitat of wan-
dering souls. The theater has functioned as a liminal space for the living
to appease, exorcise, and encounter the souls of the diseased and reli-
gious deities in order to come to terms with them. 15 The actors were of-
ten liminal figures, too, since they themselves often came from among
"ignoble," marginal social groups. 16 Frequently staged in town squares or
village temples during festivities or funerary rituals, the collective expe-
rience of the theater, so vividly depicted in Lu Xun's Temple Theater
158 I (Shexi), also provided the point for social conviviality and cultural initia-
tion of the young.11
As many actors of the traditional theater were often illiterate or semi-
literate, the scripts were often passed on orally and through rigorous
hands-on teaching by the masters. Actors often started as young chil-
dren, joining the troupe, which was organized as family, in lieu of at-
tending school. Even in the early twentieth century, as Ouyang Yuqian
recalls, the many Peking opera plays he authored were not intended for
publication. He taught other actors orally and used scrap paper with lines
and directions, but there were hardly complete scripts. Some were sim-
ply recorded by other theater teachers during performances. Published
plays attributed to him were sometimes quite different from the versions
performed. 18 The spirit of a stage play seemed largely consigned to the
contingency of performance and lodged in the bodies of the actors, much
different than Hou's attempt to relocate it within the screenwriter's mind.
As mentioned in chapter 3, the story of the Emperor Wu of Han Dy-
nasty meeting his deceased concubine's soul was reconstructed as the
earliest instance of the proto-shadowplay by film commentators in the
1920s. A performing artist had a square cloth screen lined up, behind
which a woman resembling the concubine danced in dim candlelight. In
the evening, watching the moving shadow of the actress on the screen,
the emperor was convinced that he saw his deceased concubine.
The association of a projected image with an embodied soul was still

current but acquired new meanings when photography and cinema were
introduced to China in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Growing
up in that period, Lu Xun observed how the Chinese believed that the
camera would steal the subject's soul; some even imagined Westerners'
eyes as minicameras ready to suck out the Chinese hearts to make
pickles. Even those who dared to be photographed avoided a bust por-
trait, because it would look as though one had been chopped in half-a
traditional execution method. 19 Many late Qing illustrated newspapers
and magazines (e.g., Dianshizhai huabao and Tuhua ribao) carried numer-
ous drawings of the horror and wonder evoked by photography, telegra-
phy, and X-ray. It was widely believed that electricity was a form of the
soul, or that it could be embodied through transmission. 20 One of the gifts
that the Dowager Empress Cixi received for her seventieth birthday cel-
ebration in 1904 was a projector and some film reels from the British
Minister at the embassy in Beijing. Shortly after the show started, how-
ever, the power generator exploded. Cixi was frightened and decided that
the cinema was inauspicious. The deadly lore of the cinema was aug-
mented by another incident involving members of the imperial family
showing films in the palace when several attendant officials were killed
by yet another explosion. Henceforth, film was not allowed inside the I 159
imperial palace.2 1
By the mid- l 920s the power of the electric shadowplay, associated
with life and death, was transformed into a commercial miracle that ri-
valed the theater and the print media. Even after the May Fourth en-
lightenment, which relentlessly attacked the so-called feudal supersti-
tions, the vocabulary of the immaterial soul in relation to the spectral
moving shadows persisted in the discourse on film.
Hou Yao was one of the few early cinema personalities who actually
had a direct tie to the May Fourth movement proper. In the early 1920s.
before Hou joined the Great Wall Company as a screenwriter-in-chief, he
had been involved in the Literary Association (Wenxue yanjiuhui), a ma-
jor May Fourth intellectual organ founded by Zheng Zhenduo, Shen Yan-
bing (Mao Dun), and Zhou Zuoren in Beijing in 1921. The association
consecutively clustered around the two foremost progressive vernacular
literary journals, the New Tide (Xinchao) and Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yue-
bao). The latter was owned and operated by the Commercial Press, the
Shanghai media giant. Hou embraced the humanist principle of art for
life's sake (wei rensheng de yishu) of the Literary Association and believed
art should "represent life. criticize life, harmonize life, and beautify life."
His passion for the theater, however, also stemmed from a pedagogical
principle. Because he had studied education at Nanjing University and
Chapter Five
was active in the New Drama, Hou's conception of the theater was not far
from Zheng Zhengqiu's: "Theater is the laboratory for social education.
Actors are the best teachers to impart this education." In his preface to
Techniques he described himself as a gardener (yuanding) charged with the
responsibility of cultivating the sprouting Chinese cinema. The horticul-
tural metaphor, often used to describe a devoted educator in China, also
subtly invokes the term pear garden (liyuan), which traditionally stands
for the theater world, or rather, the "school" where young pupils are dis-
ciplined by their mentors. Hou's insistence on equating life with the-
ater-a rather old view, in fact-was m6st dearly spelled out in the
opening of his book: "Life is really an endless drama. Human beings have
to continue to act out those sad partings and happy reunions, living
and aging, becoming sick and dying, declines and growths, gains and
losses .... The theater is really the epitome of human life." 22 The mod-
ern shadowplay constituted for him a privileged subcategory of drama far
more capable of achieving collective catharsis through its mass appeal
and vividness.
For Hou, the life-world, like the theater world, is comprised of prob-
lems that make it possible to transform notions from the traditional the-
ater of suffering and redemption in the afterlife into a set of burning mod-
160 I em concerns. Two modern Western writers in particular influenced him:
Ibsen and Maupassant, whose plays and stories were enthusiastically
translated by the May Fourth writers, especially members of the Literary
Association. Hou's first script for Great Wall, The Abandoned Wife (Qifu,
1924; starring Wang Hanlun) (fig. 5.1), was based on his eponymous
stage play. In essence an expose of the "problem of women's employ-
ment," it ponders the after effects of Chinese Nora leaving home. The
script, written entirely in the May Fourth-style vernacular, complete
with scene numbers and camera setups, was appended to Techniques. 23
According to the screenplay, the female protagonist Wu Zhifang has
left her unfaithful husband, seeking independence and respect from so-
ciety. But the modern city, seemingly a haven for educated and profes-
sional women, proves to be another prison. She works as a secretary at a
press where the boss demands sexual favors from her and her male col-
leagues harass her. Her maid goes to school, only to be looked down
upon by the school principal and her classmates. Wu then devotes her-
self to the suffrage movement but has to flee the city when her estranged
husband and the police begin to persecute her for being a radical. She
eventually dies of illness, hunger, robbery, and shock when the police
come to arrest her in a mountain nunnery where she has sought refuge.
Crying over the dead body of this women's liberation martyr, the maid
condemns society for devouring women and vows to fight on. Here, Wu's
5.1 The Abandoned Wife

( 1924) starring Wang
Hanlun. (Courtesy of
the China Film Archive)
I 161
corpse becomes an effective "living" mise-en-scene statement against a

corrupt, male-dominated society. There is no need to revive Wu's soul
since her maid, who has practically become her sister after they left the
oppressive home, stands as her incarnation. The film, however, has not
survived the ravages of time; only its script was retained in Hou's text.
THE SORCERY OF TRICK PHOTOGRAPHY
One year before Hou Yao wrote his Techniques, Xu Zhuodai had already
published The Science of Shadowplay. Xu did not explicitly assert the cen-
trality of the script as Hou did; instead, he seemed obsessed with the no-
tion of the photographic shadow and its peculiar, playful relation to the
soul. While Hou was a keen admirer of Ibsen and Maupassant, Xu reveals
himself to be a fan of German expressionism and its progenitor, roman-
ticism, and the technique of tuolike (trick) using double-exposure. In the
very first chapter, he sets out to distinguish film drama (yingpianju) from
theater drama (wutaiju), using the early German film Student of Prague
Chapter Five
(1913) as an independent art consisting of moving shadow pictures. 24 It

is appropriate that the short sample script (only a synopsis and the first
scene were included) in the book is called Shadow (A Thought Drama)
(Ying [sixiang ju}). This story is obviously modeled after Paul Wegener's
film, about a student's Faustian bargain. The hero is a young medical stu-
dent who is well versed in philosophy and science" but deeply tor-
0
mented by his dread of death. An evil demon encourages him to go on

living as a misanthrope. A good (redeemed) demon tries, however, to
cure him by advising him to look toward light instead of his own shadow.
He tells the student that light stands foleternity and shadow stands for
the present. The fear of death originates in the student's obsession with
his shadow, that is, his own mental shallowness and lack of substance.
The good demon gives the student a drug that can keep his shadow ex-
posed near the radiant light. Day in and day out, the student diligently
works without complaining. As a consequence, his shadow becomes less
and less ugly; more surprisingly, it begins to overlap with his body. The
student is thus able to sleep without the fear of death. At the end, the
good demon revisits the student, telling him from now on there will be
neither life nor death, except for the eternal light. Finally redeemed, the
soul of the student walks alongside the good demon toward boundless
162 I transcendence.
While Shadow bears striking resemblance to Student of Prague, it also di-
verges from the latter in some crucial aspects. The duality embodied by
the two demons clearly rehearses the romantic motif of the doppelganger
in Student ofPrague. But in the latter, the double is played out between the
student himself and his own reflection, which is sold to the devil for the
money needed in his pursuit of an aristocratic woman. The Prague stu-
dent loses his mirror image but cannot get rid of his own haunted soul,
and ends up killing the other self. The loss of the symmetrical vision
0 0
(the bodily self and the reflection) is the cause of spiritual destruction in
his pursuit of social ascendance. Once severed, the wandering shadowy
self is no longer the friend in the mirror, but a deadly repetition beyond
salvation. In Shadow the student confronts his own double along a differ-
ent trajectory. The redemption of the student here proceeds from the op-
posite: his shadow (rather than reflection) has to be reunited (rather than
killed) with his body in order for him to attain existential harmony, or
take form in the "projected" (not present) life-world. The soul at peace is
an asymptotically embodied being rather than a vacuous ghost image.
The shadow here is not a replica (or reflection) of the self, but rather a
chimerical demonic force associated with darkness, which ultimately,
through "exposure" by the chemical effect of the medicine, is submerged
and awash in light, thus completing the "development" or metamorpho-
sis of the negative into positive.i~
Screenwriting, Trick Photography, and Melodrarricltic Retribution
In both instances, the allusion to photography is unmistakable, yet

with certain variances. While Student of Prague accentuates the perceptual
confusion between the body and the soul, Shadow is more concerned
with the moral conflict highlighted by the allegorical play between
shadow and light, evil and goodness. In the German film, the drama re-
volves around the tragic effect of the mimetic infidelity between the stu-
dent's body and his mirror image. The image retaining traces of his past
as a poor student. which he left behind, haunts him like a living corpse,
or nwanders ghostlike through the present.n 26 Once the image is sold as
a commodity, it takes on a separate life of its own. Without the familiar
reflection framed in the mirror, it is no longer clear which version of the
student is the authentic one; and the two cannot converge except in the
event of (second) death, which erases both the original and the copy.
In Xu's sample script. we are confronted with a shadow that is not an
exact mirror image. The whole episode resembles a nightmare in which
the spectral sensation arises in the liminal space between sleep and awak-
ening. The moment when the student dissolves his shadow into eternal
light approximates when a dreamer feels the "action of light upon the eye
or other sensitive medium" (such as film).27 If the emergence of the spec-
tral shadow into embodied light in this story suggests the process of film
projection, it carries all the soda! and ethical implications as well. When I 163
the good demon waves his hand (in a manner typical of the early pho-
tographer addressing the sitter) and calls forth the young man's shadow,
the latter rather resembles the evil demon that the student believed to be
his own image. The instruction for shooting indicates that a trick shot is
needed here to have the same actor appearing twice simultaneously in
the frame (erchong zhiyi) through double-exposure. The writer cautions
the actor to be particularly careful. not to confuse his two distinct po-
sitions.28 A dose-up displays the grotesque, greedy expression of the
shadow. The emphasis on the incongruity, not only in substance but also
in physiognomic form, of the split sides of the self, leaves space for trans-
formation rather than confusion, thereby foregrounding the potential of
moral redemption.
The fascination with tuolike (trick) technique-(Xu devoted a whole
chapter to the techniques of reproducing transparent ghost images or
daydreams [fig. 5.2])-resonates with a peculiar cultural perception of
the body and objective reality, beyond simple toying with the camera.
Xu's own film productions (as director and actor) in the mid-I 920s in-
cluded subjects that required extensive use of trick cinematography: The
Invisible Coat (Yinshen yi, 1925), The Magic Club (Shenxian bang, 1926),
The Mobile Safe (Huodong yinxiang, 1926), to name a few. But in addition
to playing with trick techniques, Xu seems more interested in its impli-
cation for the role of the actor. In The Science of Shadowplay the fictional
Chapter Five
names of many actors contain the character yin9 (shadow), as though a
whole breed of Chinese actors is camera-ready for double-exposure. 29
The penchant for "double-roles" may be traced to the civilized play ac-
tors who indulged in playing different, or even antithetical, parts both
on- and offstage. Many early popular magazines often carried photo-
graphs of actors in various disguises and, more tellingly, their split or
multiple personalities within the same trick image [figs. 5.3-4]. This the-
atrical trend, however, has to be placed in a larger cultural framework.
In his satirical essay on the practice of photography in China, written
in the same year as Xu's text, Lu Xun sufumarizes the form of photogra-
phy as "essentially ... sorcery." He recalls that although a photography
studio opened in his hometown S (Shaoxing) in the late nineteenth cen-
tury, only those who either had "bad luck" or were "radicals" were eager
to have their souls taken by the camera. The "famous/ Bohemian per-
sonages and fashionable dandies" (mingshi fengliu) of the time experi-
mented with a prevalent genre or composition called the "two-self pic-
ture" (erwo tu) (fig. 5.5), in which the sitter would pose twice in different
attire and expression, and then the two exposures would be made into a
single photograph. This format was also called ·separate body photo-
graphs" (fen shen xian9) (fig. 5.6). "But if one self sits in an arrogant pos-
164 I ture while the other self obsequiously and pitifully kneels down in front
the former, the name is then different and is called 'the self begging the
self picture' (qiuji tu)." As though the irony were not obvious enough,
the photographed subject would later caption the picture with some po-
etic lines. This, according to Lu Xun, is akin to the traditional practice in
which men of letters would inscribe their own art and the artwork they
possessed, before they hung them on the wall in their study}° For him,
these photographic forms vividly illustrate the master-slave dialectic. De-
spite his patently satirical tone, Lu Xun recorded a critical moment in the
history of photography· in China. It called attention to an at once frag-
mented and recomposed subject caught between separate yet superim-
posed worlds, or, in Homi Bhabha's phraseology, on the "split screen of
the self and its doubling" in a colonial setting. 31
This tension-ridden double-life, when processed by the photographic
double-exposure or sorcery effect, takes on the spectral forms of the
"two-self picture" and "self-begging picture." These staged split images
are kindred spirits of the double professional roles in trick shots, as visu-
alized by Xu. They all seem to acknowledge the epistemological, ethical,
and social dimensions imprinted on the photographed image. Appearing
in China at a time of tremendous cultural change and unsure identities,
the uncanny power of photography generated a double-edged knowl-
edge that linked a modern medium with certain superstitious beliefs
I 16s
5.2 Illustrations for trick cinematography in The Science of Shadowp/ay.

Chapter Five
166 I
5.3 Xu Zhuodai (Xu Banmei). the author of TheScienceofShadowplay, in a femaie role.
about appearance and soul, body and selfhood, physiognomy and char-
acter. Even the daredevil fashionable dandies, as modern incarnations
of the traditional literati, embraced photography as a sort of spiritual
medium. It enabled the bodily manifestation of one's ambivalent phan~
tom other(s), and the mobilization of multiple perspectives on selfhood
5.4 Actors playing with trick photography.
1 167
5.5
The two-self picture
(erwo tu}.
Chapter Five
5.6 Separate body

photograph
(fenshen Jr.ian9).
and the external world through the manipulation of juxtaposed expo-

sures of the same actor. In this sense, the self-begging picture and the
double professional roles of the actor resemble the spiritualist images
168 I in early photography and film found in other cultures. Tom Gunning
sees the phantasmagoric quasi-religious images used by the spiritualists
as "modern manifestations." They are modern because, although some
served as "evidence of a supernatural metaphysical existence, the spirit
photographs also present a uniquely modern conception of the spirit
world as caught up in the endless play of image making and reproduction
and the creation of simulacra." n
To be sure, there are not only vast regions of historical time but also
paradigmatic cultural and technological differences separating the worlds
of the Han emperor's simulacrum and trick photography studio at the
dawn of the twentieth century. While the emperor contented himself
with a live performance and remained an external spectator of the fe~
male image in a private "screening room," the becoming-modern dandy
was aided by the magic power of photography to publicly exhibit an am-
bivalent narcissism. The latter fabricated not only a multiplied selfhood
but also a self-conscious, three-tiered viewing subject: the dressed-up
"master" watched the "slave" and vice versa, and the third, the "original'/
or predisguised author-sitter who posed for and signed the photograph
with epigrammatic poetry for daily introspection.
The self-begging picture is also suggestive of a cinematic impulse, as
it is essentially a heterogeneous product made of two (or several) differ-.
ent frames, moving from stasis toward mobility or transformation. 33 The
final composition, ornamented with poetic lines (like title cards in a silent
film), presents a trick shot laden with narrative tensions between a series
of originals and copies, distributed unevenly across different social and
ethical planes. The impulse to use backdrops and mise-en -scene props in-
side the studio-a practice carried over from portraiture tradition and
stage performance-also anticipated the use of painted backdrops and
real objects in early film practice.
In Xu's sample script Shadow, the student finally attains his soul by re-
nouncing the dark forces within him. This renunciation or, rather, expo-
sure, tends to erase traces of a heterogeneous subject. In his interpreta-
tion of Benjamin's historico-philosophical conception of the medium,
Eduardo Cadava writes: "The conquest of darkness by the increased light
of photography conjures a link of fidelity between the photograph and
the photographed. Yet it is precisely the conviction in the coincidence, in
the photographic possibility of faithful reproduction, that marks the de-
cline of photography." What spurred Benjamin's reaction to this decline
was the "forgetting of the photography's ghostly o.r spectral character" as
a result of the rise of a "mimetic ideology of realism" fueled by the tech-
nical perfection of the apparatus. 34 Xu's brief sample script, subtitled a
"thought drama," remained an unrealized idea. Despite the eventual for-
getting of death and exorcism of the uncanny dark force, the story as a I 169
whole shows its author's lingering attachment to "photography's ghostly
or spectral character." While Hou tried to find the soul of narrative film
in the legitimate theater and literature, Xu pursued it in cinema's debt to
photography, acknowledging its transformative power, especially its ca-
pacity for composing modern subjectivities.
A STRING OF PEARLS: RETRIBUTION

OF COMMODITY DESIRE
Having explored the inchoate relationship between the ascendance of the

script and competing perceptions of soul and body· operative in early
twentieth-century Chinese media culture, I now return to Hou's A String
of Pearls to examine how he applied and projected his theory on screen-
writing onto the silver screen (fig. 5.7). It was one of the many films he
scripted for Great Wall, a studio founded in 1924 by film enthusiasts who
had studied in America. Hou Yao, who had not studied abroad, joined the
company that year. In an attempt to differentiate itself from other com-
mercial companies that relied heavily on the Butterfly fiction, Great Wall
emphasized the importance of the independent script: #Without good
scripts, we'd rather not hastily make any films in three or five months
that might ... corrupt the society, humiliate the country." 35
110 1
5.7 Ad for A String of Pet1rls (1926). (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
Despite his insistence on imposing the naturalist drama's mimetic

function on cinema, Hou was conscious of cinematography's power to
embody a film's moral soul, or to rekindle the magic of the written word.
In the film, this soul is writ large in the animated word-image-thin$ of
the fateful pearl necklace, making concrete the ambivalence toward the
cinema's double identity-a potential vehicle for mass literacy and edu-·
cation as well as a mass-mediated commodity. Hou's critique of. com-
modity fetishism and urban modernity, and elevation of writing over im-
age, paradoxically resorted to cinema's capacity for retooling the
primitive power of mimesis or closing the distance between words and
things.
Hou's script transplants Maupassant's story to a Chinese setting, turn-
ing it into a "family problem drama" set in Shanghai's emergent urban
culture. The original short story is about a young couple that borrows a
diamond necklace from a rich friend so that the wife can wear it to a ball.
But the necklace is lost on their way home, and the couple has to work
very hard for ten years before they can repay the debt. Only then, after
all the hard work and social degradation they have endured is the truth
revealed. The lost necklace is in fact a fake. They have paid 35,000 francs
to purchase a new necklace: the fake one only cost 350 francs. 36
In Hou's version, all the characters assume ordinary Chinese names I 171
and the setting of the story has been changed to a private party in Shang-
hai during the Lantern Festival, celebrating the full moon on the fif-
teenth day of the first lunar month (fig. 5.8). Several other key elements
were replaced to enhance the narrative function of the necklace and its
commodity nature, as well as its cultural and cinematic appeal to the Chi-
nese audience. Instead of diamonds, the necklace is now a string of
pearls, a familiar motif in traditional Chinese folklore and literature. The
5.8 A String of Pearls: "Lantern Festival" in electric writing.

Chapter Five
wife's name contains the character zhen (precious), which is a prefix for
the word pearl in Chinese (zhenzhu, literally. "precious beads"). The resid-
ual hieroglyphic elements in Chinese characters make it easier to reveal
such connections (or connotations and puns) between things and
people's character, especially as Chinese names can be made out of al-
most any character in the dictionary.
The round shape of pearls (and the string, or chuan) and their literary
association with tears combine to make the necklace a pertinent narra-
tive vehicle for a melodrama about the commodity circulation and desire
in an emerging Chinese metropolis. A String ofl Pearls underscores the
danger to the nuclear family in a modern city by adding a child to the
picture and foregrounds the moral conflict encountered by the urban
woman, who is poised between the private and public spheres. Feeling
obliged to provide for his wife, Wang borrows a string of pearls from a
friend who runs a jewelry store. The husband works at an insurance
company (rather than a government bureau, as in Maupassant's story),
which allows the narrative to unfold in a different direction. The neck-
lace belonged to a female customer who had brought it to a jewelery
store for repair. Wang tries to borrow money from relatives and friends,
but without much success. In the end. he steals money from his com-
172 I pany's safe to buy a new necklace, gets caught, and is promptly sent to
prison. Xiuzhen moves to a slum, barely surviving by mending clothes
(fig. 5. 9, 5.10).
Hou also made bold alterations to the second half of the story, spin-
ning a subplot into a circular tale of moral retribution. With that resolu-
tion, the sexual imbalance caused by the (woman's) desire for material
display is readjusted and the family and social order recaptured. After his
release, Wang does menial labor at a factory where a certain Mr. Ma
works as an accountant. As it turns out, Ma had hired a hooligan to steal
the necklace after he saw at the party how much the party hostess Fu
Meixian admired it. He won Fu's heart with the stolen beads and married
her. The hooligan, however, has been blackmailing Ma, who in turn has
been taking more money from the office safe to keep the secret. Finally,
Wang "coincidentally" finds himself rescuing Ma from a violent attack by
the hooligan. At the hospital, Ma repents, revealing the truth. Fu buys
back the Wang family's house, and things return to normal-'-except that
the inauspicious pearl necklace has been excised frorri the picture.
A String of Pearls makes visible the cultural and economic presence of
the West in Shanghai. Hou's script, however, results from "borrowing" as
much as from cultural translation, enabled by a global sphere of mass
culture, exchange, and consumptionY By placing the centerpiece of
mise-en-scene-a string of pearls-in a prolonged economic trajectory,
i.9 A Siring of Pearls: At the pany. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
J 173
i. lO A Stl"in9 of Pearls: Reunion after the husband is released from jail. (Courtesy of the
:hina Film Archive)
Chapter Five
Hou's revision of the original story produces a highly dramatic effect of

reversal and accentuates the uncanny logic of repetition, reciprocity, and
social reproduction in a modernizing city. The exchangeability of the
social positions of the husband, who borrows the necklace to satisfy his
wife's vanity, and the friend, who steals the necklace to buy his fiancee's
affection, constitutes a double that is redolent of the doppelganger motif
in trick photography discussed earlier, only here no double exposures are
needed. Throughout the film, the necklace, once appearing, then van-
ishing, functions as a red thread linking different narrative elements and
characters, and thereby connecting an interie>t family drama to a larger
public scene and urban marketplace. This enigmatic object of desire and
an ornamental artifice wreaks havoc on a nuclear family of the new ur-
ban white-collar class. Through the narrative cycle, the necklace lives out
its full life as a quintessential commodity form, taking on a hieroglyphic
significance and haunting those who come into contact with it.
Even before the plot unfolds, several elements place the film in an
ambivalent space of cinematic consumption. The first appearance of the
company icon is formed by pearl-like dancing dots and then transfigured
into bricks of the Great Wall, a stylized but cliched emblem of Chinese
civilization. In the print I saw, a statement in both Chinese and English
174 I announces: #The Chinese Moving Picture Company's Manila distributor
has exclusive distribution rights in the Philippine islands. This indicates
N
that the film entered the lucrative Nanyang market, which was vital to
the Shanghai film industry at the time. The following credit displays the
film title encircled by a giant pearl necklace, which again forms a visual
reincarnation of the ancient Great Wall (fig. 5.1 la-b).
The collusion of the iconic Great Wall and the pearl necklace illus-
trates the production of a cinematic hieroglyph with a Chinese inflection.
5.1 la-b The company name is transformed into dancing dots (and then into the
"Great Wall").
Marx's classical definition of the commodity form as a hieroglyphic rests

on a reconceptualization of the fetish as both a magic object and a "per-
verse" image that lies at the heart of the "fantastic relations" between
things. He describes commodities as "social hieroglyphics" that ask to be
deciphered like a language or code.JS Prefiguring Benjamin's remarks on
the "forgetting" of photography's historical genesis in its "decline," Marx
points to the mechanism of collective amnesia as a crucial condition for
the production of a fetish, as "the intermediate steps of the process
vanish in the result and leave no trace behind." The modern day com-
modity fetish is doubly desacralized because it appears as though it
is a natural daily object free of any magic touch and has no histori-
cal grounding. 39 In a proposition that links Marx's commodity theory to
a broader conception of a mediatized mass culture, Theodor Adorno
reasons: "As image, the hieroglyphics [of mass culture] are the medium
of regression in which producer and consumer collude, as writing, they
supply archaic images to modemity." 40 Miriam Hansen goes further and
argues that the "regression" that Adorno describes parallels the "rever-
sion of Enlightenment into myth and the resurfacing of the archaic in
modern forms of domination." In industrialized society, while language
becomes increasingly instrumentalized, mass culture has acquired the
"archaic" appearance as a "language of images." However, it is precisely I 175
through the unwitting return to the mimetic faculty of language based
on hieroglyphic writing that modern mass culture resuscitates the an-
cient desire for aesthetic signification without the distance between the
sign and the image, the "producer" and the "consumer." 41
In A String ofPearls, the chimerical necklace-commodity, adornment,
graphic design, and writing-exerts its capacity of imaging mass culture
"in which producer and consumer collude." Here the hieroglyphic ap-
parition is even more emphatic and literal because of the cultural history
of ideogrammatic symbolism through Chinese characters: The impulse to
return to the archaic system of writing via the means of electric shadows
is ensconced, rather ambivalently, in a desire to showcase the lure as well
as the calamity of modern commodity culture. In a key moment, the im-
age of the necklace and the two Chinese ideographs meaning "misfor-
tune" collapse into legible animated hieroglyphic writing-or the. ~lan-
guage of images." This takes place in the sequence after Wang has gone
to jail and Xiuzhen must mend laborers' clothes. Xiuxhen's< nightly
sewing is intercut with a masked shot of her husband's forlorn posture
inside the cell. She is still at work at dawn, when the lyrical iritertitle
reads: "My tears must stop, for every drop I Hinders needles and thread."
As though evoked by the classical poetic allusion that links tears and
pearls, Xiuzhen, in a flashback, revisualizes the earlier scene when
Chapter Five
women at the party admired her necklace. As visual tokens of the

"tear drops" and "needles and thread" in the preceding monologue, the
threads and buttons on the table suddenly come to life, animated into
formation of two gigantic ideographs, Huo Hai (misfortune or catastro-
phe), thereby closing off the flashback (fig. 5.12a-b). The pearl necklace
eventually "dances" back into the shape of the threads and buttons, the
humdrum daily objects and tokens of a life in the urban lower depth. This
stop-animation brings back the necklace as a haunting specter, a hiero-
glyphic literally inscribing the moral soul of the film on the screen. Its
significance within both the daydream seqdence and the plot as a whole
vividly illustrates the other meaning of specter, namely-according to
the Epicureans-"an image or semblance supposed to emanate from cor-
poreal things, those that assail the soul when she ought to be at rest." 42
By deploying trick cinematography as a modern form of magic-one
that effectively links the commodity fetish to Xiuzhen's social degradation
and spiritual regression to archaic animism-In the service of a carefully
constructed narrative, the filmmakers demonstrated "film to be the rit-
ual cure for modern misfortune." 4 3
The circular movement of both the necklace and the plot, however, is
176 I
5.12a-d A sr.-ing of Pearls: The animated reenactment of "Misfortune."

fraught with pressure points. The narrative upheaval, as captured in the

animation, exposes commodity fetishism and the hieroglyphic, anachro-
nistic character of mass culture. The artistic and pedagogical intent of the
film is complicated by its very visual indulgence in displaying and circu-
lating the valuable yet superfluous object. The film's (or for that matter,
Great Wall's) dependence on the market, especially on the consumption
power of the overseas Chinese in Nanyang, who may or may not read
Chinese, presents A String of Pearls itself as a hieroglyphic commodity. As
universal Himage," it is highly readable; as Chinese "writing," it relies on
translation for deciphering. Yet the very presence, or, indeed, the pri-
macy of the Chinese language on the screen reminds and reassures
the uprooted Chinese communities living in the doubly foreign (non-
Chinese and colonial) setting that they are kindred spirits of the civiliza-
tion within the bounds of the cinematic Great Wall.
On the thematic level, A String of Pearls also delivers mixed messages
regarding gender and modern consumer culture in urban China while
invoking traditional notions about woman's desire and social order. The
first title card right after the credit is a didactic ballad directed at the
viewer:
Don't you know? Don't you know?

A string of pearls is equal to a million rings of sorrow.
If a woman drags herself down the road of vanity,
Her husband will be her victim surely.
This ballad's direct address, commonly used by a narrator or storyteller of

traditional vernacular tales, spells out the central narrative trope. A string
of pearls is multiplied quantitatively and qualitatively into a million rings
of sorrow prefiguring the narrative trajectory as an allegory for moral
lapse and the threat of retribution. The transaction of desire, the female
body, and jewelry recalls the famous vernacular story "The Pearl-Sewn
Shirt" by Feng Menglong. The late Ming writer adapted the story from a
classical tale and also took a keen interest in folklore. Many of his stories,
including this one, were made into films in the 1920s in the craze for
"classical costume drama." Hou's modern fable on modernity and mate-
riality unabashedly rehearses a deeply entrenched misogynist notion in
Chinese cultural tradition-that a woman of vanity is the source of de-
struction to the family and state. Thus, in its first verbal interpellation
of the spectator, the film bares its uneasiness with woman's desire for
adornment and consumption.
A String of Pearls is structured in a particular' way in order to induce a
solution to a larger social issue. If woman's vanity is an age-old "prob-
lem," the opening of the film updates it by bringing it right into the heart
of the quintessential modern setting in China: a tracking shot of the mes-
merizing night-scene of Nanjing Road in Shanghai. The flashing neon
signs of the department stores are unequivocal signposts for modern con-
sumption. The film then cuts to the Wang family's living room. The inte-
rior is crowded with furniture; the ornate pattern of the wallpaper and
the fabric of the sofas are so perfectly matched as to render the space
claustrophobic. Xiuzhen holds the baby and her husband reads while
smoking his pipe, seated quietly as if they have nothing to say to each
other. This tableau forms an archetypal sti!Vof the middle-class nuclear
family transfixed in boredom. Yet the intertitle reads: "There is nothing
in the world more precious than a sweet home." This beginning, which
contrasts the urban space brimming with motion, stimuli, and desire
with the static tableau of a self-contained nuclear family, establ.ishes a ba-
sic pattern of parallel yet contrasting narration that oscillates between the
public and the private spaces.
The rest of the film navigates the viewer through the urban maze,
linking locations marked with social disparities along the trails of the
necklace. From the street full of moving vehicles and lined with shops, to
the insurance company where Wang works, to the jewelry store, and to
178 I the lavish Fu family garden where the Lantern Festival party takes place.
The top of the pavilion in the garden is decorated with light bulbs form-
ing two gigantic characters, Yuan Xiao, meaning the "Lantern Festival."
This electric writing formed by pearl-like bulbs ominously spells out the
setting for the imminent "misfortune." Later we are led to the teahouse
where Ma finds a hooligan to steal the necklace, the prison, the working-
class neighborhood, the factory, and finally the hospital where the myss
tery surrounding the necklace is revealed. The numerous tracking shots
of locations where characters will pursue the necklace form a dizzying
itinerary. After the necklace is stolen, the jewelry becomes a wandering
phantom evading its pursuers in the labyrinthine city, yet contaminating
everything and everybody. The urban space, wrought with mobility and
possibilities, is also unpredictable, violent, and socially segregated. Cru-
cially ironic, Wang, an accountant for an insurance company, is not only
incapable of insuring the astronomical value of the necklace but is so·
cially degraded by the object as well. Similarly, the man who arranged to
have the necklace stolen is also plagued by the object, eventually wind-
ing up wounded and hospitalized. As an accountant, he must repeat
what Wang has done: removing the money in the company's safe to pay
off the moral debt.
The jewelry store, which literally supplied the necklace, serves as a
pertinent location for revealing that the commodity bears far more ex-
change value than use value. The string of pearls is in fact, in the context
of the film, a transitional fetish that embodies both traditional crafts-
manship and a modern fashion of exchange. The setting, with its outra-
geously priced jewelry on display, functions almost like a stock exchange
where big sums are dealt precariously. The store owner may be observ-
ing a traditional code of trust when he loans the necklace to Wang, but
the modern metropolis proves to be too risky a place to base social rela-
tions on trust and mutual aid. By the same token, when Wang embezzles
money to buy an expensive replacement necklace to protect his honor,
he too misses the point.
While the men, despite their respectable professions, seem so ill-
prepared to function in a modern city, the women in the film are por-
trayed as reckless consumers. The crisis of masculinity is thus linked to
the excess of women's desire to consume, and male honor is seen as un-
dermined by female vanity. Before Wang enters the store to ask his friend
for help, a group of shots is smoothly edited to place an anonymous
female customer in the center of the store for no apparent narrative
purpose. She walks into the store and examines the jewelry in the glass
cases. A shop assistant pulls over a chair for her to rest one of her legs.
Another assistant enters the frame in a low-angle medium shot and be-
gins to mop the floor. The mop leads his gaze to the woman's leg, and he I 179
stops mopping and sizes up her body. The mop suddenly falls on the
woman's leg, but she is too preoccupied with the jewelry to heed what is
happening behind her. An onlooker catches the assistant's lurid expres-
sion and pushes him down to the floor. Only then does the woman dis-
cover his presence and laughs at him with the crowd. The miscreant man
is pulled out of the frame but the mop once more touches the woman.
Another assistant tries to dean her skirt with a handkerchief, but the an-
noyed woman rejects his advances.
This sequence is typical of the comical interlude (chuancha) prevalent
in early Chinese cinema, yet in this context it bears more narrative
weight than a mere light moment. It carries over both the spontaneous
elements of the cinema of attractions and theatrical interlud~s (made up
of martial arts or down performance) in the Chinese theater. In spite of
the impulse to master a tighter narrative control in Techniques, Hou him-
self lists "interludes" (moments of comic relief or spectacle) as useful in-
gredients to make a script more "vivid and interesting." 44 However, this
particular interlude, reminiscent of Porter's The Gay Shoe Clerk ( 1903 ), is
not a piece of mere comic relief. Seemingly irrelevant to the development
of the plot, it nevertheless foreshadows the hardly comical fate to befall
the Wang family. The vain female customer is so enthralled by the jew-
elry that her body is "defiled" by both the male gaze and the dirty mop.
Chapter Five
The stain left on her skirt becomes an insignia of her vanity and loss of
moral chastity. We also get the sense that as soon as a woman enters the
public space overwhelmingly associated with commerce and consump-
tion in Shanghai, she throws herself into a perilous world. This woman
also prefigures the anonymous greedy female customer whose necklace
was loaned to Wang and who angrily goes all the way to Wang's office to
demand her necklace back, humiliating him in front of his sadistic boss.
Wang tells her that he has bought a necklace worth $15,000 in return be-
cause he does not want his friend "to share [his] dishonor." The woman
relents by saying: "Since it is worth $5,0QO more than my original one, I
may as well accept your kindness now." The surplus value pacifies the
vain woman, whose "loan" has accrued interest over time.
The interlude or, rather, prelude smoothly incorporates elements of
the cinema of attractions at the service of a long moral drama. It also
stands out as a pivotal point where a sexual economy is thrown out of
balance. Not only are the necklaces exchangeable but the female charac-
ters, whose vanity is their common "epithet," also become interchange-
able in the circulation. The missing necklace puts Wang's family on the
path of rapid social decline as it also threatens to bankrupt the jewelry
store by destroying the business's foundation: trust. The male shop assis-
180 I tants, now rollicking at a sexual joke, would all endure the dire conse-
quences of unemployment faced by Wang and Ma. On a broader social
register, the two accountants' embezzlement exposes the dirty tricks that
undermine the larger financial structure of the commercial culture.
Something other than the necklace is soon revealed to be what really
triggers the gender imbalance. Sitting in front of a large dressing mirror
in the bedroom, Xiuzhen puts on the necklace while the husband is rock-
ing the cradle. The following intertitle, with a drawing graphically repro-
ducing the previous scene, displays two lines in the mode of traditional
boudoir poetry:
After finishing her makeup [she] whispers to her husband,

[zhuangba dishen9 wen fuxu]
"Am I not dressed up fashionably?"
(" huamei shenqian rushi wu?"J
Wang carefully examines her with a circling gaze and shows his satisfac-
tion. This scene is metonymic of the gender stmcture within the emerg-
ing urban middle class family, even though Hou tries to conceal its mod-
ern significance with classical diction. In his seminal treatise on the rise
of the modern day "leisure class" in industrialized society in general and
on "dress as an expression of the pecuniary culture" in the United States
in particular, Thorstein Veblen observed that a woman's elaborate dress

and "necessary" paraphernalia were markers of being able to "consume
vicariously for the {male} head of the household; and her apparel is con-
trived with this object in view." He points out that this.conspicu~us dis-
play of the female body as an icon for "leisure" originates in the fact that
women are still "in the full sense, the property of men," "the perfor-
mance of conspicuous leisure and consumption came to be part of the
services required of them." She is the "chief ornament" of the household,
whereas her master gets the credit of social respectability. 45 The misogy-
nist remarks in the opening title card only mask a displaced desire. As the
head of the modern nuclear household, Wang is driven to borrow the ex-
pensive necklace not simply out of Xiuzhen's vanity but of his own com-
pulsion to display her in a public setting and be a part of the leisure class.
Having created a Chinese Nora in The Abandoned Wife, Hou could not
help but give a measure of agency to Xiuzhen to reveal the troubled
gender relations. On her way out to the party, leaving Wang to attend
the baby, she says to him, "Please try to be a mother to-night." While
she is enjoying the sight, sound, and the crowd at the festival. Wang
struggles impatiently to impersonate the mother role. The parallel edit-
ing here works effectively to play out the ironic contrast between the pri-
vate sphere now devoid of the crucial mother figure and the public space I 181
where Xiuzhen can flaunt her femininity. The baby's incessant cry is
"echoed (through editing) by the spectacular fireworks. The women
0
clapping hands and cheering the burning paper lantern with a male
figure in it seem to mock the inept surrogate "mother" back at home, try-
ing in vain to use a bottle of milk to calm the baby. He falls asleep, un-
aware that the baby has slipped out of his arm and dropped onto the
floor.
The nuclear family is in disarray because the gender roles are (mo-
mentarily) reversed with dire consequences. Henceforth, the balance
sheets of both the family economy and the insurance company face dis·
order. Xiuzhen is a successful "pecuniary" display at the party; after the
necklace is stolen, however, her presence has to be concealed in the deep
recesses of the private home. When the storeowner comes to ask for the
necklace back, Wang lies to him by saying that his wife has not returned
home yet, although she is just coming downstairs. Wang quickly walks
over to the stair, obstructing the view of the storeowner. First surprised,
but then realizing the situation, she quietly returns upstairs before the
owner sees her. The disappearance of the ornamental fetish object thus
necessitates her body to become absent. She has to remain invisible un-
til her husband finds a substitute for the missing object to redeem his
masculine honor.
Chapter Five
Once the truth behind the necklace is exposed, the family is also so-
cially, and spatially, removed from the leisure class. Xiuzhen's new life-
style is shot in soft, almost idyllic light, but at night Xiuzhen feels the vis-
ceral pain of poverty, again encapsulated in Hou's poetic diction-now in
a vernacular vein "fitting" her current low social station:
With fingers weary and worn

With eyelids heavy and red
Stitch, stitch, stitch
In poverty, hunger, and dirt. I
After Wang is finally released from jail and returns home, Xiuzhen
proudly shows him the twenty dollars that she has saved over the year,
an unbearable duration that has elapsed through elliptical editing. Be-
tween the astronomical price of the necklace and her tiny savings earned,
the Wangs have lost their home and social status but regained their con-
science. This redemptive process aptly exemplifies Hou's preference for
(internal) repentance to the (external) legal and moral punishment as a
solution for the "family problem" in particular and social problems in
general. 46
182 I The Wangs' social decline, however, turns out to be but a larger inter-
lude in the circular narrative. Applying the principle of "winding and in-
teresting, not too fast nor too slow" to the ending, as outlined in his Tech-
niques, Hou has the story return to the characters involved in the loss of
the string of pearls and paves the way for a major reversal of fortune.
Wang not only gets the opportunity to witness Ma (who stole the neck-
lace) mirroring his own past but also the chance to play the hero, reestab-
lishing his social and physical prowess. In the last flashback in the film,
Ma recounts how he masterminded the theft and subsequently proposed
to Fu with the jewelry as an engagement gift. Everyone shows relief at
hearing the truth about the mighty necklace that brought catastrophes to
their marriages, and no one wants to touch the inauspicious object again.
Wang replaces Ma as the accountant, and the rich Fu family buys the
house back for the Wang family. Things have come a full circle after all
the tribulations, and people return to their proper stations.
Chinese film historian Li Suyuan has argued that, similar to the But-
terfly literature from which the cinema partly derived, one of the basic
characteristics of early Chinese narrative cinema is the propensity for a
big reunion (datuanyuan). Datuanyuan refers to a conclusion that rests
upon the completion of a circular formula rather than closure of a Holly-
wood-style linear narrative. 47 The diche happy ending cannot fully ac-
count for the cultural meaning precipitated in the term datuanyuan. The
key element here is the round shape that over time has become a cultur-
ally conditioned cognitive construct in tandem with cosmological sym-
bols, such as the full moon (and mo(m-cake), and daily objects like the
round dining table (around which the family shares food or settles do-
mestic matters. The round table is an especially central mise-en-scene
element in early Chinese cinema (fig. 5.13). Around it many dramatic
conflicts and resolutions take place, as for example in Jade Pear Spirit and
The Last Conscience, both of which are Mingxing productions from 1925.
The "roundness" of the plot lies primarily in the configuration of a set of
causal relationships that, however, do not necessarily entail any recourse
to a rational procedure. More often than not, predestination and coinci-
dence act as rules of a moral order heavily influenced by basic Buddhist
notions of retribution and karma and override any linear resolution that
presupposes the separation of cause and effect.
Retribution (baoying) plays the chief role in the melodramatic loops of
datuanyuan. In everyday practice and popular understanding, retribution
entails balancing out moral (sometimes in the form of economic) debt in-
curred, whether purposefully or by unwitting transgression. The balanc-
ing can take place within one's own lifetime or in the afterlife (i.e., in the
chain of lives) and may take various manifestations: family reunions, fe-
licitous marriages, the return of favors or gifts, revenge killings, financial I 183
ruin, and so on. The underlying moral principle goes: "goodness reaps
5.13 The mise-en-scene or narrative "'roundness" in Last Con.tcience ( 1925). (Co~1rtesy <ir the
Chi.na Film Archive)
Chapter Five
benefits, evil deeds lead to evil payback." Another popular metaphor ren-
ders it even more vernacular: "Those who plant melon seeds get melons,
those who plant bean seeds get beans." The edible plants in this proverb
both suggest roundness and fruition, and the causal relation is conceived
as organic and "natural." We recall that Hou imagined himself as a gar-
dener of good deeds. For him the drama (the theatrical and the cine-
matic) is capable of cultivating both the good and the evil in people. True
to his May Fourth convictions, Hou aspired to use cinema to demonstrate
the possibility of change. But he did so in part-and in ways similar to a
number of Western and Japanese modeqilist writers and artists-by hav-
ing recourse to "primitivism," 48 the "unscientific" logic of retribution,
rather than to rational social intervention.
In his study on pao (that is, bao) as a multifaceted historical construct
in Chinese culture, Yang Liansheng emphasizes that its meanJng carries
semantic dimensions of report, reciprocation, retribution, revenge, and
response. The most crucial aspect where this construct comes into play is
in interpersonal relations (and to some degree between humans and na-
ture) that constantly require a balance of emotional or material obliga-
tions. However, the interpersonal relations also fall within larger net-
works of kinship and social transactions, which demand an individual's
184 I constant awareness of reciprocal responsibility and the observance of ex-
isting ethical and cosmological orders. 49 Quoting an ingenious philologi-
cal discovery made by Wang Guowei (1877-1927), Yang states that in the
ancient oracle bone inscriptions. the earliest known Chinese writing sys-
tem, the protoform of the bao pictogram is associated with a particular
sacrifice at the ancestral burial ground. 50 In this sense, retribution is
rooted in a belief in the existence of the deceased's soul, and the sacrifi-
cial ritual is meant to complete a cycle of reciprocity. Buddhist influ-
ences both reinforced and transformed the Chinese beliefs and practices
of retribution by extending the hierarchy of familial and social obligation
to a larger moral universe that included even animals and plants, and in-
troducing ideas of individual karma and reincarnation. Over time, baa
has become an everyday category that comes into play in both religious
and seemingly secular practices of retribution. Its varied and changing
forms are ubiquitous in popular literature, drama, and other perfor-
mance arts.s• _
The May Fourth ideology attacked what was seen as superstitious be-
liefs, including ethical fundamentals such as the concept of retribution.
That attack was also aimed at the popular Butterfly literature, which, as
in traditional vernacular and oral literature, largely relied on datuanyuan
and bao as central storytelling devices. Especially for those who migrated
into the cities, the traumatic declassement of traditional sociomoral orders
(such as the extended family and an agrarian lifestyle based on a cyclical

temporality) created the need for comfort and the assurance of a better
life to come. They were concerned that certain old values and virtues
could still retain a place, even a fictive one, in a rapidly modernjzing so-
ciety fraught with problems associated with the "new style" life. 52 Da-
tuanyuan provides a digestible narrative form for organizing the often
chaotic, unpredictable experience of modern life and for the reembed-
ding of communities in the metropolitan setting. Its structure allows
superimposition of the old and the new as well as staging of the recon-
ciliation of conflicting values and lifestyles; this integration accounts for
its popularity.
However, the very juxtaposition of incongruous ideologies and narra-
tive strategies also render datuanyuan a protean ground for formal exper-
iments and social critique. It contributed to the development of a highly
sophisticated form of melodrama or qingjieju with heavy Chinese inflec-
tions. Newspaper serialization was the common form for most Butterfly
literature. This form was inclined toward multiple episodes that loosely
fit within a large narrative, leaving ample room for play and improvisa-
tion. Its "broken-up forms," argues Rey Chow, constitutes a "very differ-
ent kind of subversion at work-a subversion by repetition, exaggera-
tion, and improbability; a subversion that is parodic, rather than tragic, in I 185
nature." 53
Notwithstanding his early connection with the Literary Association in
the May Fourth movement, Hou's rather liberal revision and extension of
Maupassant's story with retribution revealed his mixed feelings about the
May Fourth ideology. More akin to naturalism than to realism, Hou saw
life as structured like theater, constantly staging "sad departures and
happy reunions, life and aging, sickness and death, the diminishing of
plenitude and compensation of lack, gain or loss, rise or decline." Such
an endless, episodic life-drama renders any teleologically oriented narra-
tive resolution superfluous. Within this repetitive or cyclic construct, the
final message of the film is writ figuratively in the beaded and rounded
shape of the fateful necklace.
At the same time, however, this adaptation of a foreign story at a time
of fierce commercial competition and large-scale transformation of the-
atrical space demanded a mode of narration to absorb the audiences' at-
tention and money. In this regard, the several flashbacks efficiently cre-
ate suspense and a sophisticated psychological interiority, both of which
would have been much more difficult to seamlessly produce onstage. The
overt clockwise circular structure, which is otherwise appropriate for the
relatively formulaic (linear but not teleological) logic of early story film,
is significantly complicated by the counterclockwise movement (i.e.,
Chapter Five
flashbacks and hallucination), allowing in-depth explanations for the

characters' seemingly driven actions. These flashbacks provide the plot
with some rational explanations, even though the overall retributional
structure of the film keeps suggesting that a precarious modern world is
hardly immune to a fatalistic value system. At the same time, social
anonymity and increased exposure to danger has rendered modern ur-
ban life more prone to the overdetermination of chance, which becomes
a modern variant of fate. At those moments, A String of Pearls crystallizes
the multiple, competing narrative strategies adopted by pioneering Chi-
nese writers and filmmakers to present a collaie of historical landscapes
and subjectivities. 54 In this sense, the use of retribution becomes an ef-
fective gesture to expose the doubling logic of adaptation. Embodying the
tension between imported values and traditional moral codes, retribution
also proffers a rhetorical possibility for articulating a collective ambiva-
lence toward modernity.
Hou's retooling of an archaic cultural trope interweaves the modern
trajectory of commodities' global circulation and their attendant life-
styles-of which cinema is the premium medium. The logic of retribu-
tion, in which a cyclical temporality breaks down the binary of tradition
versus modernity, could also work the other way around with adapta-
186 I tions of classical Chinese tales or drama. It is thus not surprising that in
the late 1920s craze for costume drama, Hou adapted the celebrated clas-
sical play Romance ofthe Western Chamber ( l 927)- this time as both screen-
writer and director-for the Minxing Company.ss This film is studded
with spectacular pyrotechnic displays and special effects made possible
by trick photography and postproduction devices. For example, during a
scholar's dream, his brush magically enlarges into a phallic weapon to
rescue his maiden. The fulfillment of the scholar's desire is finally encap-
sulated in a typical datuanyuan but with a twist-the formulaic reunion
of the beauty and the scholar appears in silhouette shot through a paper
window screen. With this denouement Hou is obviously bowing to the
shadowplay aesthetic; at the same time, this playful conclusion reminds
the audience that the llscholar-meets-beauty" romance has become em-
phatically a modern day cinematic rendition.
A String of Pearls and Romance of the Western Chamber represent two op-
posite poles on the spectrum of Hou's adaptations. as well as for much of
early Chinese narrative film. His use of datuanyuan, however, directly
contributes to the patterning of circulation and redistribution of desire in
each film. In both films, male 'social impotence is finally canceled out by
bringing women back to their proper place: home and matrimony. Only
when the external threat-the temptation of modern commodity con-
sumption or the untamed masculine banditry-is cleared, can the frac-
tured moral universe and social order be repaired. Yet, the recovery (of
the necklace or virility) remains highly improbable due to the scan-
dalously irrational nature of retribution. The consummation of erotic de-
s.ire at the end of Romance is abstracted by the two-dimensional shadow-
play. The hieroglyphic value of the necklace in A String of Pearls, on the
other hand, can hardly be domesticated. As an inauspicious fetish it
was literally exorcised from the house before the Wang family. could
safely return. But there was no guarantee that it would not come back to
haunt them.
LUSTROUS PEARLS: MELODRAMA IN THE WILDERNEs·s
A String ofPearls internalized the archaic trope of retribution in adapting a

Parisian tale as a Chinese urban fable, and skillfully dovetailed it with ex-
plicit cinematic techniques, such as stop-animation, flashbacks, and par-
allel editing to create a convincing moral allegory. Lustrous Pearls, how-
ever, presents an altogether different picture of the circulation and
redistribution of wealth and desire. The film is neither adapted nor is it a
serious drama promoting social or moralistic interventions.
The plot of Lustrous Pearls also has many twists and turns but they are
not narratively motivated. Unlike A String of Pearls, the bilingual intertitle I 187
cards in Lustrous Pearls are kept to a minimum, as if words were redun-
dant, and the characters busily engage in playing hide-and-seek games
rather than being enveloped in a psychologically absorbed drama. The
film does not have an urban setting (though the characters all have acer-
tain urban flair), nor does it revolve around family problems as in A String
of Pearls. Yet the look of the film is unmistakably modern. Notably, the
Huaju Company, founded by Zhang Qingpu and Zhang Huimin, 56 distin-
guished itself in producing "modern-costume romance" (shizhuang yan-
qing pian), at a time when most other companies turned to "classical-
costume drama." The title cards display the film's modern look. Though
sparse, they are decorated with Art Nouveau style drawings of seminudes
adorned with roses. The characters themselves parade in European style
(Ouhua) clothes (such as riding breeches and boots), even though they
are supposed to be living in a fishing village, and strangely shaped con-
crete buildings dot the seaside landscape.
Four young fishermen have harvested two large-size lustrous pearls
from the sea, but once they come ashore, their brotherhood is put in
jeopardy by the impossibility of evenly distributing the treasure. Xin
Xiong, played by screenwriter Zhang Huimin himself (also a company co-
owner), appears to be the big brother among them. He decides to give the
pearls to his cohabitant (tongju) girlfriend Yu Zhiyin and his sister for safe
Chapter Five
keeping. 57 But the three other young men, unable to get a share of either
the pearls or the girls, vow to seek revenge. The three brothers-turned
villains come to Xin's place to demand the pearls, but Xin insists that he
harvested them. A series of physical ordeals ensues. In the first trap, the
villains tie Xin up with a rope and leave him on a rock offshore. Spotting
his helpless figure, his girlfriend swims over and rescues him. In the sec-
ond trap, his sister is kidnapped and one of the three men forces her to
marry him. Master Yang, "a crafty and ambitious bandit in retirement,"
gets his hands on the pearls when he steals them from the jewelry box
next to the sleeping girls. 58 Xin Xiong seeks lielp from a friend who be-
trays him and abandons him in a desolate valley.
Seemingly docile objects of male desire in the beginning, the women
unexpectedly prove themselves to be the real heroes of the film. The girl-
friend and the sister set out as disguised knights-errant to find Xin. In a
suspenseful sequence full of vertiginous vertical pans and horizontal
tracking shots, the heroines rescue the trapped hero, and the three of
them run from the villains through the rugged landscape. Meanwhile,
the villains finally get hold of the treasure, only to be caught in the same
predicament of uneven distribution. The two female knights-errant in
male disguise proceed to rescue Master Yang's daughter, who was cap-
188 I tured by the villains. To show his gratitude and repay his moral debt,
Master Yang tracks down the bad guys and recovers the pearls. Xin is so
impressed by the women's capability that he gives them one pearl each.
The lovers are reunited as the sister happily watches over them, in a man-
ner similar to the "big reunion" of the Western Chamber. Yet no indication
is given that this resolution necessarily leads to matrimony and social
harmony.
On both thematic and stylistic levels, Lustrous Pearls echoes many fea-
tures in the American serial-queen melodramas between 1912 and 1920.
The significance of this "other melodrama" for female fantasy and em-
powerment is revelatory. The serial-queen drama films, which were
shown in China (numerous mentions of the American "adventure/
detective" series appear in Chinese film magazines), typically featured
the tribulations of an androgynous heroine (most famously the actress
Pearl White), and were "essentially antithetical to Hollywood's domestic
melodrama." 59 The insistence on unabashed "externalization," that is,
the idea that "everything happens on the outside," and the "total ban-
ishment of the figure of the mother/ yield particular interests for a read-
ing of the genre as an important intertext for the modern mythology of
the New Woman. 60 Ben Singer argues that the female inclination for
novel and risky experiences in this genre expresses female fantasies of
mastery at a time when women were rapidly entering the public world
outside the home. But at the same time, the recurrent imagery of imper-
ilment, trapping, and violence sends cautionary messages about the risks
inv<Jlved in this liberation. Similar oscillations between empower~ent
and containment in Lustrous Pearls is clearly seen in the figure of Master
Yang's daughter, who steals the pearls and tries to elope with one of the
villains only to be cheated and abandoned on the seashore and driven to
a suicide attempt. The two heroines also eventually resume the roles of
the (unwed) wife and the sister in relation to the hero, when they receive
one pearl each from him as reward.
The promiscuous textual and sexual economy of Lustrous fearls sug-
gests that many features of an early heterogeneous cinema outlasted the
institutionalization of a narratively integrated cinema with loftier social
and pedagogical ambitions. Although the trope of retribution is also cen-
tral to this loosely linked film, the films' diffuse and erratic temporality
does not allow any seamless crystallization of a self-contained narrative.
The film is replete with sequences of suspenseful chases in spectacular
and discontinuous landscape-oceans, hills, woods-which constantly
disrupt any sense of spatial realism. What actually seems to link the dis-
parate segments together is the prominent role played by the numerous
traps Uiguan) and ropes-devices common in the serial-queen dramas- I 189
that bring about surprises and coincidences in a constantly displaced
cinematic space. The spatial jolts and leaps created by these devices con-
stitute a temporality that is, in Tom Gunning's words, "explosive, sur-
prising, and even disorienting." 61 The first use of ropes in the film leads
to the explosion of the house. From that moment on, the film embarks
on a journey in the wilderness dotted with show-stopping and breath-
taking actions that are not oriented toward creating a diegetic totality yet
filled with a spontaneous storytelling energy.
Gunning's conceptualization of the temporality of attractions as "that
of the alternation of presence/absence ... embodied in the act of display"
is also germane to the role the two pearls play in the film. Froin the first
moment the pearls land in our view, the spectator is engaged less in the
unraveling of the plot than in a game that is played out in both visible and
invisible spaces-spaces of exposure and disappearance. The spectator
gets entangled in the permutation of numbers: two pearls, three maidens,
one master/father, four brothers, and several other friends. The hiero-
glyphic function of the pearls here conveys a strong picaresque air, espe-
cially as they are being shuffled between different hands and landscapes
without a clearly justified narrative motivation. The pearls are treated
more like the folkloristic motif of mythic treasure, evoking stories in
Chapter Five
which the recovery of riches incites the hero's many trials and final re-
turn and restoration.
CINEMA AS MODERN FOLKTALE
To better account for the significance of this forgotten early narrative

film, I will now turn to an allegorical approach inspired by but not
confined to Propp's seminal study of the folktale form. 62 The latent folk-
tale structure of both Lustrous Pearls and A String ofPearls is given new and
palpable expression by the cinematic techn¢logy. Propp's syntagmatic
(rather than paradigmatic) schemata in dissecting formal elements (or
"motifs") of the Russian fairy tale centered primarily on the linear tra-
jectory of dramatis personae. His morphological study has revolutionized
folklore study and challenged a Levi-Straussian structuralist binarism.
His formalist approach, however, has been criticized as too confined to
the action and internal composition of the folktale, failing to account for
the larger cultural contexts and local variations.63 Although Propp's
schemata are useful in understanding the picaresque pattern of action in
Lustrous Pearls, which I see as a modern folktale, my analysis of the film
as a fable of that period's commercial film industry will attend to motifs
190 I that fall outside of the tale proper. Yet, these external motifs constantly
point back to various components of the film. The transaction between
internal and external meanings invites an interpretation of the context of
its production and reception, whereas a mechanical use of Propp's cate-
gories in analyzing a Chinese film would be quite misleading. The appli-
cability of Propp's morphology to this cinematic tale produced in the age
of mass-mediated modernity is at best rhetorical or ironic.
There are numerous signposts in the film other than the ostensible Art
Nouveau-styled intertitles that urge a reading outside the internal mor-
phology of the tale per se. The film and the Huaju Company itself are
deeply implicated in a vibrant commercial cinema in which even "con-
science" has to be reconciled with profit. The preoccupation with wealth
and the attendant problem of distribution (among the brothers or part-
ners) in Lustrous Pearls reveals its self-conscious link to the competitive
distributive system of the film world at large. The arrival of the ship and
the unloading of cargo in the beginning of the film paves the way for the
first mythic appearance of the lustrous pearls and locates the film in a
port market that trades overseas, especially in Southeast Asia. Through-
out the film, the four brothers, who look identical in their white Western
shirts and hairstyles, are caught in a war of pursuing and sharing the in-
valuable and indivisible treasure. Among the sparse intertitles, two keep
recurring:
"How [are we/you] to divide it?"

"How [are we/you] to repay [the debt]?"
This anxiety over payment and distribution (of dividends, in a lit_eral

sense) seems less strange considering the organizational plurality, confu-
sion, and fierce competition that beset the Chinese film industry in the
late 1920s. The competition among dozens of small and medium,sized
companies over access to the means of production and the distribution
system was intense and even ruthless among the unequal players. These
companies had no choice but to fight to win the attention of distributors,
exhibitors, and, ultimately, audiences.
Indeed, many film companies still retained the early cottage industry
mode of production, essentially operating as family businesses. The leg-
endary earliest family company Uiating 9ongsi) was Dan Duyu's (1897-
1972) Shanghai Shadowplay Company founded in 1920. His wife, the fa-
mous "Miss F. F." (Foreign Fashion), Yin Mingzhu (a.k.a. Pearl Yin), and
his nephew Dan Erchun constituted the main cast of Dan's productions.
Dan Duyu's A Family Treasure (Chuanjiabao) was made a year earlier than
Lustrous Pearls and portrays several cousins' search for and vain attempt
to divide a magic antique coin, a legacy from their deceased grandfather.
When the two parts of the halved coin are pieced together, it reveals an I 191
inscribed epistle admonishing the young generation not to feud over ma-
terial gains but to instead form harmonious bonds within the extended
family.
In 1924, two years prior to the two elder Zhang brothers' establish-
ment of Huaju, their younger brother Zhang Huichong ( 1898-1962) had
already set up Lianhe, which produced several short and medium-length
films, including Seizing a National Treasure (Duo 9uobao, 1926).64 In 1927,
the same year Lustrous Pearls was made, he founded a new company with
his own name, Huichong, and made several of China's first martial-arts
films, heralding the commercial craze for the genre in late l 920s. Beside
the Zhang brothers, the Shao brothers (Shao Zuiwen, Shao Cunren,
Shao Renmei, and Shao Yifu) established Tianyi in 1925.65 One of Tian-
yi's early productions was called A Lustrous Pearl (Ye guangzhu, 1928). 66
The Tianyi version (which may have stolen the idea from the Huaju
film), however, has the stolen magic pearl go to the urban jungle in
Shanghai where the kidnapped maiden is then taken to the wilderness.
In all these variations on (or, in Propp's terminology, "species• of)
family members feuding over a precious treasure, the object of desire
constantly plays hide and seek with the characters as well as the specta-
tors. The different players in the games, who often happen to be broth-
ers, friends or lovers, keep shifting their allegiances. There is, further-
Chapter Five
more, unfailingly the character of a servant who, in his blind (but not to-
tally unjustified} ambition to rise above his station, betrays the mas-
ter/mistress. Such Htreasure-hunting" folktales, with a visible modern
makeup, constitute a particular cinematic landscape in the 1920s. The
pressures of competition for the film market unwittingly stimulated the
desire to experiment with various forms, old and new, indigenous and
translated, while also unleashing a near neurotic drive to run ahead of
others to find the secret of success.
The vocation of cinema no doubt presented an unprecedented oppor-
tunity for great fortunes in the mid-l 920s Slyanghai. At the same time, it
also created real anxiety over the chance of survival and the likelihood of
financial success. Many small companies proved to be disposable in-
stances of modern life in which "all that is solid melts into air." 67 The
oversized rare pearl as a hieroglyphic index for this anxiety is most per-
tinent because the pearl. although considered a piece of precious jewelry,
lacks the permanence of metals or minerals that allow the accumulation
of antique value. Once taken out of the protective shells, it will literally
melt away over time if not carefully processed and preserved. At a telling
moment in Lustrous Pearls, the hero teaches his girlfriend that "the gems
are calcareous concretions deposited for centuries in layers around a cen-
192 I tral nucleus in the shells of a pearl oyster. They are known as carbuncles
or lustrous pearls." This emphatically modern, "scientific" discourse un-
derscores the long duree of the creation process from the "raw material"
to "art." 68 It also conveys a tension between the film as a hastily churned-
out marketable modern folktale in the age of mechanical reproduction
and the desire on the part of the filmmaker to create an artwork that
transcends monetary motives. The use of Art Nouveau motifs that frame
the title cards and the rough trajectory of the pearls seem to provide con-
trapuntal traces of this dilemma. The "artistic" makeup is, however, pre-
cisely the selling point of the film: it revolves around the circulation and
transaction of something (i.e., the pearls} that is both a natural aesthetic
object and a valuable commodity.
The collage of old and new values-scientific ideas and folkloric mo-
tifs-demands a consideration of the historical conditioning of retribu-
tion storytelling. Walter Benjamin's diagnosis of the aesthetic paradox in
storytelling at the dawning of modernity in his essay, "The Storyteller, 0
sheds light on the issue at stake here. While the demise of traditional so-
ciety unleashed destructive forces on community-based modes of story-
telling and social networks, the rise of modern communication does not
necessarily entail an apocalyptic ending to the past as much as a radical
new beginning. He cautions us not to dismiss outright the transitional
mode of narration as a "symptom of decay" but to treat it rather as a his-
torical "concomitant":
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of
truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has
been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous
than to want to see in it merely a "symptom of decay," let alone a
"modern" symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of
the secular forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually
removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same
time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing. 69
The "new beauty" brought by the "secular forces" of the ruins of a dying
history is singular in its own right, because it manifests the dynamic pro-
duction of new modes of address. This productive process links the dying
and nascent forms of storytelling and reception. The penchant for the
compounded (traditional, though not necessarily native) "folktale" plus
(modern) "adventure/detective" genre in films discussed above may thus
be seen as stemming from a desire to search for narrative solutions at a
particular juncture of film history. The increasingly institutionalized sys-
tems of distribution and exhibition called for long features that would at
once cultivate and cater to spectators' tastes. The various manifestations
of this storytelling mode-at once frivolous and balanced, exotic yet fa-
miliar-are testimonies to the "concomitant" storytelling effect outlined I 193
by Benjamin. The success of Great Wall's and Huaju's modern-style fables
can be largely attributed to their awareness of both the commodity na-
ture of the cinema and its attractions as a novel aesthetic form. Demo-
graphically speaking, this cinema, irreverent of any single tradition, also
directly addressed a highly diversified audience ranging from the edu-
cated to the illiterate-those who preferred "European style" as well as
those who still relished the teahouse mode of storytelling and the power
of retribution.
This sets up a stark contrast to the failures of Tian Han's (1898-1968)
early cinematic efforts to visually represent the folklore movement as a
purely artistic project. A prominent May Fourth playwright and poet,
Tian spent his formative years (1916-22) studying education in Japan,
where he was also drawn to folklore studies and cinema, particularly the
film aesthetics of the Japanese modernist writer Tanizaki Jun'ichiro. In
1921 Tian, along with Guo Morou, Yu Dafu, and several others studying
in Tokyo, founded the Creation Society, a small literary coterie known for
its "art for art's sake" banner. Returning to Shanghai, its members were
engaged in polemics with the May Fourth cultural movement flagship
organ the Literary Association. The latter adopted the slogan "art for
life's sake" as its institutional motto. The famous literary magazine, Fic-
tion Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao), edited by Mao Dun and published by the
Commercial Press in Shanghai, was the chief forum for discussion of the
Chapter Five
large amount of the fiction of problerns. The magazine was promoted
0 0
as the counternarrative to the "playful" Butterfly fiction but with limited

success. Both the Creation Society and the Literary Association, in spite
of their antagonistic slogans, played a major role in the vernacular liter-
ary movement. At the time when Tian Han began to experiment with the
cinematic medium, the Creation Society was also steering toward more
progressive pursuits.
After returning to Shanghai from Tokyo, Tian scripted and directed
Going to the People (Dao minjian qu, Nanguo Film and Drama Society, 1926)
and Lingering Sound of a Broken Flute (Duandi 6,uyin, Shanghai College of
Arts, 1927) for the Nanguo Film and Drama Society. Nanguo was a fra-
ternal and collegiate association rather than a commercial film enterprise.
Both films were left unfinished due to Jack of funds and entrepreneurial
skills. In his memoir Tian called the aborted Going to the People "an un-
finished silver dream." He recalled that the chief source of inspiration for
the film was a poem by Ishikawa Suzuki, a Japanese poet of the late Meiji
period. Suzuki expressed his impassioned desire to mobilize his contem-
poraries to follow the example of the Russian Narodnik (Go to the People)
movement of the 1890s. 70 The film, however, transplants this poetic spirit
into a romantic tale set in China about some young urban intelligentsia's
194 I ambivalent relationships to rural reconstruction. Interestingly, the film
has an alternative title: Dance in Front of the Tomb (Fengtou zhi wu). 11 The
story centers on a newlywed couple who settles among the peasants and
choreographs new "folk dance" to show respect and pay their moral debt
to their dead friend, who killed himself out of regret over his failed love
and life. The New Village becomes an exotic setting for a highly improb-
able menage-a-trois story of the petty bourgeoisie. Their attitude towards
folk culture, particularly the so-called "folk dance" as opposed to the
Western ballroom dance in the city, is both naive and patronizing. The
film, like the Go to the People pioneers it portrays, died prematurely.
In part Going to the People satirizes the frenzy of the stock market, one
of the main causes of the young man's suicide. The failure of the Nanguo
production itself nevertheless suggests that "going to the people" was not
as simple as gathering a little money for a charitable cause. At a moment
when the film world was dramatically transforming itself into a complex
network of industrial and commercial enterprises, Tian's sentimental ar-
tisan attempt at the silver screen was ill-fated because he did not take the
market or the audience into account. The folklore movement as a high-
flung idea imposed from above by the self-styled avant-garde became a
thwarted "silver dream," unable to find a legitimate place in popular cin-
ema. Its dead spirit could only be encased in the film's alternative title,
waiting tO be revived at a later point in Chinese film history. 72
The modernity of Lustrous Pearls as a folktale incarnate owes a great

deal to its portrayal of women. Instead of the trite folktale trope of
the "hero rescues the beauty," the film sets the stage for the two female
"pearls" to transform themselves from passive or victimized maidens to
able-bodied heroines (or helpers, to use a folkloristic term) in androgy-
nous masquerade. They rescue the endangered hero and recover the
treasure. 73 The erratic itinerary of the two bright pearls through the film,
ostensibly a narrative device like that of the necklace in A String of Pearls,
is associated with the imbalance in sexual economy but departs signifi-
cantly from the more rigorously regulated gender configuration in Hou
Ya o's film adaptation. Unlike A String of Pearls in which the draJna about
moral debt and male honor takes place in an interiorized family drama
of the rising urban white collar class, the erosion of gender roles in Lus-
trous Pearls is inscribed in the physical landscape and measured by bodies
in motion and transformation. The latter film is emphatically about the
the mobile, indestructible heroine bodies that dare challenge any natural
or artificial obstacles. The film is permeated with too many long shots of
feet and legs on the move and of bodies wrestling to tell the difference
between the female and male characters.
A String of Pearls makes a serious attempt to penetrate the psychology
of the new urban subjects, who constantly moved from one interior set- I 195
ting to another. The whole story is in fact "framed# from beginning to
end within the domestic space of the nuclear family except for a few dis-
astrous digressions into the public space. In contrast, Lustrous Pearls is em-
phatically about the freewheeling spirit of the often indestructible bodies
that dare to challenge all obstacles. Unlike the docile and sacrificial ma-
ternal figure in Hou's melodramatization of Maupassant's story, the un-
wed (but not necessarily "pure") maidens in Zhang Huimin's modern
folktale wander recklessly in the wilderness with chimerical identities
and bizarre outfits. They defy any prescribed femininity by showing off
their swimming and cliff-climbing skills. Their intelligence as well as
prowess seems probable precisely because the film is not structured along
a logical story line; instead it relies heavily on chance and the mutability
of the social. physical. and economic environment.
If Hou Yao harnessed the traditional conception of retribution to ac-
commodate a subdued social commentary, he does so at the expense of
rendering women culpable of male disgrace and the disintegration of the
proper social order. By contrast, the tribulations of retribution in Lustrous
Pearls are hardly "strung'' together to produce a closure. The weight of
the concept is relocated from the claustrophobic psychosocial and moral
interiority to the more externalized material and social world.
Above I have tried to delineate the emergence of a particular mode of
Chapter Five
narration and its variations in the mid-1 920s. The historical trajectory of
this change, albeit often contradictory and multidirectional, is marked by
a sustained interest in reworking the traditional socioethical concept of
retribution and its protean presence in folklore into a cinematic vernac-
ular of storytelling. The ingrained cultural obsession with moral recycla-
bility releases new secular productive forces of history" (as for Ben-
0
jamin) into social reproduction and representation against a modern

background. This deeply entrenched concept of retribution as a narrative
device was ubiquitous in popular fiction and folklore before and after the
1911 demise of dynastic history, which or,anized itself according to the
cyclical lunar calendar and the repetition° of dynastic temporality. How-
0
ever, its manifestations were effected by the radical transformation of

modern modes of production and reproduction. New notions of the copy
versus the original developed in response to new technological-and
consequently epistemological and historical-changes, in particular with
the onset of mass print technology, photography, and the cinema. Pho-
tography and cinematography not only made the soul and body, the orig-
inal and the copy, or a series of selves simultaneously visible on single
planes, but also they set in motion new modes of identity formation. As
a result, the culturally conditioned cognitive susceptibility to notions
196 I such as retribution, soul, and afterlife took on a renewed but qualita-
tively different valence and, quite literally, visibility.
The ontological preoccupations with the cinematic soul in early Chi-
nese film and the afterlife of the written word in the moving image, par-
ticularly as evidenced in Hou Yao's and Xu Zhuodai's writings, are symp-
tomatic of a widespread anxiety. As a process of translation, the cinematic
adoption of retribution and other cultural elements involved a series
of successive or concomitant practices, such as photography, the New
Drama, popular Butterfly fiction, and the May Fourth intellectual dis-
course. Their overlap changed, but never overhauled, traditional struc-
tures of experience and perception. The return of retribution-often
under various modern disguises and in competing melodramatic forms-
became in this sense a historical "revenge against the enlightenment
narrative critique of superstition and other feudal residues. Yet, these sto·
ries also actively engage with modern concerns and desires provoked by
rapid urbanization, industrialization, modern technology, and com-
modification of social relations. The collusion of these competing dis-
courses and practices is visually embodied in the form of the pearls, so
graphically illustrated in two of the few extant films from that period. The
mysterious pearls function as mobilized, visible words that signal the
constant sliding and superimposition of the commodity, the verbal sign,
and the visual register. Such a dynamic interaction, while threatening
the distinction between the sign and the referent, also magically revives
the mimetic faculty of human imagination as shown in the dance of the
animated string of pearls in Xiuzhen's daytime reverie.
At the level of gender representation, the folklore formula is also
significantly rewritten. The tales of pearls, traditionally laden with mean·
ings associated with sentimentality and femininity, are "translated" by
Hou and Zhang from diverse origins into different cinematic visions of
modernity. Although both films use the trope of retribution as an organ-
izing device of storytelling, their social and aesthetic interests embarked
on disparate itineraries. The May Fourth-influenced Hou Yao's version
primarily examined the nuclear family as the mirror of large_r-social prob-
lems. The necklace tale's circular structure serves to redeem the urban
white-collar nuclear family as a modern institution at the expense of cur-
tailing women's desire to break out of the bounds of domesticity. Hou's
pedagogical impulse is most obvious at the end of the film, in his re-
working of the "big reunion" vernacular idiom into a scene of moralizing
edification. Its message is reinforced by the formal emphasis on the neck-
lace's circular shape, which exploits the culturally overdetermined sensi-
bility of retribution. Similarly, Hou's skillful vernacularization of classical
poetry using parallelism in several key intertitles dramatizes and purges
the evils of modernity. The numerous misogynist ballads elaborately I 197
reinscribed as folk wisdom in semiclassical diction function as a verbal
straightjacket for urban women instead of creating a new language for
gender relations. As it tries to incorporate the oral tradition as a critique
of modernity, the very process of appropriating the oral tradition into
writing via the cinematic medium turns that critique on its head. More-
over, such a critique, true to the film's circular hermeneutic struc-
ture, mobilizes the conservative components within folklore-especially
when it comes to gender and sexuality-in order to affirm the male sub-
ject's masculinity in the modern urban setting.
The unabashedly exhibitionist Lustrous Pearls, by contrast, can hardly
be called a self-contained narrative predicated on spatial realism and psy-
chological interiority. Its interest is emphatically elsewhere in the dis-
jointed exterior space or, rather, the concomitant spaces of nature and
culture, the urban and the countryside, the cosmopolitan and the paro-
chial; such heterotopic spaces provide playgrounds for both male and
female, old and new subjectivities. The film presents a new kind of "ex-
tended family" in the making: ambivalent business partners and ambig-
uous sexual relationships that refuse to be contained by either the tradi-
tional kinship stmcture or the modern nuclear family. The film does not
aim to manipulate emotional responses from the spectator as A String of
Pearls does through its carefully wrought and, quite literally, inscribed
Chapter Five
story. The narrative logic of Lustrous Pearls contains far fewer verbal
traces. The film has very few intertitles, nearly all of which are in the
vernacular or Pidgin English. In other words, although the film does not
tell or pose as a folktale, its externalized folktale structure, loosely
stitched together by ample leaps, bounds, and repetitions, embodies an
experimental impulse of storytelling through a more accessible visual
vernacular.
Because Lustrous Pearls is not aimed at creating full-fledged fictional
individuals, its women's new physicality, prowess, and performativity can
be interpreted as a formulaic revision of old and new mythic gender
types, 74 whether the martial-arts heroine or the New Woman. And be-
cause the film works within an evolving genre (the adventure/detec-
tive/treasure hunting film), the actresses who played similar roles and
who embodied the ambivalent figure of the New Woman in urban China
in the 1920s also enter the picture. Leaving the theater, the audience
would expect to see Wu Suxin, who played the heroine in all Huaju pro-
ductions from 1927 to 1931, return in a new film as a reckless spirit,
playing tough games with men in various settings. Her action-oriented
heroines in Huaju productions, her gender performances within the wild
sociophysical landscape, and her penchant for masquerade prefigured
198 I the "knight-errant" heroine (niixia) that was about to dominate the film
scene by the end of the decade. The Valient Girl White Rose (Niixia Baimei-
gui, 1929), also starring Wu Suxin, will constitute part of my discussion
on the martial-arts film fever in chapter 6.
The films and the discourses on film informed by differing ideolo-
gies and aesthetics discussed in this chapter should by no means be con-
strued as consciously polarized representations or critiques of moder-
nity. Rather, the different attempts made by Hou Yao, Xu Zhuodai, Zhang
Huimin, Tian Han, and their contemporaries to meet the challenges
posed by the cinematic medium-and to envision new possibilities for
personal and cultural expression-were translated from a vast wealth of
sources and experiences. Thus no simple lines can be drawn between
China and the World, the East and the West, the old and the new, the city
and countryside, and the oral and written traditions. Their serious or
playful experiments constitute a spectrum of practices that paralleled or
engaged the iconoclastic May Fourth movement and cinematic moder-
nity as competing global phenomena.
CHAPTER SIX
THE ANARCHIC BODY

LANGUAGE OF THE
MARTIAL ARTS FILM
LUSTROUS PEARLS, with its emphasis on the body, the landscape, I 199
and the spirit of chivalry and play, prefigured the martial arts films that
flourished and declined in Shanghai between 1928 and 1932. Some fifty
studios produced about 240 martial arts films and hybrid "martial arts-
magic spirit" films (wuxia shenguai pian) during those four years 1-com-
prising about 60 percent of the total film output. Eighty-five films were
released in 1929, the peak year of the craze. 2 The widely popular genre
proved to be a commercial miracle, and Nanyang distributors rushed in
to order copies, sometimes producing films themselves. 3
In essence, most martial arts films made in this period were fast and
cheaply produced commodities that fed the seemingly insatiable appetite
of the market. The impact of the genre's reception was equally astound-
ing. Some spectators were so enthralled by the superhuman power and
freedom embodied in the image of the knight-errant (xiake) that they
went to the mountains to become disciples of martial arts or Daoist mas-
ters.4 One frequently cited story in film magazines at the time was about
how spectators started burning incense inside a theater to worship the
almighty spirits appearing on the screen. 5 The whole film world seemed
to be swept into frenzy; producers, distributors, critics, and spectators
alike became mesmerized and confused by the commercial power and so-
cial energy generated by the genre.
The phenomenon spurred strong reactions from film critics and cul-
Chapter Six
tural bureaucrats of the Nationalist government, established in 1927,
who considered themselves the custodians of the growing Chinese film
industry. After a brief period of excitement over its political and aesthetic
emancipatory potential, the liberal critics lashed out at the genre for its
overt commercial interests, shoddy quality, superstitious indulgence, and
vulgarity. The official censors were more concerned with the anarchic
tendency manifested by the genre and the film industry as a whole. From
193 L the authorities sought to regulate and streamline the production of
the genre, dosing down many small studios that prospered from making
low-budget martial arts films and banning 1yany films from release or
reshowing. Several companies continued to work sporadically with the
genre, but as experimentation with sound film began and left-wing film-
makers came to occupy a substantial place in the film scene, this mass
cultural phenomenon quickly receded into the background.
My return to this early martial arts genre will be a "flight" in a double
sense. First, on a quite literal level, it was a major step to take in the early
experiments to cinematically create the kinesthetic experience of flying,
which in turn became a staple ingredient for the martial arts film. Sec-
ond, flight as a dialectic trope is employed here in a way that invokes Wal-
ter Benjamin: it attempts to reconnect the past with the present on a si-
200 I multaneous plane. A flight to the past, as in Benjamin's "tiger's leap" to
nineteenth-century Paris, is thus by no means an escape to a phantom
but a laborious archaeology of the modern experience enmeshed in the
here and now, which in effect "blasts open the continuum of history." 6
My fascination with flight as both a cinematic and historical experience
embodied in the martial arts film has led me to encounter a duster of is-
sues that are deeply implicated in the question of modernity, in particu-
lar the question of science and its bearing on the magical new art of cin-
ema in the Chinese context. Far from being formulaic and homogeneous,
the martial arts film stems from a promiscuous family tree that compli-
cates any facile definition of the genre as such. Particularly of note, a
prominent subgenre situates the female knight-errant at the center of
dramatic tension and visual spectacle.
A perusal of film titles from the period reveals an array of the term
niixia (female knight-errant). This subgenre gave rise to a group of ac-
tresses whose physical dexterity and prowess drastically changed the im-
age of an earlier generation of actresses who, despite their modern looks,
had the residual features and constrained body language of the traditional
woman. The names of actresses such as Wu Suxin (starred in Lustrous
Pearls), Wu Lizhu (1910-78, nicknamed the"Oriental Female Fairbanks")
(fig. 6.1-2), Fan Xuepeng (1908-74), Xia Peizhen (1908-7), Xu Qinfang
(fig. 6.3), and Hu Die became synonymous with the swordswomen they
1 201
6.1 Actress Wu Lizhu. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)

Chapter Six
6.2 Wu Lizhu
(right), the
"Oriental lemale
Fairbanks"
((rom Dianyin9
y11ebao).
202 1
6.3 Actress
Xu Qinfang.
(Courtesy of
the China Film
Archive)
·.· .. : .,·,.. ... ·

_· .
portrayed.' Appearing in anachronistically dramatic attire and sporting

superhuman or supernatural skills (rendered by special effects), their per-
formance or disguise in various chivalrous roles created a constellation of
empowering, though often ambivalent, female images. As I will show in
more detail later, this iconographic ambiguity, which often involves
blurred gender identity, is coextensive with a larger cultural ambiguity op-
The Anarchic Body Language of the Martial Arts Film
erating in the contemporary discourse on the role of science, technology,

and human agency. Thus the subgenre, besides generating female power
for some and a threat for others, also alerts us to the tension-ridden rela-
tionship between nature and culture (including their redefinitions) in a
modernizing society.
What is the historical and cultural significance of the invention and
reception of the martial arts-magic spirit film, a genre that has left last-
ing echoes in Hong Kong cinema to this day? What is the relationship be-
tween its aesthetic of excess and the political anarchism pervading social,
cultural and cinematic discourses in a larger historical framework? To
what extent is the proliferation of the nuxia or martial heroii;ie suggestive
of the anxiety toward women's exponentially growing public presence
and the social power they embodied? Ultimately, these questions are
bound up with issues concerning the role of science, the tension between
elite and popular culture, the relation of this cinema to the vernacular
space of folk culture, and the gendered meaning of the body as it was ar-
ticulated through this hybrid genre.
The scarcity of extant films makes researching the brief yet explosive
popularity of the genre difficult. Only one fragment of eighteen still ex-
ists of the most celebrated film(s), The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple (Huo-
shao Hongliansi, Mingxing, 1928-31) (fig. 6.4), which allegedly ignited I 203
the craze with its phenomenal box-office success. As it is impossible to
survey the genre as a whole, I will concentrate on the few films I have
had access to, excavating and imagining lost connections and contexts.
Indeed, the fragmented nature of this body of films is indicative of the
volatile fate of the genre in particular and early Chinese cinema in gen-
eral. Our incomplete records inevitably bear upon our present inquiry
and challenge any facile narration of history. Among the few extant
films, there are three of the nuxia subgenre: The Red Heroine (Hong xia,
Youlian, 1929), The Valiant Girl White Rose (Nuxia Baimeigui, Huaju, 1929),
and the sixth episode from The Swordswoman from the Huangjiang River se-
ries (1930-31). This accidental Nabundance" provides us with a precious
entry point into both this subgenre and the martial arts-magic spirit film.
A careful tracing of the genre's genealogy and close examination of
several films show that the genre's cultural significance extends beyond
the commercial miracle it created. By concentrating on the motif of fly-
ing-the genre's trademark-this chapter addresses technology and so-
cial transgression, and their implications for new perceptions of the body.
The genre also generated, or made visible, ·a particular vernacular social
space-a utopian folk culture that blurs the boundary between premod-
ern ethos and modern aspirations, popular taste and the avant-garde. In
a sense, the martial arts-magic spirit film carried over the spirit of the
Chapter Six
6.4 Bumin9 of the Red l,orus Temple (Hu Die. second from left; Xia Peizhen, second rrom
204 I right). (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
cinema of attractions and the attendant exhibitionist mode. The dynamic

interplay between production and reception, formula and variation, spe-
cial effects and storytelling mark the genre as an exemplary form of cin-
ematic folktale.
THE FAMILY OF A PROMISCUOUS GENRE
To study the formation of a genre, according to Rick Altman, is like ask-

ing the question, "How did the whale become a mammal?" It is about es-
tablishing a corpus in light of a particular historical paradigm. The in-
quiry is in fact comprised of a cluster of interrelated questions:
What genre is, what it does, why it exists (and who makes it exist),
what diverse roles industry, critic, and public play in genre func-
tioning, how (and how not) to define a genre, ... how to identify
and delimit subgenres, and, in a broader sense, how to recognize
and theorize the relationship between generic functioning and the
strategies of the society that spawns a genre. 8
If genre can be defined essentially as the order of things, 9 the martial

arts-magic spirit film that evolved into a mass phenomenon in Shanghai
in the late 1920s is emphatically a hypergenre characterized by disorder,

chaos, and cross-fertilization. Since its inception, the genre has received
mixed reactions. On the one hand, the audience and critics marveled at
the spectacular pyrotechnic display and the entertaining suspense pro-
duced by dramatic or supernatural elements. It was hailed as a "new art"
that could bring "new knowledge, new technique, new ideal and new
courage," and was considered democratic in its address. 10 Its immediate
origin can be found in the teahouse milieu, where the storytelling of tra-
ditional tales and folklore catered to the taste of the layman. 11 The valiant
fortitude and physical prowess in martial ans-magic spirit films were re-
garded as particularly empowering by a people who had internalized the
image of the "sick man of the orient" (dongya bingfu) since China's defeat
in the Opium Wars and the subsequent suppression of the Boxer rebel-
lion by Western powers. On the other hand, when the genre quickly ex-
panded in quantity and variation, attacks were launched at its outlandish
use of "superstitious" motifs, cinematic tricks, sexual promiscuity, and
gender ambiguity. Major studios such as Mingxing and Tianyi were es-
pecially challenged by the fact that dozens of small companies swarmed
the market with their low-budget productions, causing frantic competi-
tion and confusion.
Ma Junxiang finds the coexistence and the mutual sustenance of I 205
the avant-garde cinema and genre-oriented entertainment cinema in
the West virtually absent in early Chinese film history. If the farcical and
slapstick comedy (e.g. Laborer's Love) may be regarded as an oblique sub-
stitution for the avant-garde cinema in China, reasons Ma, then the in-
vention of the martial arts-magic spirit film was the second wave to cre-
ate a genre cinema, assimilating or repackaging experimental elements of
the early comedy, particularly the focus on optical play.1 2 In this sense,
the early stage of the martial arts-magic spirit film served the dual func-
tion of both experimental cinema and commercial entertainment in a
form that may be called navant-pop." This aesthetic fuzziness largely de-
termined the slippery nature of the genre, further complicated by the fact
that a multitude of studios of varying size and resources had diverse ap-
proaches to style and production value.
Insofar as this emerging genre experimented with trick photography,
special effects, camera movement, and editing, it proved to be a vanguard
in modernizing the Chinese cinematic language. Its attraction and popu-
larity overshadowed the slow-paced socioethical film, love film, and a
large part of the classical costume drama burdened with theatrical fabri-
cation and stasis. Many film advertisements of the time boasted nmagnifi-
cent sets" and "strange special effects." 13 While some films were adapted
from traditional tales and folklore, most were either derived from con-
temporary martial arts fiction or simply filmmakers' spontaneous inven-
Chapter Six
tions. The latter were more concerned with creating spectacular and
profitable motion pictures than being faithful to any received notions or
practice of the martial or other esoteric arts.
The genre was by no means an ex nihilio self-generated cinematic
event; rather, it filtered through diachronic and synchronic cultural lay-
ers. China, of course, has a long tradition of martial arts practice and lit-
erature. The root ethos of the martial arts (wuxia) is the idea of xia, for
which the inadequate English equivalent is "knight-errantry." James Liu,
in an early treatment on the subject in English, lists eight basic tenets
of xia: altruism, justice, individual freeclt>m, personal loyalty, courage,
truthfulness and mutual faith, honor and fame, and generosity and con-
tempt for wealth. 14 Ancient records or descriptions of xiake (the person
with a chivalric aura) can be found in the early historiography Shiji
(Records ofthe Historian) by Sima Qian (145-86 BC), which contains chap-
ters called "Biographies of Assassins" (Cike liezhuan) and "Biographies of
the Wandering Knights-Errant" (Youxia liezhuan).1 5 As a social and moral
trope, the origin of xia is commonly traced to the Warring States (ca.
403-22 l BC), when political chaos and feudal divisions gave rise to a dis-
tinct group of independent warriors who dispensed justice and offered
protection to the weak and the dispossessed. These social agents were re-
206 I garded as the embodiment of moral superiority and physical strength;
their mastery of military arts, especially the sword, was indispensable to
their heroic aura. The genealogy of xiake runs through a subsequent long,
turbulent dynastic history until the late Qing period, as profusely demon-
strated by literature (in both classical and vernacular languages), drama,
and storytelling. Usually of commoner origins, they were essentially self-
made men (and sometimes women) who, in times of disorder and disas-
ter, embarked on self-imposed missions to restore a moral conscience to
the social body, which often involved redistributing wealth and power by
force. The chief characteristic of a xiake's chivalry or righteousness was
his faith in a transcendental moral order and the ultimate equality or
mutual respect in human relations (as manifested in friendship or fra-
ternity) outside the mainstream, corrupt social order, even though its
achievement would often entail a measure of violence and sacrifice. 16
Over time, the historical authenticity associated with the early figures
of xiake gave way to more mythic representations, branching into popu-
lar literature, iconography, and folklore. The Ming novel On the Water
Margins (Shuihu zhuan) is an exemplary text amalgamating historical ac-
counts and the popular imagination, weaving the two into a sustained
narrative of both political and magic power, and spelling out the lure and
trappings of marginality. 17 The novel's creation of a "family" of 108
knights (including a few women), most of whom came from humble ori-
gins, was its most celebrated aspect. Many knights are endowed with
some form of supernatural power, such as flying or swallowing flames.
This expanded tribal family, consisting mostly of sworn brothers and em-
powered by its proximity to nature (woods, swamps, mountains), stands
as a symbolic counterpart to culture (i.e., the court) and the flourishing
urban civilization under its dominion. As a self-contained power, this
unique family in the wilderness posed a serious threat to the imperial
court and its purported heavenly mandate. Ultimately, however, the fam-
ily on the nwater margins" is dissolved by forces from within and with-
out. When the head of the family, Song Jiang, a disgraced former official
of literati origin, fails to resist the temptation of a prominent post in the
court, the stronghold on the Liangshan Mountain is quickly reduced to
historical ruins.
On the Water Margins is but one exemplary instance in the large corpus
of traditional knight-errantry lore ambivalent to civilization and its cor-
rosive forces throughout Chinese history. The ancient ideal of xia did not
pass through literary and oral tradition down to modern times in a con-
tinuous flow. To be sure, the historical imagination surrounding xia was
resurrected in the twentieth century by the cinematic medium, bene-
fiting from the unprecedented visual spectacle of moving images. The
most crucial catalyst for this resurrection, however, was the proliferation
of popular martial arts literature in the early Republican period, largely
made possible by the spread of vernacular literacy, modern print tech-
nology, and other mass media. In fact, the term wuxia (with emphasis on
wu or martial arts), as it has been known in modern times, was allegedly
only coined and began to be widely used in this period by the translator
and novelist Lin Qinnan (Lin Shu) as well as other writers and literary
historians. 1 8 This modern martial arts literature coincided with both the
emergence of narrative cinema and the vernacular movement. It is more
polymorphous and sophisticated in both form and content with multiple
subgenres, daring expression of amorous chivalry (qingxia), and ampli-
fied description of martial arts techniques. 19 The boom and diversifica-
tion of the Butterfly literature created space for this new breed of martial
arts fiction. Significantly, the new martial arts fiction widely adopted col-
loquial Chinese as opposed to the classical language in which much of
early martial arts literature was written. Many newspapers and maga-
zines serialized popular martial arts works. Pingjiang Buxiaosheng's
(pseudonym for Xiang Kairan, 1890-1957) Tales ofStrange Knights-Errant
in the Wilderness (Jianghu qixia zhuan), began its serialization in 1920 in
Red Magazine (Hong zazhi) and was published in book form in 1928, to-
taling l 50 chapters. It is often seen as the pioneering text that nraised the
curtain" of the surge of modern martial arts fiction. 2 0 This daily or weekly
Chapter Six
form of storytelling through arbitrary suspense is no doubt a modern
form of literary production contingent upon the cycle of periodical pro-
duction and circulation. But it is also reminiscent of the zhanghui struc-
ture of the traditional novel with interlocked chapters, which was in turn
modeled after the serial forms employed by professional storytellers to
hook the audience in teahouses and theaters.
Indeed, as elsewhere in the world, mass-produced seriali1.ation was
one of the hallmarks of the culture industry in the Shanghai of the 1920s
when modern mass media began to pervade the fabric of everyday life.
Popular fiction, comic strips, various forms of 6rama, and cinema, all, in
one way or another, adopted the serial format. The cultural market of the
time was inundated with products recycled from one popular genre to an-
other, creating a chain effect that blurred the boundaries between dif-
ferent venues of cultural consumption. Part of Tales of Strange Knights-
Errant in the Wilderness was adapted for the screen by Mingxing in 1928.2 1
The Burning ofthe Red Lotus Temple became an instant hit, which led to three
sequels in the same year and another fourteen over the following three
years. Serial illustrated books (lianhuan tuhua) based on the film(s) quickly
appeared on street corners, satisfying the cravings of children and the poor
who could not afford to see the movie. The whole city was aflame with a
208 I passion for the saga of the Red Lotus Temple. In the film industry alone,
the fire quickly spread to other studios, which tried to repeat Mingxing's
success. A host of films that had titles containing the word burning (huo-
shao) filled the silver screen. Though no other studio was as ambitious and
affluent as Mingxing, which produced eighteen series, many attempted
several series or at least one sequel. Just as Bao Tianxiao and other But-
terfly writers had been recruited by the expanding film industry to serve
as screenplay writers, so too, the martial arts fiction writers also became
natural candidates for adapting prose fiction to the screen. Gu Mingdao,
author of The Swordswoman from the Huangjiang River, wrote the screen-
play for Youlian Company's eponymous film. Between 1929 and 1932,
thirteen series of the film were released. The circular nature of the cul-
tural context that gave rise to the genre interestingly paralleled the open-
ended narrative structure of the film series. Prone to prompt more in-
stallments, episodes were never complete narratives but existed in a loose
but suspenseful relation to what came before and after, in a manner sim-
ilar to the use of "cliff-hangers" in the American serial queen drama.
The birth of a genre is more about the production of form-or "for-
mula" -than content,2 2 which nevertheless cannot be divorced from its
origins. Form as such is thus never complete and self-sufficient. Given
the syncretic nature of the intertextual and intermediatized seriality, the
commonly accepted view that Burning is the first martial arts-magic
spirit film in Chinese film history requires some qualification. Although
the film was the first big-budget attempt at institutionalizing the com-
pounded genre and turning it into a mass phenomenon, it derived from
a series of experiments in the preceding years. These experiments may
not have directly contributed to the formation of the genre proper, but
they nevertheless created a vital contextual field in which the genre
evolved. Jia Leilei traces the "prototype" of the "martial arts" film to Rob-
bery on a Train (Che zhong dao) produced by the motion picture depart-
ment of the Commercial Press in 1919 .23 Adapted from a story by Lin
Qinnan based on an American film (most likely The Great Train Rob-
bery), the Chinese version boasts a series of chase scenes and martial
arts fighting sequences. It also features a hero, who, with the help of
a flower-vending girl, catches the villains. The director Ren Pengnian
( 1894-1968) later made a couple of films set against the background
of the 1911 revolution that contained a more pronounced theme of
"knight-errantry" and were inflected with patriotic sentiments. 24
Red Beauty and Skeleton (Hongfen kulou), modeled on a translated de-
tective novel, was released by Xinya Company (using the facilities and
equipment of the Commercial Press) in 1922. One of the earliest Chinese
feature-length films, it features a disguised heroine who rescues her lover
from the villains' den with the help of his detective brother. Screenwriter
and director Guan Haifeng, who was involved in the adaptation of the I 209
sensationalist play Victims of Opium in 1916, chose the topic because the
Shanghai audience was very attracted to films with a martial arts plot
(wuxia qingjie) at that time. 25 The film, containing plenty of on-location
shooting, is replete with elements of "the detective, adventure, martial
arts, romance, and comedy." 2° Before entering the film industry, Guan
had been active in Peking Opera and New Drama. He even adapted an
American detective film The Phantom Bandit for the stage. Guan intro-
duced several mechanical tricks or devices Uiguan) into Red Beauty and
Skeleton to produce a thrilling sensation of horror and mystery. In this
sense, the film may be a progenitor in combining elements of both the
"martial arts" and "magic spirit;" it also prefigured the emergence of the
horror film, which I will discuss in chapter 8.
In these early experiments the spirit of xia is deployed in varying de-
grees to articulate a number of modern character types, such as the ur-
ban hero or heroine (often refigured as a detective) or the revolutionary
assassin. Interestingly, these modern incarnates of the classical xiake are
akin to those heroic characters on the New Drama and civilized play stage
around the Republican revolution a decade earlier. The blending of en-
tertainment with patriotism, adventure with revolution, attraction with
narration, popular tastes with artistic play, and theatricality with cine-
matic experimentation endows these nongenre-oriented films with an
exploratory and synthetic style and appeal.
Chapter Six
With the rise of Mingxing and the long film and serious drama in the
first half of the 1920s, the impulse to make martial ans films, however,
did not vanish entirely. The two directors qua actors who contributed
most significantly to the perfecting of the modern (i.e., in modern cloth·
ing and setting} martial arts film are Zhang Huichong and Zhang Huimin,
the two brothers mentioned in chapter 5. The former started his acting
career at the motion picture department of the Commercial Press in 1922
and played the knight-errant hero in many films. He is regarded as the
first major actor of martial arts films in China, long before Mingxing
made Burning. 27 Zhang Huimin and Wu -Suxin, who formed a strong
partnership both on screen and in their private life, demonstrated their
unique modern orientation in the midst of the "burning" craze when
most martial arts-magic spirit films had either a salient or a vaguely ar-
chaic look.
While the Zhang brothers represented the modern style martial arts
film, the boom of the so-called unofficial history film (bishi pian) and the
classical costume drama (guzhuang ju) between 1925 and 1927 installed
a traditional look on the Shanghai commercial cinema-at least on the
surface. The first experiments with historical subjects made by the lib-
eral-minded Commercial Press in the early 1920s were directly influ-
210 I enced by the intellectual movement of ''reordering national heritage"
(zhengli guogu) advocated by, among others, Hu Shi, the "father" of the
vernacular movement. Tianyi set the trend in 192 5. Its founders were the
famous Shao (Shaw) brothers. It launched a campaign to "propagate Chi-
nese civilization" (fayang Zhonghua wenming} through cinema as a means
of countering Western modernity. However, the kind of "civilization" un-
earthed and remolded for the petty urbanites and diasporic audiences
was mainly the vast reservoir of folklore, traditional literature, and un-
official history. The materials that most attracted producers were tales
with strong supernatural and amorous elements. They included the fa.
mous legend White Snake (about a love affair between a scholar and a
snake spirit appearing as a beautiful woman} and episodes from classical
novels and their extrapolated popular versions (e.g., Investiture of Gods
and Journey to the West). 2 s
The aesthetic emphasis of these cinematic adaptations was on the
narrative devices of "strange machination" or "wondrous coincidence"
(xuanji}. In spite of Tianyi's original aim of "focusing on old morals and
ethics" (zhuzhongjiu daode,jiu lunli}, many costume dramas often appear
ultramodern, replete with contemporary fashion, expressionist sets, and
even seminude scenes. The Cave of the Spider Spirit (Pansi dong,. Shanghai
Film Company, 1927), adapted from an episode in Journey to the West, is a
spectacular example (fig. 6.5}. Originally a beauty-calendar painter, the
6.5 The Cave of the Spider Spirit ( 1927). (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
director Dan Duyu was known for his obsession with the look of his
films. The cave in which the spider queen reigns is designed in both "re-
alistic and magnificent" ways to evoke an animate yet ghostly ambiance.
The boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the dead and
the living, are blurred as the main characters-the spider queen, the
monkey king Sun Wukong, and the pig Zhu Bajie-keep taking on dif-
ferent disguises. The biggest attraction of the film seems to have been the
scene of swimming spider-beauties shot through an underwater camera,
the first of its kind in China. 29 A 1927 adaptation by the Fudan Company
from the classical romantic novel Dream ofthe Red Chamber simply had the
cast appear in modern fashion, with the female protagonist Lin Daiyu in
a flowing Jong robe and high heels, her hair adorned with white ribbons.
The color cover of the special issue for the film published by the company
is rendered in art nouveau style, featuring a scantily clad romantic couple
ascending into the sky amid clouds. The famous Burning also owes its
sensational success to its presentation of titillating scenarios of seminude
beauties shown in the midst of violence and esoteric rituals (fig. 6.6).
The provocative, and often erotic, appeal of costume drama created a
phantasmagoria of overlapping temporality; the alternative versions of
"history," when rendered cinematic, became the place where magic and
Chapter Six
6.6 Burning ofche Red lotus Temple: temple as harem. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
technology, archaic fantasy and modem desire fused into a feast of visual
display. The genre was immensely popular in Nanyang, which created a
competitive edge for Chinese cinema over American cinema. 30 These ex-
periments with the magic spirit of the cinema in rendering the past pal-
pable also paved the way for the emergence of the commingled genre, the
martial arts-magic spirit film. The latter became a new formula for toss-
ing together both visual attraction and narrative suspense, physical action
and psychic power, natural wonder and supernatural forces. The supple
and cunning female figures in The Cave of the Spider Spirit, though por-
trayed as negative forces in the film, may be seen as the prototype of nuxia
(martial heroines) who were to crowd the screen in less than a year.
As a whole, the cultural labor involved in the making of the martial
arts-magic spirit film was transmedia in form and heterogeneous in na-
ture. The genre as such was a meeting place for a variety of experimen-
tal cultural and filmic practices, creating an alchemy of traditional obses-
sions with the fantastic and the strange, and modem fascinations with
the new and the changeable. Engaging and translating the vast wealth of
folklore and oral histories with the aid of modern mass media, the cos-
tume drama as a diffused genre practice provided an important spring-
board for the martial arts-magic spirit film-an implosion of' the ver-
nacular culture of both past and present.
BODIES IN THE AIR: SCIENCE OR MAGIC?
The critical vector of martial arts-magic spirit film discourse shifted dra-
matically over the period from 1927 to 1931, including the perception of
the body and its relationship to cultural representation. When the first
full-fledged martial arts films appeared in 1927, critics enthusiastically
welcomed the foregrounding of bodies, specifically, the cinematic display
of various bodily techniques. In contrast to the emphasis on sentimental
close-ups of facial expression prevalent in the interior-bound melodra-
matic film, the actor's physical dexterity and martial skills acquired para-
mount importance. By 1931, however, the authorities officially banned
the production of films with explicit "superstitious" elements. The body,
now seen as the vehicle of dangerous desires and spirits, was a source of
degeneration of Chinese cinema and national spirit. Measures for con-
tainment and restructuring of the industry were implemented.
The emergence of the martial arts-magic spirit film marked a turning
point in the presentation and perception of the body in early Chinese cin-
ema. Until this time the narrative and performing style of the dominant I 213
genres such as the socioethical film, romance film, and a bulk of cos-
tume drama was generally characterized by wen-which has a polyse-
mous meaning of literary, restrained, and elegant. As I have shown in my
analysis of A String of Pearls in chapter 5, close-ups on subtle facial ex-
pressions, continuity editing, and the focus on the interior space were
crucial to the construction of narrative cohesion and moral persuasive-
ness. The martial arts film. on the other hand, embodied the spirit of wu
(which means the state of being virile and military). 31 The spectacle of wu
consists of martial arts and related instruments, the physical landscape,
and even driving a car in instances of the modern-dress martial arts film.
In other words, the body in motion, in direct contact with the physical
world and basic elements, is a distinct trademark of the genre. The body's
kinetic experience and its transformative power become the emphasis.
However, the body does not roam about in a totally externalized physi-
cal landscape; in fact, it constantly moves in the unstable zone between
nature and culture, the society and its margins. The physiological char-
acter of the body is thus inscribed in the social landscape at large. The
abundance of visual delight and magical effects so crucial to the martial
arts-magic spirit film serves another purpose as well; it contributes to the
cultivation of xia as a kind of embodied aura in a modernizing and alien-
Chapter Six
ating society. For this reason, the genre was seen by a critic as a Hstimu-
lant," which could "lift [one's] aspiration for the martial spirit [shangwu
jingshen]":
The martial spirit is something everyone ought to possess. Yet, if

there is nothing to awaken it, it will always be shrouded and will
never attain exciting expressions. As a result, one will look like a
weakling. Wouldn't that let down one's aspiration for the martial
spirit? Those stirring and extraordinary martial arts films, how-
ever, demonstrate all kinds of shocking,\'et gratifying action [dong-
zuo], as well as depicting events that solicit everyone's sympa-
thy.... These are really the special merits of the martial arts film.n
Physicality is thus preeminently fraught with moral and cultural sig-

nificance. Most of the wuxia films unfailingly convey the message of
"eradicating villains and wiping out despots, redeeming the good and
aiding the poor" (chujian chubao, jiuliang jiping}. This heroic aura is typi-
cally masculine because wu is traditionally associated with male warriors
and swordsmen with superhuman powers. This critic however, suggested
that the martial spirit could awaken a collective spirit in the audience
214 I when embodied through cinema. He believed the martial arts film, more
than any other genre, could "direct the world,» filling the void where ed-
ucation or propaganda could not penetrate.
This ambiguity of the genre lies in the sense of wonder evoked by the
"shocking and gratifying action° and its sense of purpose as a social rem-
edy-contradictory conceptions of its aesthetics and politics, magic and
science. In a broader cultural context. such contradictions speak to the
valorization of modern science, which had acquired heightened currency
in the May Fourth movement and especially the 1923 extensive contro-
versy over "science and metaphysics" (kexue yu xuanxue) in 1923. The
critical focus was centered on both the sensual physicality and the
socioethical power it embodied; this conflict was further complicated
and amplified by the discourse on technology-the flying machine in
particular.
"NEITHER HORSE NOR DONKEY," OR

THE LORE OF THE FLYING MACHINE
One of the modern martial arts films produced by Zhang Huimin's Huaju
Company, The Great Knight-Errant of Aviation (Hangkong daxia, 1928)
(fig. 6.7), was based on a real-life story of Zhang Huizhang, the first pilot
to successfully complete a long distance flight in China. 33 Zhang Huimin
:~--~=
f-~ ~.
~-··.
~ft
~-~-- ±·
6. 7 The Great Knight-Errant of Aviation ( 1928). a modern martial arts ·fijrtqfrom Dlanyins
yuebao, 1928, no. 7).
himself played the pilot-knight-errant, described as one who "practiced I 215

knight-errantry and observed loyalty" (renxia haoyi) (fig. 6.8). The mod-
ern knight-errant is always ready to rectify injustice, tempted neither
by money nor treasure. One day, riding the train after completing a
"knightly mission" (xin9xia), the pilot catches sight of a bandit, nick-
named the Flying Tiger, threatening a young woman (played by Wu
Suxin). He rescues the beauty and rides away with her on horseback. The
bandit and his underlings have to give up the chase when they see the
couple vanish into the sky, where an airplane is dancing like a dragonfly.
As it turns out, he has rescued his future wife, betrothed to him by their
parents when they were children. Then, against a beautiful sky, the re-
united lovers spend their honeymoon cruising the open space, the tradi-
tional practice of arranged marriage thus reconciled with free love, em-
blematized by the flying machine.
Ostensibly parading as a martial arts film, The Great Knight-Errant of
Aviation, contains, however, no swordplay or classical costumes.' 4 Rather,
the virtuoso displays the wonder of the flying machine and the fantasy of
modem science. Yet a sensational effect is produced by blending chival-
ric knight-errant routines and the shop-worn motif of extending the
martial hero's prowess and speed with a horse as well as modern trans-
portation. As in Gaston Bachelard's conception of productive ruptures in
scientific knowledge, transforming martial arts stock elements through
Chapter Six
6.8 Zhang Huimin and

Wu Suxin, with the
company's camera
(Silver/and, no. I 0,
July 1928).
216 I
cinema's spectacle may be seen as recasting (refonte). 35 These breakages

and leaps are realized by techniques such as editing, trick shots, super-
imposition, and sometimes animation that materialize the transfers be-
tween different forms of knowledge, representation, and genre. In the
case of The Great Knight-Errant ofAviation, the instant spatiotemporal tran-
sition from the scene where the hero rides away with the woman on a
horse in the wilderness is literally sprung into the next shot of the air-
plane in the sky. The attraction here rests not so much in any logical nar-
rative progression, but in the spectacle of speed and compressed meta-
morphosis from organic martial arts to mechanical virility.
The "flight" in The Great Kni9ht-Errant of Aviation is not portrayed as a
painful transition from nature to culture or the premodern to the mod-
ern but rather as a delightful crossing of contiguous realms of experience.
Just as the hero effortlessly inhabits the double identity of the archetypal
knight-errant and the pilot in his modern armor, the airplane and the
horse are not necessarily antithetical symbols of different temporalities
and consciousness. The airplane may be seen as a winged horse, a mech~
anized creature that gives the martial arts plot a touch of the magic spirit.
Given that airplanes were still rare in China at the time, its traceless ap-
pearance and disappearance were perceived as "natural" precisely be-
cause of its mythical aura. According to a contemporary description of

the film, Nwhen weak and oppressed people hear the engine of the plane
from afar, their faces are lit up as though in a shadowplay; their sad dis-
tressful expressions are replaced by happiness and relief. n 36
The reception of cinematic recasting was not uniform. During the
years immediately preceding the martial arts film boom, one commenta-
tor on the "craze for classical drama" regarded certain ways of "revising
old drama" (guju xinbian) with shock and disdain. Citing the examples of
Zhuge Liang (a historically-based character in the classical novel Romance
Ii/the Three Kingdoms) fighting Sun Chuanfang (a warlord of the 1920s),
and of Tang Sanzang (the monk in Journey to the West) riding_ a motorbike
instead of a white horse on his pilgrimage to fetch the scriptures in India,
the critic accused the studios of blindly catering to audience curiosity
(xinqi) in order to make quick cash. 37 The question to be asked, however,
is why the audience was so enthralled by "curiosities" that were consid-
ered Nneither horse nor donkey" lfeiliifeima). 38 What really disconcerted
this critic was perhaps the cross-fertilization of the past and the present,
the body and the machine, and literary canon and cinematic technology
that effected a temporal collapse and disintegrated a certain order of
things. The cartoonlike image of the legendary monk riding a motorbike
is outrageous because it redefines the sacrosanct body of the pious monk I 217
by aligning it with the machine age. While the classical figure is associ-
ated with a rugged natural landscape, the motorbike takes him directly
into the urban jungle.39 In his twentieth-century incarnation, Tang San-
zang is no longer a passive victim of worldly desire; he instead becomes
the icon of commodity desire itself. In that sense, the cinema updates ar-
chaic texts as part of modern urban folklore.
The opposition between the organic folk world and the mechanical
world or for that matter, the premodern and the modern, popular intra-
ditional folklore studies encounters a challenge here. Just as the plane
was to the pilot, the motorcycle to the monk became an "extensionof his
bodily scheme"; the apparatus at their disposal is not presented as some-
thing ontologically transcending, but rather intimately related to the op-
erating agents and their awareness of its [practical] function. 40 It is thus
hard to distinguish the objectification of the body from the anthropo-
morphism of the machine. As Hermann Bausinger points out, inventors
and technicians often treat their work in technology as something .be-
yond the realm of science. When a new gadget or machine is first tested,
the experimental impulse and anxiety are evoked more as an "experi-
ence," often tinged with "demonic power." 41 In this experiential dimen-
sion the boundary between the rational and irrational becomes quite ir-
relevant as the body and the machine constitute a new kinesthetic fusion.
Chapter Six
NAVIGATING THE LANDSCAPE OF MODERN SCIENCE
The voracious mixing of traditional tropes and modern technology,

canonical literature and commodity culture, is part and parcel of a larger
cultural discourse about technology and modernity in China in the early
twentieth century. The connection and interpenetration between the hu-
man body and machines had already captured the Chinese imagination
in the late Qing fin-de-siecle period. The popular illustrated newspaper
Dianshizhai huabao (1884-96) carried numerous reports and illustra-
tions of how various new apparatus and infitruments dramatically altered
people's perceptions of the body in time and space. X-rays, cameras,
trains, and airplanes appear most frequently. Airplanes were seen as
mythic flying ships cmis.ing over exotic landscapes (fig. 6.9).
If these illustrations displayed the vernacular scientific imagination in
a visually palpable way, the literary and intellectual discourse, though
still couched in the classical language, was hardly slow to respond. Huang
Zunxian (1848-1905), the innovative late Qing poet, reformist, and
diplomat, wrote a set of poems in his late years about the modern expe-
21a I
6. 9 TI1e winged flying machine (Dianshizhai hi1abao).

rience of parting and nostalgia affected by photography, the telegraph,

the steamship, and the train. Fast and efficient as these instruments and
vehicles are, they "conspire to increase the sorrow of people parting" be-
cause tight schedules, punctual timetables, and high speed allow. no in-
dulgence in bidding farewells. Sentimentality is redundant as a steamship
vanishing over the horizon long before the people who send off the pas-
senger get home. The self, when "transported" by these mechanical ve-
hicles over time and space, becomes shot through with technology's un-
settling power.
Of the telegraph Huang wrote about an entirely new mode of media-
tized personal communication. In these lines he considers these messages
from his lover.
But this letter I am reading is not from your hand

And it seems to be lacking your personal touch
I did read my sweetheart's name just at the end,
But I suspect the signature was forged by someone else!"
Huang searches for an answer outside his window:
In front of my gate two rows of straight poles 1 219

March in perfect order to a place over the horizon.
Metallic strings nm along each row,
Strings that connect one pole to the other.
I really don't understand how you mail all these letters,
And how they arrive so quickly, one after another.
There are hundreds of minutes in each single day,
But how do you find time to send so many notes?
If I don't have your news for just one moment, darling,
My face turns ashen with anxiety and worry.
I wish I could travel at the speed of lightning,
And flash in one moment to my lover's side! 4 2
The poem questions the nature of the disembodied written word without
the personal touch of a calligrapher. The classical poetic sensibility asso-
ciated with Chinese calligraphy (and hence ideogrammic characters)
gave way to the transnational digital coding of the telegraphed message.
Yet, the compound sense of wonder and anxiety over telegraphy's "speed
of lightning" incites his will to "flash" his body to the faraway lover's side
like those wired characters. The poems on "modern parting" are ac-
counts of disjunctive bodily and spiritual movement on the "confused
horizons" in the late Qing moment. 43 Huang's observation of (and on) the
Chapter Six
Eiffel Tower in 1893 elucidates the vertiginous experience of a vertical

movement that radically transforms one's worldview.
An elevator car suddenly shoots up its cable,

And I leap when I hear the whine of its engine.
I really am flying, without any wings on my back,
Soaring on a journey to the heavens above! 44
This dizzying experience of rapidly ascending an artificial peak and

the new perspective it offers was rendered/visible by a contemporary il-
lustration of the world's "Tallest Building" in Dianshizhai huabao. The
twenty-eight-story building, supposedly located in Boston, has inflec-
tions of Chinese architecture, such as the flying eave and arched win-
dows, yet features external basket-like machines that transport people up
and down. 45 The human body in these poems and visual representations
was no longer the solitary subject of classical poetry who contemplates
the wonder of nature and travels in real time (as on a horseback or in a
wooden boat). Rather, the body was quite literally "carried away" by ma-
chines that generated speed and kinesthetic sensation. Despite the anxi-
ety and lamentation over a passing world, these poems and pictures
220 I about the transformed experiences deliver a humorous recognition of a
paradigmatic change in human perception. They explored the possibili-
ties in the broadening of the cultural horizon and facilitating communi-
cation in a world context that was at once shrinking (due to technology)
and enlarged (by an expanded consciousness). Though still written in the
classical language, Huang's poetry was regarded by Liang Qichao (1873-
1929) as a pioneering voice in the "revolution in the poetic realm" (shijie
geming). For Liang, Huang's poetry exemplified the reformist vision of
"casting new ideals in old styles" (rongzhu xin lixiang yi ru jiu fengge). 46
Well before Hu Shi's Experiments, Huang Zunxian was certainly among
the vanguard that brought a vernacular impulse and a global outlook to
the classical Chinese poetic tradition.
Huang's modern poetic views were echoed by his contemporaries. For
instance, reformist intellectual Tan Sitong pioneered the concept of sex-
ual relations as a physiological mechanism and wrote of the human body
as "an intricate machinery which could be adjusted and regulated." 47 The
leading liberal magazine Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), first pub-
lished by the Commercial Press in 1904, was a forum where much up-to-
date information and knowledge on modern science (including cinema)
was disseminated. Its August 191 l issue carried a photograph of a "ma-
chine-man" (jixie ren), or a robot. The "man" in the picture, a machine
body with a human head and even a beard, is named Oceutus (meaning
The Anarchic Body Language o-f the Martial Arts Film
the "incredible"). He can "mimic all human behaviors, such as speech,

laughter, screaming and singing." Although Oceutus would obey any hu-
man instruction to perform like a clown, he is not a monster, nor fan-
0
tasy play." In short, he is not human but like a human. 48

These incipient discourses were related to the political discourse on
"enriching the nation and strengthening the military" (fuguo qiangbin)
and subsequent intellectual discussions on the roles of science and tech·
nology in a modernizing China. 49 As modern technology was also asso-
ciated with Western imperialism, many late Qing debates focused on the
advantages or disadvantages of introducing new technology, including
weaponry and warships. In the second half of the ninete~nth century,
under internal and external pressure, court reformers were able to carry
out the "self-strengthening" (ziqiang} program that allowed modern mil-
itary schools, factories, and shipyards. But reformists rationalized that
Western science only ought to be regarded as a useful tool, whereas the
"body" of Chinese learning to remain intact.
After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the clamor for more radical
changes in social infrastructure and cultural consciousness culminated
in the May Fourth movement, the two chief banners of which were de- O
mocracy" and "science." The humiliating events at the Versailles confer-

ence in 1919 convinced the intellectuals that the reasons for China's in- I 221
feriority was its slowness in embracing the project of Enlightenment and
modernity. For the same reason, any residual feudal beliefs and Confu-
cian values should be cast into the historical trash bin. The cult of science
went hand in hand with the iconoclastic antireligious movement and an
extensive effort to reevaluate and reorder the traditional heritage. Antiq-
uity was studied through scientific methods that had been introduced to
China in the late nineteenth century and further developed in the early
1920s in the wake of the visits by John Dewey, Bertrand Russell. and
other Western thinkers. Even folklore became an object of scientific
study, which attempted to record and categorize folk traditions of the past
while removing "superstitious" eleinents.5o
The supreme status accorded modern science was seriously challenged
in 1923-24 in a debate on "science and metaphysics" -also known as
the polemic on "science and the view of life" (kexue yu renshen99uan
zhizheng)-that intensified the rift among the intellectuals. Liang Qi-
chao's book, Impressions of a European Journey, written after his visit with
a group of Chinese delegates to the Paris Peace Conference and to war-
torn Europe in 1918-19, provided a prelude'tO the debate. The book con-
tains an essay called "The Dream of the Omnipotence of Science," a pes-
simistic reflection on the destructive power of modern technology, and
the decline of Western material civilization:
Chapter Six
Those who praised the omnipotence of science had hoped that, as
soon as science succeeded, the golden age would appear forthwith.
Now science is successful indeed; material progress in the West in
the last one hundred years has greatly surpassed the achievements
of the three thousand years prior to this period. Yet we human be-
ings have not secured happiness; on the contrary, science gives us
catastrophes. We are like travelers losing their way in a desert. They
see a big black shadow ahead and desperately run to it, thinking
that it may lead them somewhere. But after running a Jong way,
they no longer see the shadow and fall ibto the slough of despon-
dency. What is that shadow? It is this "Mr. Science." The Europeans
have dreamed a vast dream of the omnipotence of science; now
they decry its bankruptcy. This is a major turning point in current
world though1.s1
A promoter of the "poetic revolution" more than a decade earlier, Liang

saw modern science as an instrument of mass annihilation instead of
democratic emancipation on a global scale after his own journeys to
the West. He directly took "Mr. Science" to task, comparing him to a
shadowy illusion-a provocative metaphor as it negates the substantive
character associated with modern innovation. His "impressions" were
confirmed by his meetings with Henri Bergson, Rudolf Eucken, and Ber-
trand Russell during the trip, as these philosophers had already begun to
critique the material obsession and the supremacy of Western civilization
following the World War I.
Liang's view was shared and propagated by Zhang Junmai (Carson
Chang), a Beijing University professor in the delegation to France. In his
lecture "View of Life at Qinghua University on February 14, l 923, 52
Zhang argued that one's general relation to the world could not be re-
solved by a pragmatic scientific perspective alone. Rather than privileg-
ing logic, causality, objectivity, and uniformity, he proposed that complex
life phenomena, including psychological experience, might be better per-
ceived-if not explained-in terms of an intuitive, nonquantitative, and
inclusive approach. Such an approach could account for problems in
ethics, religion, literature, and philosophy, which science tended to leave
out or circumscribe. 53
Zhang's views were quickly refuted by the geologist Ding Wenjiang
(1887-1936), also a member of the delegation, on the grounds that they
extolled a combination of Western and Chinese metaphysics. 54 Despite
their friendship, he called Zhang "possessed by the ghost of metaphysics",
(xuanxue gui) in his article "Metaphysics and Science." 55 He insisted that
politics, metaphysics, and education, rather than science, should be held
responsible for the war. The "God of Science· (kexue shen) was more than
ever needed in China in order for it to modernize. 56 The dualism between
Western materialism and Eastern spiritualism, as underscored by Zhang
in his lecture, appeared arbitrary. In spite of his hard-line empiri~ism,
Ding's polemic is ironically "scientific" in its use of categories such as
"ghost" and "God." In his desire to expel the specter of metaphysics-be
it imported Western agnostic philosophy or the much~heeded Wang
Yangming intuitionist school of Confucianism-he advocated the "new
religion" of science, which paradoxically ran counter to the iconoclastic
May Fourth rhetoric.57 ..•. ·. ·..
The impact of the debate was far reaching. Extending over a year and
a half, it involved leading intellectuals of diverse persuasioni ~nd ideolo-
gies who published more than forty polemical essays in influential mag-
azines. Similar discussions carried into later decades, including the· I 980s,
when the modernization agenda was once again highlighted. If the de-
bate would seem divorced from the realm of the popular, its visibility in
mass print media wove it into the larger social fabric. Some of the basic
issues resonated in the conflicting discourses on the martial arts-magic
spirit film a few years later. After the establishment of the Nationalist
government in Nanjing in 1927, in the midst of the martial arts-magic
spirit film boom, a number of publications on the subject appeared in an I 223
effort to evaluate and conclude the earlier debate. 58 The prevalent film
criticism rhetoric of science vis-a-vis superstition in and the eventual cen-
sorship of the popular genre cannot be disassociated from this extensive
debate on modern science and the fate of the modernity project in China.
Popular cinema, largely operating on the margins of the May Fourth
movement yet occupying a substantial space in the vernacular culture,
engaged with the contemporary controversy and its aftershocks in indi-
rect but complex ways. The plots of most films were largely derived from
traditional sources; however, the adaptations often privileged strange,
magical, and improbable elements in order to enhance narrative sus-
pense and visual effect. The bold use of film technologyJor these effects
turned adaptation into a distinctively modern experience. The cine-
matic realization of the fantastic and mythical world, made possible with
editing techniques, multiple camera set-ups, superimposition and so
forth, rendered the impossible not just possible, but even believable. The
sword-fighting scene in Romance of the Western Chamber was reportedly
shot from several camera angles at once and edited afterwards. The result
is a complexly patterned pyrotechnic display of light and shadow at high
speed, redolent of the avant-garde film aesthetic. Burnin9 was the first
large-scale production that combined ·martial arts" with "magic-spirit"
and experimented with film technology to create special effects and a
Chapter Six
6.10 The special effect of the '"light of swords competing in magic arts:· (Counesy of the
China Film Archive)
224 I
mystical ambiance. The cinematographer Dong Keyi ( 1906-78) found an
ingenious way to solve the problem of spatial contiguity by aligning the
temple roof painted on glass with the roofless life-size backdrop, creating
a "magnificent" piece of virtual architecture. 59 By putting together the
performance of actors and cartoon "stunts," the effect of the "light of
swords competing in magic arts" Uianguang doufa) is achieved (fig. 6. 10).
His most important invention, partly taken from an idea in an Ameri-
can magazine, is the flying knight-errant ifeixia), which quickly became
a trademark of the genre. 60 The headdress of the heroine was dyed
red, highlighting the prominence and androgynous look of the female
knight-errant. 61 The film magazines of the day also copiously published
articles on modern, state-of-the-art techniques used behind the scenes,
revealing the secrets of cinema's magic spirit.62 Through the innovative
play between science and magic, film technology and folklore, avant-
garde aesthetics and popular tastes, the cinema came to embody the mul-
tiple "faces" of modernity.63
These interwoven faces create new perceptions of the body at once
corporeal and metaphysical, visible and invisible, material and magical,
human and mechanical. Here the boundaries between nature and cul-
ture, the irrational and the rational, the traditional and the modern, were
much less fixed than perceived by those of Enlightenment-minded intel-
lectuals. If the "body is man's first and most natural instrument," as Mar-
cel Mauss put it, the "techniques of the body" in the martial arts-magic
spirit film constitute a particular habitus in which the body is both the
medium (instrument) and the message (aim) of a cultural practice.64 In
early twentieth-century China, this habitus could be located in the com-
posite space of traditional folklore and an emergent urban mass culture.
The termjian9hu traditionally signifies both the geographical and imagi-
nary habitat for the "world of martial arts" and the liminal social space
inhabited by the outcasts and outlaws in a predominantly rural land-
scape. Sam Ho put it succinctly, "the domain of the marital arts is there-
fore a subculture, at once a part of the real world but also apart from it." 6 5
The urban teahouses and amusement halls, where so much martial arts
and magic spirit storytelling took place and where cinema first appeared
and remained, are concrete examples of this renewed folk space. In other
words, the world of jianghu had extended into the metropolis of Shang-
hai (and later Hong Kong), both as cinematic imagery and social organi-
zation. The martial arts-magic spirit film, stemming from a promiscuous
body of cultural forms, sensibilities, and social experiences, articulated
the ambiguity of the space of modern folk culture.
The flying body of the knight-errant may be seen as the quintessen-
tial embodiment of this mosaic and contentious space. The cinematic I 225
technology transforms the magic power-to borrow Robert Stam's for-
mulation in another context-into an "aesthetic resource, a means for
breaking away from the linear, cause-and-effect conventions of Aris-
totelian narrative poetics, a way of flying beyond the gravitational pull of
verism, of defying the 'gravity' of chronological time and literal space." 66
Suspended in the air by invisible devices or various stunts (tishen9 or "re-
placement body"}, the body's movement and speed generated visual and
kinesthetic experiences that effectively materialized the previously imag-
inary tricks of oral tales, literature, theater, and pictorial art. The hero's
body and spiritual aura were fused together in this technologized liminal
space. Such an extraordinary skill was certainly practiced and realized to
varying degrees in the past (On the Water Margins abounds with such de-
scriptions). However, the technique was mostly considered a superhu-
man skill possessed only by a few masters. In the late Qing period, flying
and walking on air came to be perceived as acts that ordinary people
could perform as well (fig. 6.11). When the film actors were able to per-
form these skills "effortlessly" and repeatedly on the silver screen, the
flying body became the site of mass attraction and identification. This
prompted many teenagers to go into the mountains in pursuit of such
magical skills, a frenzy that, in part, led the cultural elite and the author-
ities to denounce the genre for corrupting the innocent and to take mea-
Chapter Six
6.11 The art of walking

on air: "female thief
leaps onto the roof·
(Dianshizhai huabao).
226 1
sures to curb its feverish production and consumption. Before going into
more detail on the eventual censorship of the genre, I will deepen my dis-
cussion on its social implication and cultural effect through a close look
at several niixia films, bringing the gender subtext to the forefront. This
may in turn help to explain the popularity and paranoia about the genre
as a whole.
MARTIAL HEROINES: MASQUERADE AND AMBIVALENCE
As a mass-produced cultural product marketed beyond major urban cen-

ters, the martial arts-magic spirit fllm's appeal tO rural Chinese audience
and overseas Chinese communities was overwhelming. A revival of the
martial spirit was much desired in a time of political instability and social
fragmentation to compensate for the image of the "sick man of the Ori-
ent." The martial hero, such as the pilot in The Great Knight-Errant ofAvi-
ation, became an icon for modern masculinity. His superman-like image
and pilot gear created an aura charged with mobility and velocity that
epitomized the new epoch.
However, the martial aura and magic spirit were not reserved for men
alone. Although the male martial hero .is a more familiar archetype;the
genre was distinguished and became increasingly popular through the
proliferation of the female knight-errant. 67 This no doubt corresponded
to the proliferation of swordswornen characters in contemporary martial
arts fiction,68 which provided raw material tor screen adaptatforis. Al-
though very few films of this subgenre have survived, the li~t of select
film titles below, with the character nii (female) and xia (knighHrtant)
appearing in each one, testifies to the popularity of the subgenre with
martial heroines: 69
• Niixia Li Feifei (The Female Knight-Errant Li Feifei, Tianyi, ins)

• Mu/an congjun (Mulan Joins the Army, Tianyi, 1927)
• Erniiyinxiong (Hero and Heroine, Youlian, four series, 1927-30)
• Xianiijiufuren (The Female Knight-Errant Rescues the Lady, Ming-
xing, 1928)
• Wunii fuchou (Five Vengeful Girls, Minxing, 1928) 1 221
• Jianghu qin9xia (He and She, Youlian, 1928)
• Feixia Lu Sanniang (The Flyin9 Knight-Errant Lii Sanniang; Da
zhonghua beihe, 1928)
• Nii dalishi (The Great Woman, Da zhonghua beihe, 1929}
• Niixia bai meigui (The Valiant Girl White Rose, Huaju, 1929}
• Hong xia (Red Heroine, Youlian, 1929)
• Lan9man nu yinxiong (A Romantic Heroine, Xintian, 1929)
• Nii haidao (The Female Pirate, Da zhonghua baihe, 1929)
• Huangjiang niixia (Swordswoman from the Huan9jian9 River,
Youlian, thirteen series, 1929-32)
• Lan 9unian9 (A Girl Bandit, Huaju, 1930)
• Nu biaoshi (a.k.a. Guandong nuxia, A Woman Bodyguard, Yuem-
ing, four series, 19 31)
• Niixia Hei mudan (The Female Kni9ht-Errant Black Peony, Yuem-
ing, 1931)
Unfortunately, only a few of these films still exist. Huaju specialized in

the modern style martial arts and action film, but Youlian was most
prolific in producing nuxia films. 70 The Red Heroine, the most complete ex-
tant film from Youlian, exemplifies the diverse yet overlapping aspects of
the genre (fig. 6.12). Its most striking feature is the alliance between the
Chapter Six
6.12 The Red Heroine (1929): shoocing on location. (Courcesy of the China Film Archive)
228 I desexualized heroine Yungu and an old Daoist master called (and re-
sembling) the White Ape (Baiyuan Laoren), who not only rescues her but
also teaches her martial arts and the magic of flying. 71 Surrounded by a
bevy of half-nude girls and his minions (including one with protruding
wolf teeth), a decadent bandit represents the force of evil. All of them re-
side in a secret, sumptuous palace in the wilderness. The orphaned hero-
ine, abducted by the bandit, avenges her grandmother's death and also
rescues another maiden from the claws of the bandit. Her abilities in-
clude such feats as instantly transporting her body in a puff of smoke,
evoking similar dazzling feasts in Melies's and Pathe's films of magic
transformations.
Another extant film, Uproar at the Lujiao Valley (Danao lujiaogou), is the
sixth episode of the thirteen-series Swordswoman from the Huan9jian9 River
and features a heroine (played by Xu Qinfang, 1909-85) n who roams
Northern China's rugged landscape and saves villagers from monstrous
birds. Another mission in the episode involves a visit, masquerading as
an old woman, to a martial heroine in a neighboring village. After a sis-
terly swordplay competition, the two join hands to raid a bandit's den to
avenge the young heroine's father's death.
The Valiant Girl White Rose from Huaju, again starring Wu Suxin, is a
shorter feature (extant in incomplete from) that carries over many of the
chase and rescue elements of Lustrous Pearls discussed in chapter 5. The
difference here, however, lies in the foregrounding of the heroine. In the

film Wu acts as a double for her feeble brother in order to assist their sick
father in fending off intruding bandits. The theme of masquerade is con-
sciously deployed to render the plot more dramatic and the gender rela-
tions more ambiguous. The mistaken identity also provides ample mate-
rial for comic relief, an element clearly carried over from the civilized
play and early physical comedy.
In all three instances, and in the niixia subgenre as a whole, the hero-
ine is usually pushed onto the stage by default, due to either the absence
or enfeebled condition of a male heir in the family-suggesting varia-
tions of the Hua Mulan legend. Having assumed the role of ·avenger for
an unjust death in the family and guardian of a community under exter-
nal threat, the heroine embraces the challenge and renounces or post-
pones her sexual desire. Her transformation is usually signaled by visible
changes in her iconography (costume and facial make up) and body lan-
guage, in addition to her newly acquired martial skills. Her obligatory
departure from her home community for a specific quest in a far away
place also propels the narrative to enter, quite literally, an otherworldly
dimension.
These films typically open with the "telling" of an emergency situation
befallen an ordinary community. The Red Heroine, for example, literally I 229
opens in the mouth of a villager who announces the imminent arrival of
the bandits. This expression effectively acknowledges martial arts film's
roots in oral storytelling. At the same time the formally provocative fram-
ing, while betraying an experimental impulse, attracts the audience
through a sensory organ and demonstrates the embodied nature of cin-
ematic storytelling. Against the background of emergency, the narration
gradually gravitates toward a more fantastic representation of reality
with the heroine's transformation from a country lass into a woman war-
rior. From that point on, the unfolding of the film tends to operate on
two parallel lines-often through crosscutting. One continues with the
realist presentation of the distressing situation at home involving the
people who are related to the heroine; the other follows the heroine's tra-
jectory of transformation, mediated by magical powers that complicate or
intervene in the logical unfolding of the plot proper. These films' resolu-
tions typically fall within the happy reunion (datuanyuan) paradigm, of-
ten culminating in marriage or a family gathering. However, such an
ending does not always return the heroine to her original maiden form,
at times surprising the audience with disconcerting developments.
Unfailingly, the heroines are endowed with extraordinary bodily tech-
niques that mark them as supernatural creatures. One such technique is
the effortless ability to move horizontally or vertically, such as flying or
Chapter Six
leaping over walls or across chasms. In other words, overcoming gravity

or temporality makes the instant bodily transportation from one location
to another possible. It is thus only natural that the name of the female
knight-errant in The Red Heroine is Yungu, the "maiden of clouds." 73 Af-
ter three years of training in the holy Emei mountain, Yungu's name is
figuratively spelled out in the sky when she returns home walking on the
clouds in a classic nuxia outfit. It includes the flowing turban that covers
her hair and her maiden identity, and the unisex "martial arts" dress
completed by a pair of boots. Diagonally flying down from the upper
right corner of the frame toward the aiidience, her appearance is a
shocking contrast to her image in the sequence of three years ago. Back
then she was a virgin captured as the bandit's sexual slave and appeared
with her long disheveled hair over her bare shoulders, stripped to her
black slip.
A mysterious old master, the White Ape, comes to her rescue. In a re-
vealing moment, the bandit pulls the curtain open to find the ape-man
leisurely smoking a pipe in her place. Here the mise-en-scene, resem-
bling a magician's theater, establishes a prelude for a dramatic transfor-
mation. As though the ape-man was her papier-mache facade, Yungu
emerges from behind him. The powerless Yungu suddenly turns into an
230 I avenging goddess when she lifts a huge vase and crashes it on the head
of a bandit. Yungu never appears with her long hair and feminine dress
again. At the end of the film, after she fulfills her role as the matchmaker
for the maiden and her cousin the scholar, she disappears in a cloud of
smoke rising from the ground. In the next shot, from the young couple's
point of view, she is shown in the sky brandishing her sword and mov-
ing rapidly. Her forward approach ultimately overtakes the screen, which
can no longer contain the velocity and energy of her body in the air
(fig. 6.13).
Similarly, the heroine Fang Yuquin in Uproar at the Lujiao Valley is also
capable of overcoming gravity, if not precisely flying across vast distances.
After entering a cave to rescue a boy kidnapped by the monstrous
golden-eyed bird, she holds the boy in her arms and jumps over a pre-
cipitous chasm. This spectacle in silhouette is accomplished in a long shot
with the aid of animation technique and the shadowplay aesthetic. In a
later sequence, at a temple where Fang meets her nemesis (who killed
her father), she performs an effortless jump over a tall wall into the
courtyard. Likewise, with a strong and supple body, Nian, a girl from an-
other village, invites Fang to assist in avenging her father's death. In one
remarkable sequence, Nian jumps onto a wall carrying a huge pair of
round grinding st0nes (passing for weights). The back-lit lighting makes
Nian's image atop the wall extremely imposing, amplifying the earlier im-
6.13 The lied Heroine (1929): Yungu fighting against the bandits. (Courtesy of the China Film
Archive)
1 231
age of Fang jumping over the chasm. This performance is presented as a

public spectacle in front of the villagers. These sudden insertions of shad-
owplay-like images, accentuated by backlighting, foreground the martial
women as larger than life figures. Nian's performance is also presented as
a spectacle, enacted in the midst of a crowd. Fang, disguised as an old
beggar with her sword hidden in her luggage, happens to witness the
show. Through this repetition and identification, the two forge their sis-
terhood in the world ofjianghu.
Bai Suyin, the heroine in The Valiant Girl White Rose, performs her
flying technique on a swinging rope. The theme of xia here playfully un-
folds through masquerade and a series of chase scenes, recalling similar
treatment in Lustrous Pearls, also starring Wu Suxin.74 Unlike the other
two niixia films, which are set in mythical time and rural space, White
Rose, as with Huaju's other films influenced by the serial queen dramas
and Westerns, opens in a conspicuous modern setting: the stadium for
girl's school sports tournament. In an almost documentary fashion (and
prefiguring Sun Yu's Queen of Sports), the camera tracks the women in
T-shirts and shorts parading into the stadium and performing Western-
style gymnastics. Bai Suyin, the student leader who excels in all sports
including target-shooting, wins a bow and a martial arts costume that in-
Chapter Six
eludes a cowboy hat. Soon after, she assumes her brother's masculine-
sounding name Bai Tiemin (Tiemin means Hiron people"), puts on the
martial costume, attaches a mustache, and embarks on a journey toward
the North to save her father from a local tyrant. 75 During her adventures
she repeatedly has to prove her martial skill and (male) virility. The rope,
a common device used in early comedy film to generate motion and
scene connection, 76 is deployed time and again to escape from danger or
to demonstrate dexterity, as when she confronts and defeats the villains
by swinging on a rope back and forth across the screen. Skillfully flying
in the air by using the rope almost as a prosthetic extension of her body,
White Rose even takes a moment to salute the camera! She also uses the
rope to bind the captives while jumping onto her horse and leadin.g' her
game back to her father's ranch. All the while, her real identity remains
concealed. Only when she is ordered to have a bath with her fatherdoes
she confess the truth.
The device of masquerade and identity change is important for the la-
tent theme of female bonding or even love in these films. Iri The Red Hero-
ine, Yungu, after her return as an androgynous knight-errant, rescues
another girl who is trapped. Unlike the heroines in other films who en-
ter the world of martial arts to avenge or aid their fathers, Yungu's mis-
232 I sion is to avenge her grandmother's death and to rescue the neighbor's
daughter. Her role as a surrogate parent to the girl becomes apparent at
the end of the film when she presides over the engagement between the
girl and her scholar cousin (who had been keen on Yungu before her
transformation). She then vanishes into the sky. Similarly, Fang Yuquin,
disguised as an elderly woman. encounters the younger heroine who has
solicited her help to avenge her father's death. Their duel in the court-
yard, with each gazing into the other's eyes, is not so much a competition
as a ritual of bonding-a practice common in the world of Jianghu, es-
pecially among men. After the competition, in which the more experi-
enced Fang wins, the two heroines drink wine to cement their bonding
as sworn sisters.
In White Rose, Bai Suyin, acting as a man, becomes the love object
of two sisters who study martial arts with the man whom Bai secretly
adores. In one sensuous scene. Bai enters two sisters' bedchamber by
mistake. The romantic, feminine ambiance of the set is accentuated by a
door shaped like a huge crescent moon. 77 For a brief moment, this mar-
tial arts story enters the inner chamber of the intimate female space. The
mistaken sexual identity here provides the occasion for the staging of an
ambiguous rendezvous between the three women. Inadvertently, this
Hmixed-up" relationship also cancels out the subplot of the heterosexual
relationship in the film. In addition to his fear of offending his friend the
bandit, the male protagonist refuses to help Bai Suyin upon discovering
the romantic interlude. These fleeting scenarios of female bonding and
mistaken love are perhaps signposts of a fledgling longing for a feminist
utopia, where women help and love each other and form connections
outside of kinship and the reproduction-oriented extended family.
The image of the martial heroine, in its diverse narrative and icono-
graphic expressions, conveys a mixed message. On the one hand, the
heroine, embodying technologized freedom, social mobility, and even
transcendence, offers the viewer an empowering image of a modern
woman. Her androgynous look and body language make her appealing
to all kinds of spectators-men and women, old and young-thereby
representing multiple potential identifications. The fact that the martial
heroine has to conceal her gender or even to assume a male identity,
however, continues to subordinate female power to a patriarchal order.
This ambivalence is further played out regarding the issue of female vir-
ginity and the association of women with nature or primitive forces.
The overwhelming presence of nonhuman or semihuman figures-
apes, birds, and other forms of uncanny embodiment-and their affinity
to women in these films complicates the ambiguous social and sexual
identity of the female knight-errant as a cultural icon. As in the case of
contemporary martial-arts fiction, the proliferation of the image of the I 233
female knight-errant on the screen was almost invariably accompanied
by the collective image of sexually victimized women, which sometimes
borders on misogynist violence. Instances include the decorative semi-
nude girls in the bandit's palatial den and the reference to rape in The Red
Heroine; similar motifs occur in Burning, where lecherous monks keep
young women in secret cells.
The martial arts-magic spirit film has to a certain extent developed
from science fiction and other forms of popular culture in the late Qing
and the early Republican periods. The thrill of fantasy, previously acces-
sible through storytelling, print media, and theatrical performance, was
visually materialized and enhanced by cinematic technology. The screen
incarnation of the female knight, as typified by Yungu, may be consid-
ered a protocyborg figure that combines attributes of the woman, the
primate, and the machine. This multifarious female subject defies an-
thropocentric reproductive laws and social hierarchies. In making the
phantom leap into the sky, Yungu literally approximates the Unification
of the Heaven and fWo ]man, the traditional ideal the literati had sought.
The leap into a new dimension, or a cinematic space, accentuated by the
martial-arts outfit that endows her with the sartorial attributes of an an-
drogynous angel, also considerably alters her social and gender identity.
She is no longer bound by social norms regulating marriage and family.
Chapter Six
This change, however, does not necessarily entail an escapist transcen-

dence. Instead, Yungu's expanded physical capacity and supernatural
power enable her, if at a remove, to serve her native community in the
most effective way. It is this combination of being at once a supernatural
creature, a social subject, and a technological hybrid that makes her ua
condensed image of both imagination and material reality." 7/l Through
this distillation, fantasy becomes a lived experience, magic an embodied
reality.
As the only complete extant nuxia film, The Red Heroine is also more
complete in its portrayal of a female knj~ht-errant who evades conven-
tional matrimony, unlike The Swordswoman and White Rose. Faithful to the
original novel. the heroine in The Swordswoman ties the knot with her
male comrade at the end. Similarly, in White Rose, after all the mishaps of
her masquerade; Bai Suyin marries the man who refused to aid her re-
venge plot after her rendezvous with his sisters. Fang Yuquin and Bai
Suyin are both bound by their passion for, if not devotion, to the other
sex. Their knight-errantry is chiefly conditioned by their private missions
to avenge their fathers and is therefore caught in the trappings of safe-
guarding or restoring a patrilineal order. Yungu's heroism, on the other
hand, is mainly motivated by her allegiance to women. Her blind grand-
234 I mother's death by a stampeding crowd, her own captivity, and the rape
of the neighbor's daughter exemplify how women are the most down-
trodden subjects in a society dominated by men. Thus, Yungu's transfor-
mation into a "maiden of the clouds" constitutes a vertical movement
that not only dissolves the boundary between the social and the super-
natural sphere, but also breaks up the patriarchal hierarchy that places
women at the bottom of society. Yet, despite her role as a superhuman
savior, she does not entirely evolve into a celestial creature bereft of so-
cial bindings. Her double identity as an insider, who is loyal to her fellow
villagers and victimized women, as well as a semidivine agent dispensing
justice through deus ex machina spectacles, positions her at the threshold
of the personal and the communal, spiritual transcendence and social
immanence.
The final scene of the film encapsulates this multifaceted character
through a double narration of the familiar and the strange, the earthly
and the magical, all wrapped in an unconventional happy ending. After
Yungu descends from the sky, she conducts an engagement ceremony
between her cousin and the neighbor's daughter-an act that would
have been reserved for an elderly male member of the family. Yungu's
transformation into a semidivine subject not only endows her with the
power to perform this ritual but, more significantly, gives the ritual a
magical touch. When she vanishes in a cloud of smoke from the scene,
the engagement-already simplified in that no relatives are present and

it is set in the wilderness rather than a conventional social space-is fur·
ther bereft of its normative meaning. The role Yungu plays here is by no
means an authority imposing an arranged marriage but a witness and
catalyst of a liberal romantic relationship. The issue of virginity is here
once more brought up when the maiden apologetically tells the scholar
about the Nloss of her body" (shishen, to the bandit presumably). If her
apology confirms the tenacious conservativism regarding female sexual·
ity even in the post·May Fourth late 1920s, the fantastic happy ending
effectively removes the weight of that guilt. The maiden, now also don-
ning a martial arts outfit, stands out more as a duplicate of the trans-
formed Yungu than a victimized village girl. The film thus achieves a
happy ending that is both conventional and refreshing. Its narrative clo-
sure of romantic fulfillment (Yungu's earthly desire will be vicariously
lived out by the girl) is charged with a supernatural power that renders
the ending more phantasmagoric than logical, more ambiguous than
normalizing. If this ending is reminiscent of similar closures in Romance of
the Western Chamber and Lustrous Pearls, in which a woman also witnesses
a romantic union, it departs from them through magic female power.
THE TAMING OF THE MONSTROUS

I 23s
The proliferating and profitable martial arts-magic spirit film came to an

abrupt halt in 1931 when the newly established National Film Censor-
ship Committee (NFCC) of the Nationalist government officially banned
the showing of many films. After its establishment in November 1930,
the FCC (a forerunner of NFCC) had already begun to issue licenses to
films. The extremely successful Burning received a license on June 27,
but it was soon revoked on July 21. The Flying Female Knight·Errant Lu
Sinian9 (Lianhua), The Knight-Errant with Double Swords (Youlian), and
The Ghostly Shadow on a Strange Island (Dadong) were among other cen-
sored films in this first wave of legal containment. 79 Within three years,
more than sixty films in the genre were exiled from the silver screen,
some of which simply never made it there.
This massive onslaught against the genre was part of the Nationalists'
antisuperstition campaign.so as well as a response to the outcry of the
cultural elite in and outside the fil~ world. The genre was considered a
dangerous vehicle for feudal ideology and a threat to the health of a mod·
ernizing society and the film industry alike. In other words, the Nation-
alists were concerned with disciplining the film culture as part of its pro-
gram to create order and inculcate citizens with its party ideology and
modern values. 81 The Nationalist regime had come to explicitly acknowl-
Chapter Six
edge the political and pedagogical instrumentality of the cinema and

consequently even set up an official film studio, the Central Studio, in
Nanjing for producing propaganda and educational films. The censorship
of the martial arts-magic spirit film thus inadvertently paved the way for
the 1934 New Life movement with its similar but more rigorously de-
fined goals.
To be sure, film censorship was neither a novel invention nor only di-
rected at the martial arts-magic spirit films in the early 1930s. Censor-
ship had existed prior to the Nationalist era and could be traced to the
early 191 Os when cinema began to ass!lrt an increased presence in pub-
lic space. Theater morality (such as the segregation of the sexes in seat-
ing) and tax collection (as film became recognized as a new commodity)
were among the chief concerns of the early censors. Film censorship was
a topic of concern in public discourse after the social impact of cinema
became rather visible. 82 Cheng Shuren's 1927 China Film Yearbook also
contains a section on censorship, which includes several official pro-
nouncements and police ordinances regarding production and exhibi-
tion.s3 Domestic and foreign productions censored during the early 1930s
were either banned or ordered to be cut because of nudity and eroti-
cism, torture and murder, anti-Chinese and racist elements, or religious
236 I and superstitious subjects.84 However, the martial arts-magic spirit genre
comprised 70 percent of all banned Chinese films. Censorship quickly ex-
tended to printed martial arts fiction as well. Tales of the Strange Knights-
Errant in the Wilderness, the serialized novel that inspired Zhang Shichuan
to make Burning, was deemed "absurd in content" and ideologically
0
counter to the Party doctrines" by the NFCC. The Ministry of Education
c!nd the Ministry of Internal Affairs joined the NFCC in issuing orders
prohibiting the publication and adaptation of such fiction. 85 The mass ap-
peal of the genre's anarchism, both on and off the screen, obviously
caused the paranoid reaction of the fledgling regime.
Official censorship notwithstanding, the May Fourth writers and ide-
ologues had also been waging a war against Butterfly literature from
which fertile ground the films had launched their commercial successes.
Their attack against this literature had begun in the late 191 Os and the
early 1920s when the May Fourth movement was in full swing. The writ-
ers who spearheaded the attack include Lu Xun, Mao Dun (Shen Yan-
bing), Qu Qiubai, and Zheng Zhenduo. In 1919, Lu Xun had already
voiced his distaste for fiction about knight-errantry and scholar-beauty
romance as a whole in New Youth, the leading journal of the New Culture
movement. 86 In a newspaper article called "Names" published in 1921,
Lu Xun listed pen names of popular writers whose writings he would
not bother to read, including A Knightly Soul (Xiahun) and A Strange
Knight-Errant (Guaixia). Despite his overall sensitivity to popular cul-

ture, Lu Xun's view of the martial arts fiction and the films remained neg-
ative and dismissive.
In the early l 930s, the May Fourth intellectuals' resentment and envy
toward Butterfly literature intensified, especially as the martial arts-
magic spirit film brought unprecedented popularity to the genre. In a
seminal article on the failure of the May Fourth Nliterary revolution," Qu
Qiubai lamented that the literary scene, twelve years after the revolution,
was still dominated by a wide range of popular literature and arts that fell
outside the May Fourth ideological orbit. Martial arts fiction and other
popular genres enjoyed wide readership among the moderately educated
commoners, who could indulge their favorite readings at street-corner
libraries, which were essentially neighborhood rental joints. Those who
were illiterate or semiliterate could resort to serial cartoons and teahouse
storytelling. According to Qu, popular (or old-style) vernacular literature
was so influential among laymen because its readership was organized in
a #mobile" fashion. Through a. rental club, a book could be circulated
among many readers very cheaply. One old-style novel was worth eight
or nine new-style novels.87 As a staunch May Fourth critic, Qu's point
was hardly to affirm the cultural significance of such popular literature;
on the contrary, he perceived that body of vernacular literature as inher-
ently reactionary because it skillfully repackaged "feudal virtues" and
"bourgeois" values to satisfy the tastes of a mass readership. 88
Shen Yanbing (Mao Dun}, another prominent May Fourth writer, di-
rectly attacked the martial arts-magic spirit film and welcomed the Na-
tionalists' censorship on the genre. For him, both the film genre and its
fictional progenitor were nothing but the "feudal arts of the petty ur-
banites," which Shen also alternatively defined as "petty bourgeoisie"
(xiao zichan jieji). Shen thought that after seeing Burning, audiences
would be so obsessed with Jin Luohan and Hong Gu (the male and fe-
male leads) that the knights-errant would later appear in their dreams.
His condescension notwithstanding, Shen offers an ambivalent eyewit-
ness sketch of the genre's reception in a Shanghai movie theater:
As soon as you arrived at a movie house, you could witness the

great appeal of The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple for the petty ur-
banites. As cheering and applauding are not prohibited in those
theaters, you are from the beginning to the end surrounded by the
[noise of the] fanatic crowd. Whenever the swordsmen in the film
begin to fight with their flying swords, the mad shouting of the
spectators [kanke] is almost warlike. They cheer at the appearance
of the flying Hong Gu, not so much because she is played by the
Chapter Six
female star Hu Die, as because she is a swordswoman and the pro-

tagonist in the film .... For them, a shadowplay [yingxiJ is really
not "play," but reality! s9
The eruption of the crowd, which Shen desc.Tibes with a mixture of

sarcasm and paranoia, in fact dramatizes a spectatorship that is consti-
tuted by a dynamic interaction between the magical power of the films
(and the actors) on the screen and participatory auditorium practice.
What Shen failed to see was that this genre, at once absorbing and dis-
tracting, like Dada for Benjamin, "hit the si,ectator like a bullet ... thus
acquiring a tactile quality." 90 The excessive identification of the fans with
on-screen knights-errant, especially through the kinesthetic stunts that
defied physical and social laws alike, illustrates how a particular kind of
cinema could rekindle or reinforce the mimetic faculty of alienated met-
ropolitan and dislocated diasporic subjects. This form of mimesis, as Jen-
nifer Bean has persuasively argued with regard to the "hypnotic" specta-
torship of the serial-queen dramas, "stresses the reflexive, rather than
reflection; it brings the subject into intimate contact with the object, or
other, in a tactile, performative, and sensuous form of perception." In the
contagious and tranformative realm of embodied mimesis, "it is the body
238 I of the fan that becomes extraordinary-the material on which the cine-
matic 'real' acquires its most palpable, historical register." 91
Such a mass-mediated mimetic desire or "burning" passion for the
martial arts-magic spirit film, as Shen observed, also spread outside the
theater, taking a truly "mobile" character. The junior petty urbanites
would continue their daydreams about the martial heroes through
"those crudely illustrated serial fiction" (cartoon books) adopted from the
screen version. In the countryside and towns inland where there were no
movie theaters, the cartoon books of Burning, though much shabbier and
less tangible compared to the screen version, simply assumed the place of
the film, providing a vicarious cinematic experience. The martial arts-
magic spirit film, incarnated in polymorphous forms and reaching a
greater public than the petty urbanites in Shanghai thus became a wan-
dering monster, capturing utopian dreams of millions. What this mass-
scale escapism through cheap entertainment and magic embodiment re-
ally suggested was in fact a collective desire and effort to recuperate a
popular imagination and utopia as an antidote to the disappointing social
and political reality in which they lived. 9 2
In Shen's theory, the "knight-errantry craze" (wuxia kuang) was sim-
ply a "bowl of magic potion" concocted by "feudal forces" to distract the
people by channeling their frustration and anger toward corrupt society
and the ruling class into a fantasy world. Shen's rhetoric smacks of an
elitist sarcasm, and his theory about the invisible "feudal forces" persist-
ing in modern entertainment is characteristic of the May Fourth dis-
course; yet, his reaction toward the official censorship betrays a strain of
ambivalence toward the popular craze. He attributes the genre's appeal to
the "petty" people, in particular, the youth, to its providing a "way out"
for their disillusionment with reality. He speculates that Nationalists ini-
tially tolerated the genre because of its direct or indirect critique of the
feudal past, especially the Qing dynasty and the warlord period that pre-
ceded it, which could help to legitimize the new Nationalist regime. How-
ever, the anarchic energy generated by the cinema began to have a wide-
spread social impact. It posed a real threat to the official. program of
modernization and its nationalist ideology, inadvertently foregrounding
the political impotence of the status quo, which could hardly top the
heroic image of the knight-errant. Realizing the social significance of the
petty urbanites, the Nationalist regime, which Shen equated with other
contemporary "fascist regimes" in Italy, Germany, and Japan, was never-
theless eager to stabilize or appease this expanding social power. Shen
concludes that it was under such sociopolitical exigencies that the Na-
tionalists decided to take measures to outlaw "monstrous" and "feudal"
films such as Burning, which propagated the cult of the "superman;" 93
In spite of their opposing political and ideological interests, the official I 239
censors and the May Fourth intellectuals were united in their denuncia-
tion of the genre (from fiction to film to comic books) as essentially "un-
scientific" and "feudal." As a fiction writer devoted to promoting social
realism, Shen also found fault with the retributional narrative pattern
(shan you shanbao, e you ebao) in the genre, which he linked to fatalism
(dingming lun). 94 These charges defined the genre as nothing but feudal
residues and thus politically regressive. The left-wing writers were eager
to exorcise the demon of the martial arts fiction in particular and But-
terfly literature in general to make room for May Fourth realist fiction,
which was deemed capable of inspiring social change, The Nationalist
government, on the other hand, was primarily concerned with establish-
ing a culture industry at its service rather than one that caused unrest.
For both the Left and the Right, the impact of the genre generated a sur-
plus "misdirected" social energy counter to the project of Enlightenment
and modernization.
Ironically, both parties choose to overlook the vernacular modernism
manifested in the genre, especially its cinematic form and popular ap-
peal. As Shen's rather paranoid account of the spectatorial sensation in
the theater suggests, it was not the film Burning itself that upset the sta-
tus quo or the leftist critic. At stake was the emergence of a sociophysio-
logical sensorium inside and outside the auditorium that seemed to have
Chapter Six
exceeded the political imagination of both the Right and the Left. The
eruption of the magical power on the screen was echoed by the audi-
ences' kinesthetic energy, creating a near anarchic experience that was
predicated on mobility, sensation, intensity of enjoyment, and identifica-
tion rather than passivity, stability, and conformism. The physical and po-
litical freedom of the knight-errant, articulated through his or her capac-
ity to transcend the confines of time and space and realized through the
technology of cinema, created a modern phantasmagoria where the im-
ages of the feudal knight-errant and the romantic modern superman (or
superwoman} amalgamated. Out of this ~perimposition came a modern
folk hero who did not quite fit the ideological projec.tions of either the
Nationalist regime or the May Fourth intellectual camp. Seen in this
light, it is not surprising that a didactic section about the nationalist anti-
Qing movement in Burning failed to interest the audience because it ap-
peared to be rigidly imposed from outside the story proper. 95
The immense size of the audience, which ceaselessly grew beyond the
bounds of the urban setting and even the nation, was matched by its
demographic complexity. In fact, the biggest market for the martial arts-
magic spirit film was in the diaspora Chinese communities in Nanyang.
The rentals for these films were cheaper than other kinds of features
240 I (e.g., the socioethic film). The genre embodied a certain version of the
Chinese heritage through its evocation of the traditional lore of knight-
errantry, yet it required only a minimal knowledge of the written lan-
guage (for reading intertitles) to understand the plot. The overseas Chi-
nese audiences, despite their geographical distance from China and its
contemporary social situation, could identify the cultural icons in the tra-
ditional folklore. The simultaneous recognition and geographical dis-
tance created a degree of self-exoticism in the reception of the genre,
which has the hybrid look of both the familiar and the strange, the ar-
chaic and the modern. The Cave of the Spider Spirit, The Swordswoman of
Huangjiang, Journey to the West, and Burning were allegedly among the
best-selling films among the Nanyang distributors and theater owners. 96
In fact, because their representatives stationed in Shanghai were always
inclined to pay more for prints than local distributors, the Nanyang dis-
tributors had a direct influence on what kind of films were to be made.
The martial arts-magic spirit film thus became a staple product in the lu·
crative Nanyang market for a long time to come.
The overseas saga of the genre's reception demonstrates how its at-
traction literally crossed national boundaries and marketed an image of
China at odds with the blueprint of the modernizers at home. This mul-
tifaceted genre shows a stubborn resistance to any single prescribed
ideology, but rather stems from the social fabric of quotidian life, further
intensified by transnational migration as well as the expansion of mass

media and technology. While the mainstream project of modernity laid
a heavy emphasis on rationality and standardization, the martial arts-
magic spirit film exemplified an alternative yet powerful cultural di-
mension that celebrated the mobility and heterogeneity of modern
experience.
A crucial component of the Nationalist ideology and the May Fourth
Enlightenment program was the cultural iconoclasm that sought to top-
ple the real and imagined idols of the feudal past. In the wake of the two
waves of antireligious campaigns-the first during the Republican revo-
lution (1900-15) and the second after the inauguration of the Nanjing
government (1927-30)-"images of popular gods were desecrated or
forcibly removed from rural temples and the temples themselves were
refashioned into elementary schools and offices for local government." 9 7
The violence against iconographical representations of folk religions and
beliefs went hand in hand with the drive to enlighten the people who
had largely been excluded from the elite literary culture. The erection of
schools on the ground of temples was symbolic of the self-righteous En-
lightenment ideology that sought to replace idolatry with literacy, folk
belief with scientific knowledge.
This structural and architectural reform, imposed from above, unwit- I 241
tingly recycled the entrenched supremacy accorded to the written word
in the traditional political and literary culture. The May Fourth intellec-
tuals, despite their radical vision, were surprisingly insensitive to the
significance of a technologized visual literacy that had already begun to
reshape everyday life in China since the late nineteenth century. Even Lu
Xun, a giant of modern Chinese literature and an astute cultural critic,
voiced his deep suspicion of the cinema early on. The now classic story
about his visceral, and patriotic, reaction to a slide show about the de-
capitation of a Chinese while he was studying medicine in Japan between
1904-6, has been redeployed by Rey Chow in her anatomy of the May
Fourth writers' denigration of image. 98 Chow argues that the impres-
sionable young Lu Xun, who upon seeing the show abruptly left the
auditorium and switched his vocation from medicine to literature, crys-
tallizes the "circumvention of visuality" in the "(re)introduction of liter-
ature and writing" as the primary instruments of modernization. 99 Such
cultural iconoclasm, progressive in its intention yet regressive in its effect.
helps explain why the May Fourth writers "simply refused to take the
film medium seriously" and "expressed nothing but contempt for the
cinema." 100 The democratization of culture remained on superstructural
level where literature was assigned a paramount role. Vernacular ico-
nography and mass entertainment were regarded as incapable of accom-
Chapter Six
plishing the lofty goals of nation building. Throughout the 1920s and un-
til the outbreak of the "national salvation" movement in the 1930s, the
May Fourth intellectuals, many of them active .in the Shanghai literary
scene, kept conspicuous distances from the film world even if they were
avid moviegoers in their leisure time.10 1
The attempt to turn temples into schools in the second antireligious
campaign paralleled the censorship of the martial arts-magic spirit film.
It is no coincidence that Burning was the chief casualty in this purge. In-
deed, the temple (simiao) was ubiquitous in this body of films both as a
central mise-en-scene and as a culfural reference crucial to the martial
arts culture. Typically situated in or near wilderness, beyond the reach of
ruling powers, the temple (of a particular kind) is a spatial trope in clas-
sical tales and folklore closely associated with esoteric arts and magical
powers. Its geographic marginality and political neutrality (or, rather,
ambiguity) has also made it a popular place of retreat for either political
or personal reasons. 102 In this sense, this kind of temple is really a nodal
point of the anarchic social landscape of Jianghu. the world of martial
arts. The cinematic multiplication of the temple image associated with
martial arts could hardly be the direct cause for paranoia on the part of
the state; yet, the power of the cinematic mise-en-scene produced a vir-
242 I tual Jianghu space, transplanting remote temples right into the heart of
the urban space. Such relocation elides the boundary between the geo-
graphical and the cinematic, the rural and the urban, recreating a land-
scape both familiar and strange to urban dwellers who came from the
countryside. The uprooted experience of migration to the cities, further
exacerbated by the crowded urban space, is vicariously compensated for
by. a virtual· trip to faraway landscapes where freedom can be attained
and justice rectified. When spectators began to burn incense inside the
theater and kowtow to knightly and mythical spirits onscreen, the space
was literally transformed into a temple. Martial arts-magic sp.irit films
not only created much-needed palpable heroes and heroines but more
importantly, transformed the theater into a modern shrine of anarchic
energy and utopian yearnings.
The censorship of the genre, however, was soon complicated by the
political turmoil following the Japanese invasion of Northern China and
subsequently the bombardment of Shanghai on January 28, 1932. This
national crisis not only directly affected the official policy toward the film
world but also brought about a structural reconfiguration in the film in-
dustry and exhibition. Prior, the establishment of the more progressive
Lianhua Company and the gradual entry of the May Fourth writers (as a
new breed of screenwriters) into companies such as Mingxing had al-
ready begun to steer commercial genres toward more socially concerned
themes. In July 1932, NFCC gathered representatives from major do-

mestic film companies at a conference, demanding the producers to re-
frain from making films with explicit reference to Nclass conscious-
ness." "Tragic materials" that might depress the audience should also be
avoided. 103 The year l 9 33 marked a crucial transition point. With the re-
lease of Wild Torrent (Kuang iii,, Mingxing, 1933) and other films scripted
by left-wing writers, an incipient puluo-jino (proletarian kino) movement
began to come to the foreground.
Alarmed by the quantity and influence of the progressive films being
made within a few years' time, the Nationalist government's propaganda
organ promptly put more pressure on the NFCC to target this new cin-
ema. As the Nationalist army was busy dealing with the "red bandits"
(chifei, i.e., the Communist army) in the mountains, the left-inflected
cinema also came to be labeled as "bandit-making" (zaofei).' 04 The mar-
tial arts-magic spirit film was now taken over by the left-wing cinema.
This time, however, the censors were faced with a far more complicated
case. The onscreen world of martial arts and the knights-errant who in-
habited it were perceived as supernatural, a reality in a mythical past. In
contrast, the mountains in Southern China, where the communist Red
Army was waging guerrilla warfare for an ambitious political agenda for
the future of China, was a real place at the present time. The taming of I 243
the red monster was to prove to be very arduous and with unpredictable
consequences.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FIGHTING OVER
THE MODERN GIRL
" HARD II
AN D " SO FT II
Fil LM S
244 I LIKE OTHER METROPOLISES of the world, Shanghai during the

first half of the 1930s was the site of high modernism and attendant forms
of social and cultural upheavals. No other period in Chinese cinema his-
tory matches the intensity and complexity of this period of high idealism
as well as everyday strife. It was an age that left a rich yet troubled legacy.
A new generation of filmmakers (such as Sun Yu, Cai Chusheng, Shen
Xiling, and Yuan Muzhi) and actors (such as Jin Yan, Li Lili, Wang Ren-
mei, Gao Zhanfei, and Zheng Junli) entered the center stage; the Shang-
hai film industry as a whole restructured. More importantly, their
entrances were accompanied by numerous film critics who held con-
siderable power in defining contemporary or epochal (shidai) cinema.
Film criticism-and with it the writing of the literary script-became a
highly professionalized and politicized cultural institution. The raised
status of a modern writing style associated with the New Culture move-
ment pressured for changes in cinematic expression and spectatorship,
and hence the meaning of the vernacular. Against this contentious back-
ground, further complicated by censorship, the directors, screenwriters,
actors, critics, and the studios often espoused differing or overlapping
aesthetic and political tendencies simultaneously and shifted their alle-
giances constantly.
In the midst of this major transformation, a debate on the so-called
soft film (ruanxing dianying) and hard film (yingxing dianying) was staged
Fighting over the Modern Girl
in the modernist film magazine Modern Screen (Xiandai dianying) and

other film-related publications in 1933-35. This debate started in the
realm of aesthetics but quickly escalated into an ideological battle in the
shadow of war and the Nationalists' modernization project, in particular
the so-called New Life Campaign. It had profound implications not only
for film production and reception but also for the fate of cosmopolitanism
represented by Shanghai's film and urban culture.
Not so surprisingly. the battle over what constituted the cinematic in
relation to the political was waged over the body of the modern girl and
her destiny in the metropolis. The modern girl and the viciss.itudes of her
transformation emblematized a flourishing urban moderhity and in-
tensified social division and political turmoil. Gone were the 1920s stu-
dents or widows torn between self and family. The amorous maidens in
classical costume and androgynous martial heroines with otherworldly
auras had been replaced by a new breed of Chinese Noras, trapped in
what had liberated them, primarily the modern urban lifestyle. The cin-
ema produced in this period bears a starkly contemporary look accented
by a vibrant cityscape and the 1930s design and fashion-as well as by
the patriotic and revolutionary fever galvanized by a national crisis. The
true meaning of this epoch emerged. however, in the contestation about
its forms, material registers, cultural representations, and gender inscrip- I 245
tions (or prescriptions).
Historicizing a highly mythologized era, this chapter proffers a remap·
ping of the heterotopic landscape of 1930s film culture. I focus on two in-
terrelated facets: the emergence of the left-wing film discourse and the
debate on "soft film" featured in Modern Screen, and the respective liter-
ary and film production of its key members. My goal is to carefully dif-
ferentiate and periodize this debate by outlining the many crisscrosses
and exchanges within this pivotal moment in Chinese film history. The
material I use to facilitate this investigation is embedded in the multifac-
eted spaces of production and reception and the metropolitan space of
Shanghai, which the Nationalist government tried to refashion (as can be
glimpsed in Sun Yu's Queen of Sports, discussed in chapter 2). These texts
and the debates surrounding them engaged the tension between aes-
thetics and politics, elitist discourse and vernacular experience, cosmo-
politan yearnings and nationalist sentiments in the first half of the 1930s.
It is neither possible nor productive here to conduct a comprehensive
survey of the most contentious and perhaps richest period of Chinese
film history. 1 I hope my focus on the imbrication of the changing shape
of the modern girl will shed light on the nature of a cinema caught.be-
tween competing modernist claims and vernacular praxis. Despite their
avowed oppositions in a polemic war, these competing moderns shared
Chapter Seven
an obsession with the question of urban modernity and national identity

in the shadow of war.
THE LEFT TURN: RADICALIZING

THE CINEMATIC VERNACULAR
The early 1930s witnessed the transformation of a thoroughly commer-
cialized film industry into an increasingly politicized enterprise, espe-
cially in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931
and the bombing of Shanghai on/January 28, 1932. In the existing Chi-
nese and Western historiographies of Chinese cinema in the 1930s, the
period from the 1932 bombing up till the overall Japanese invasion of
China in 1937 has been labeled the first "golden age." 2 Its inauguration
has habitually been linked to the ascendance of the left-wing cinema that
emerged early in the decade, culminating in the so-called National de-
fense cinema (guofang dianying) launched in 1936. Aptly couched in an
urban terminology, this paradigmatic shift was called the "left turn"
(xiangzuozhuan). 3 The political and aesthetic implications of the rise of
this socially engaged and patriotic hard cinema by its critics have received
much scholarly attention. Both to its advantage and disadvantage, patri-
246 I otic cinema has been apotheosized into a myth ever since the Commu-
nists' Yan'an years. In the late 1970s, this myth was further consolidated
after the rehabilitation of many 1930s filmmakers and actors who were
persecuted under the directives of Jiang Qing (an actress in the 1930s
Shanghai and Mao's wife) during the Cultural Revolution. The erstwhile
"poisonous weeds," as Chris Berry has noted, were reinstated as "na-
tional treasures" through this revisionist enterprise. 4
The political rehabilitation was accompanied by a series of public ac-
tivities in exhibition (both national and international), research, and
publications in the early to mid- l 980s. 5 The most extensive exhibition
took place at the China Film Archive in Beijing in September 1983 where
some 20, 000 people saw forty-three films, many deemed left-wing. Vet-
eran critics and writers such as Xia Yan, Yang Hansheng ( 1902-93), and
others inaugurated the exhibition; a scholarly conference was held con-
currently. 6 It was nothing less than a rescue operation, especially as many
filmmakers and critics active in the 1930s were rapidly aging or dying.
Numerous memoirs were hastily written; copious compilations of the
left-wing film criticism were published; and symposia on representative
left-wing directors were held one after another. This extensive effort has
no doubt helped salvage and organize a significant amount of historical
material. The sifting and interpretation of the archival material by and in
the interest of a few surviving members of the left-wing group, however,
have yielded a fairly one-sided story that is not so much a history as an

updated myth.1
The version reinforced repeatedly is that the left-wing cinema move-
ment was created and guided by the Communist Party (the headquarters
of which was then far away in the mountainous region of Jiangxi). It
saved the Chinese cinema by defeating the feudal and imperialist forces
in the Shanghai film scene, in particular the advocates of the so-called
soft cinema. The heterogeneity of the film world in the period has been
reduced to a binary opposition between the "hard" and "soft" stances, or
between the patriotic or revolutionary and the escapist or reactionary.
Within the left-wing itself, the differences between its core coterie-
mainly the critics and script writers who were party members (Xia Yan,
Ah Ying, Wang Chenwu, Shi Linghe, and Situ Huimin)-and the often
shifting outer circles of progressively minded but hardly dogmatic cre-
ators have been smoothed over, creating an image of the left-wing as a
more pervasive and centralized movement. The rescue operation in the
1980s succeeded largely because their major opponents died long ago
and thus were not able to participate in this retrial, in which the latter
were judged to be "historical sinners" or "national traitors" in absentia
once and for all.
More recent studies have challenged this myth and have come up I 247
with some new insights into this rich yet complicated period. This re-
visionist approach tries to demystify the existing historiography by sit-
uating the left-wing cinema in the broad landscape of the syncretic
Shanghai film culture of the 1930s. Far from being an isolated radical
movement within the predominantly commercial Shanghai film indus-
try, the left-wing cinema emerged and thrived in a moment in Chinese
and international film history when multiple ideological and aesthetic in-
clinations coexisted and commingled as much as they collided. This com-
plex web of allegiances and conflicts together created a film culture torn
between competing brands of modernism. Demythologizing does not
discredit the historical importance of this progressive cinema, but rather
traces its history, in particular its interaction with urban modernity and
a mass culture of consumption and entertainment.
The veteran film historian Li Shaobai leads this reevaluation of the
I 930s progressive film movement. While acknowledging its origin in the
left-wing drama movement, Li argues that the term left-wing cinema is a
latter-day construction. Li notes that the term only appeared once in the
0
outlines of present action" of the left-wing association of dramatists,
which was founded in September of 1931. The outlines did, however,
stress the film medium's importance and urged members to actively seek
opportunities to launch a Chinese puluo-jinuo (proletarian kino). 8 How-
Chapter Seven
ever, for about two years this orientation only existed as a loosely con-
nected patriotic and progressive tendency in the film circle, after the es-
tablishment of the Lianhua Company in 1930 and the Japanese invasion
of Manchuria in 1931. This tendency took on the more salient form of a
cultural front with the formation of the Association of Chinese Film Cul-
ture (Zhon99uo dianyin9 wenhua xiehui) on February 9, 1933. Its member-
ship was hardly exclusive, open to almost anyone who worked within
the film industry in Shanghai.
Rather than an insular political group with a uniform doctrine, the as-
sociation was a broad democratic forum JI patriotic filmmakers and other
cultural workers who shared the desire to join forces and create a socially
concerned and economically viable domestic cinema. They responded
not only to the national crisis that directly affected the Shanghai film in-
dustry but also to the encroachment of Hollywood. 9 Its manifesto pro-
claims, in a somewhat utopian spirit, that the association's primary goal
is to Nexpand our powerful avant-garde movement in film culture and
build a new silvery world [yinse shijie]." 10 Under the banner of patriotism,
economic survival, and cultural resistance, members of different studios
and the critics' circle from different generations and with different ideo-
logical outlooks united to begin a new chapter of Chinese cinema. Col-
248 I lectively they responded to the urgent situation, although their methods
of achieving this common goal varied. The left-wing cinema was, strictly
speaking, a subsegment of a multifaceted cultural movement, while the
political exigencies pushed many to adopt a receptive attitude toward a
progressive social and aesthetic orientation.
Above all, the left-wing cinema was a screenwriting and film criticism
movement, with its origins in the New Culture movement and its strong
print media. The effort to channel the May Fourth ideology of the mod-
ern vernacular fiction into the domain of entertainment, especially cin-
ema, coincided with the film industry's crisis after the quelling of the
martial arts film, and the Japanese attacks. Zhou Jianyun, the cofound-
ing manager of Mingxing, made the first contact when he approached Ah
Ying (Qian Xingcun), also a native of the province of Anhui, and asked
him to help introduce famous writers to "consult" on Mingxing script
producti<>n. 11 Mingxing was hit hard in the Japanese bombing and had
been losing its competitive edge after the establishment of Lianhua,
which thrived on its contemporary subjects starring new, youthful, ath-
letic stars. In 1932, Mingxing only managed to turn out three silent fea-
tures whereas the up-and-coming Lianhua produced eighteen (including
works by the three energetic and prolific young writer-directors, Cai
Chusheng, Bu Wangcang, and Sun Yu).1 2 In the next two years, Ming-
xing released a number of films scripted by left-wing writers, in particu-
lar Xia Yan and Ah Ying, to considerable critical and popular acclaim.
They include Xian Yan's Wild Torrent (Kuang liu, directed by Cheng Bu-
gao, 1933), Spring Silkworms (Chuncan, 1933, based on Mao Dun's fic-
tion), Rouge Market (Zhifeng shichang, directed by Zhang Shichuan, 1933),
Ah Ying's Year of Plenty (Fengnian, directed by Li Pingqian, 1933) and
Three Sisters (San zimei, directed by Li Pingqian, 1934). The left-wing writ-
ers also adopted the tactic of working closely with directors who had built
careers making commercial films in the 1920s but were now seeking
change. This method was described as "trailing on the playing field."
While Xia Yan worked with Cheng Bugao at Mingxing, Tian Han wrote
scripts for Bu Wangcang at Lianhua. 13 To avoid the suspicion of both the
Nationalist and foreign censors, the writers would sometimes assume
pseudonyms or have the directors take the credit as screenwriters.
These script-centered films, though to some extent each carrying their
individual director's style, are markedly different from films of the civi-
lized play or Butterfly literature tradition, both of which relied heavily on
formulaic theatrical or traditional storytelling conventions. These new
films were elaborately written, using the idioms of critical realism, which
May Fourth writers applied in their antifeudal and anti-imperialist liter-
ary enterprises. As a whole they inaugurated a new genre in cinematic
writing by infusing the May Fourth literature and drama into the "silver
world." This effectively redefined the meaning of the vernacular on the I 249
screen, which up to that point had been dominated by mass entertain-
ment, traditional theater arts, and popular urban fiction. The obvious
changes can be seen in the increased number and length of intertitles,
their political didacticism, and in the replacement of the (classical) verti-
cal format with a horizontal format. For instance, Spring Silkworms, hailed
as the first sound of adapting the New Culture to the screen" by direc-
0
tor Cheng Bugao himself, literally put Mao Dun's words on the screen.
Cheng related how he painstakingly tried to "visualize every word and
sentence in the story and not to stray from [the story]." The result: a
faithful "sketch" of the original. 14
Soviet cinema and film theory and Japanese radical film writing cat-
alyzed the flourishing of the May Fourth-style script. 15 The diplomatic
relationship between the Soviet Union and China established in De-
cember 1932 made public dissemination of Soviet film culture less risky,
though the nationalist authorities and the colonial administrations kept
a constant eye on such practices. On February 16, 1932, The Road of Life
(Shenglu, directed by Nikolai Ekk, 1931) premiered in Shanghai. In 1933
and 1934, nine Soviet films were shown in Shanghai, including Golden
Mountains (Jinshan, directed by Sergei Iutkevich, 1931 ), Storm over Asia
(Yaxiyajengbao; a.k.a. The Heir to Genghis Khan, directed by Vsevolod Pu-
dovkin, 1928; released in 1929), and Marionettes (Kuilei, directed by Iakov
Protazanov, 1934). 16 The progressive filmmakers were elated to discover
Chapter Seven
a new film language and quickly incorporated the so-called Soviet shots
(Sulian jingtou), referring to the montage technique as well as the social
and political form these shots constructed. The Soviet fever among the
radical intellectuals resulted in a series of translations and publications in
1932-33. Xia Yan and Ah Ying translated Pudovkin's On Film Direction
and On Screenwritin9, respectively. Most film-related publications, includ-
ing popular fanzines, increased their coverage of Soviet cinema and cul-
ture. Suddenly, puluo (proletariat) and jino (kino) became fashionable
cinematic vocabulary within the educated strata; the exuberant utopian
spirit and aesthetic in Soviet cinem4 captured the imagination of both the
left and modernist filmmaker and critics. The Soviet connection provided
Chinese cinema its first forays into the global arena in a grand style.
A delegation, including Hu Die, the "Queen of Cinema," was dispatched
to Russia to attend the Moscow International Film Festival in 1935. The
famous Peking Opera actor Mei Lanfang also appeared on stage there,
where he enthralled Sergei Eisenstein. Among the Chinese submissions,
Cai Chusheng's Fishermen's Ballad ( 1934) became the first Chinese fil~ to
win an international award.
The crop of films with heavy May Fourth literature inflections prima-
rily appealed to the intelligentsia that fervently responded to the national
250 I distress. Hardly surprising, then, this May Fourth-styled cinema was em-
bodied in the recurrent male writer, poet, or actor, who undergoes trans-
formation from a dandy to an awakened, even radicalized social agent.
As such, the progressive and high-minded turn in cinema created a new
orientation in film spectatorship. If the entrance of Butterfly writers into
the film world in the mid-l 920s marked the first fusion of vernacular lit-
erature and screenwriting, this new wave of literary and cinematic con-
vergence was motivated by entirely different reasons and had different
consequences. The flourishing Shanghai cinema in the 1920s capitalized
upon the social anarchism and political polycentrism of the time. The Na-
tionalist regime in Nanjing, established in 1927, however, tried to eradi-
cate the martial arts-magic spirit film that was deemed usuperstitious"
and socially threatening. It also took measures to contain the Communist
influence in the arts and mass media. Censorship and confiscation of rad-
ical literature and drama were diligently practiced. However, barely liter-
ate working class people and other petty urbanites with a taste for popu-
lar culture had limited interest in the lofty May Fourth style literature,
which adopted Western grammar and syntax and complex intellectual
ideas. This further impelled progressive writers and dramatists to use cin-
ema accessibly to proselytize their political ideals. Yang Hansheng, a May
Fourth writer-turned screenwriter, recalls: "At that time, the number of
copies for a novel was limited. Those that sold well had a print of five
thousand to ten thousand copies whereas those that did not sell had but
only two to three thousand. Moreover, they were subject to the censor-
ship of the Nationalists and often confiscated at the postal office. Cinema
was, however, entirely different. Each film could have millions of audi-
ences. For that reason, we encouraged many people working on stage to
strengthen cinema." 17 The radical political momentum created by the
1932 confrontation with Japan and American plans to build Shanghai
studios abated as the city and the film industry quickly recovered, al-
though the New Film Culture movement had became a broader yet poly-
morphous cultural phenomenon. In order to pass the censors and appeal
to studio producers, left-wing screenwriters often resorted to tactics that
compromised divergent demands or concealed radical messages behind
popular formulas, such as selectively adapting, and subtly altering, But-
terfly-style film titles or romantic plots. One interesting example, again
related by Yang Hansheng, is the title of Tieban hon9lei lu, which literally
means "A record of iron boards and red tears," couching the hard mes-
sage in soft romance. When Yang confessed that he did not know how to
write a film script, Hong Shen, a Mingxing veteran screenwriter and di-
rector, told him to "just write it like a novel" and Hong would modify it
for the screen. He assured Yang that such an ambiguous title would eas-
ily pass censorship. 18 I 251
Left-wing writers successfully infiltrated the film studios while other
business-savvy producers and directors continued to make films catering
to audiences that craved sentimental melodrama and other genres. Ming-
xing and Lianhua, where the left influence was most palpable between
1932 and 1935, also churned out conventional genre pictures, often by
the same directors. Sound films were carving out a distinct space where
the new technology focused the filmmakers' and viewers' attention on
singing and speech, a topic to be tackled in chapter 8. While also partici-
pating in the New Film Culture movement and producing several patri-
otic films, Tianyi, the stronghold for costume drama and Butterfly ro-
mances. never ceased to make its signature commercial films. Directors
sympathetic to the progressive cause who also continued to indulge their
popular taste were regarded by the hard-line left critics as "fellow travel-
ersp at best. Their works were subject to relentless ideological dissec-
tions, a practice carried into the People's Republic era. Ideological critique
reached its devastating climax during the Cultural Revolution, when film
criticism became mass campaigns that forced filmmakers and actors to
denounce themselves and others or commit suicide.
Indeed, through film criticism the left-wing cinema emerged as an
ideological discourse and institution. Its explicit goal was to transform an
urban mass culture represented by the cinema. With this movement. se-
Chapter Seven
rious film critic's (yingpingren) social status became visible in the film
scene, overtaking other film journalists working in a popular idiom with
much less theoretical rigor or political passion. In the early 1930s, the
film press boasted a big expansion. Popular fanzines and trade journals
included Movie Monthly (Dianying zazhi), Screen Weekly (Yinmu zhoubao)
(fig. 7.1 ), Movie Fans' Weekly (literal translation of Yinmi zhoubao), Ming-
xing Bimonthly (literal translation of Mingxing banyuekan), the Film Mag-
azine (Yingxin zazhi, Lianhua's trade journal. later changed to Lianhua
huabao), and Qingqing Film (Qingqing dianying). A new breed of film pub-
lications took the form of newspaper s-lipplemems, which quickly be-
came the chief battleground for the left critics, including Morning Daily's
"Daily Film," Shibao's "Shibao Film," Minbao's "Film Forum," and Dawan-
bao's "Silhouette {JianyingJ." Xia Yan and Ah Ying's translations of Pudov-
kin's works were first serialized in "Daily Film" before they were published_
in book form. Xia Yan's script, Wild Torrent, was published, as an appen-
dix (or illustration) of the monograph On Film Direction. 19 Some supple-
ments, such as "Daily Film," resulted from complicated negotiations be-
tween political objectives and commercial interests. "Film Forum," edited
by Lu Si and supported by a team of critics from the league of left-wing
dramatists, occupied the far left position in the spectrum. It also sys-
252 I tematically introduced Soviet film theory and cinema, particularly films
screened at Shanghai theaters. The critics often attended the films to-
gether, held discussions, and even collectively signed the reviews. 20
This organized film criticism practice, joined by about three dozen
well-educated intellectuals and film professionals, quickly launched po-
lemic debates on cinema and national culture in the news supplements,
magazines, and a duster of urban public settings. They made moviegoing
a serious profession and roamed about the city armed with their note-
books and ideological lenses. These modern men of letters and ambiva-
lent cinephiles spent hours watching imports and domestic products and
took them apart at "film tea party" (dianchahui) gatherings at restau-
rants or teahouses, before going home to write up reviews for print
overnight. 21
This self-styled group of avant-garde critics, however, was not uni-
form in its ideological stance and personal attitude toward urban culture.
At the film tea parties they often argued vehemently about specific films
and issues concerning Chinese film industry, as well as over personal dif-
ferences. Such contentions were reported in great detail in film maga-
zines.22 A few hard-line Leninist critics (such as Yu Ling) rejected nearly
all modem forms of Shanghai entertainment and leisure and, as a social
statement, wrote their reviews at street food vendors' eateries. But many
took advantage of the numerous coffee shops in the concessions where
they sat in anonymity and wrote their articles over beef tea (niucha) or
I 2s3
7. l The modern look of Yinmu zhoubao (Screen Weekly).
club sandwiches. The payment for film reviews was very low, typically
two yuan for a thousand characters (which could only pay for two sand-
wiches).23 Some of them, despite their radical polemics, nevertheless en-
joyed other urban pleasures in addition to cinema that the city provided,
especially dancing with dance hostesses. 24
While helping to construct a film theory and, to some extent, a Chi-
nese national cinema, radical film criticism tended to hold a patronizing
Chapter Seven
and judgmental attitude toward Shanghai filmmakers and their films.

The critics were eager to turn the vast number of urban masses into pu-
luo (proletarians) after the Soviet model and make cinema an instrument
for the ideological and cultural war against feudal remnants and imperi-
alist forces. They thus regarded any film practice not entirely and explic-
itly in service of these ends as either politically backward or outright re-
actionary. The films deemed problematic were often those that either
indulged in "exposing" the glamour (and sins) of metropolitan pleasures
or the ones that adhered to previous melodramatic formulas. stressing
the "ethical" or "fateful" dimensibns of social relations and conflicts. Left-
ist film criticism left behind a formidable but also ambiguous legacy. Its
rigor and political vision radicalized the cinematic vernacular and iin-
abled a paradigm shift in Chinese cinema from a popular entertainment
to a political instrument. At the same time, its exclusionary dogmatism,
though practiced within a public sphere that allowed considerable dis-
sention, planted seeds for more totalitarian forms of discursive (and
sometimes physical} violence. It was directed even toward some of their
own or "fellow travelers" in Yan'an and after I 949, the year the Com-
munists took power.
By and large, this culture of high-minded film criticism was part of a
254 I print-centered masculine public sphere and a form of male intellectual
flanerie. Hardly any women were involved in the circle other than as
quiet companions to their male friends. 25 Yet interestingly, one of the key
points of contention among different factions of the critics was the qi.1es-
tion of woman's relation to urban modernity. Her changing iconography
and the social and epistemological status of her body were of critical im-
portance to the transformation of Chinese cinema and its spectatorship
during this anxious "left turn."
REMAKING THE "SILVER DREAM" AND THE MODERN GIRL
The left-influenced film circle, formed in early 1933, seized a great po-
litical opportunity when Shanghai became more closely tied to the coun-
try's fate and took on more salient nationalist overtones. For many out-
side of the core group, embracing left-wing cinema was part of a
conversion experience. Some old-style figures, such as Zheng Zhengqiu,
attempted to update their social aspirations by "embarking on a progres-
sive road." 20 More romantic ones saw the national crisis as a chance to
channel their petty bourgeois, narcissistic sentimentality toward sympa-
thy for the underdogs of capitalism and imperialism. The movement's
frontline was hardly uniform as conversion and allegiances within the
left-wing varied as the political tides shifted.
This conversion was often described as waking up from a daydream

world, which signaled a fundamental change in cinema's perceived on-
tology and function. For some, the conversion had actually begun before
the national distress became an emergency and before the New Film Cul-
ture movement was officially formed. Tian I-Ian, a central figure of the
movement's left-wing component, is a case in point. His essay 0ut of the
0
'Silver Dream' has often been cited as the signpost of both the personal
0
and collective conversion for Western and especially Japanese-educated

intellectuals (Lu Xun among them). As mentioned in chapter 5, since his
return from Japan in 1924 the poet and playwright Tian Han tried to
make films with the Nanguo Film and Drama Society, but financial con-
straints hindered the completion and distribution of Going to the People
and Lingering Sound of a Broken Flute. Both productions, lasting intermit-
tently for two to three years, were undertaken with very few resources,
though he did obtain some support from the Shanghai Art College where
Tian Han taught and briefly served as its president. 27 Just like the ama-
teur drama (aimeiju) that Nanguo advocated and practiced, the two films
were low-budget ventures and possibly the first fruits of independent art
cinema in Chinese film history.
For Tian Han the poet, cinema presented the unique medium for
umanufacturing dream" (zaomeng) in the twentieth century. 28 His passion
for and ideas about cinema stemmed from his student years in Japan. In
his earlier writings on cinema published in the film magazine Silver Star
(Yin9xin9) during 1927 and later collected in a book, Yinsede meng (Silver
Dreams), Tian recalled his experience as an avid llcinemafan" in Japan,
where he watched more than a hundred foreign films in seven years.
Moved by the image of a girl too poor to buy a pair of shoes she desired,
Tian wanted to send her his own savings but later realized his own
naivete after he saw her appearing again as a queen in another film. 29 His
belief in cinema's #manufacturing dream" was largely inspired by Tani-
zaki Jun'ichiro, a famous New Sensationalist writer and an active mem-
ber of the pure cinema (jun'eiga) movement. 30 As I will show later, the
influence of Tanizaki and the New Sensationalist aesthetic was also in-
strumental for the "soft film" advocates.
Tian's idea of imparting a #silver dream" art cinema to the then pre-
dominantly commercial Shanghai film scene was directly borrowed from
Tanizaki. In his English-titled first installment of Silver Dream, llDay
Dream," Tian Han defined cinema by way of translating Tanizaki's film
theory and practice:
In some sense, film is perhaps a dearer dream than ordinary ones.

People have simple dreams when they sleep; they like to dream
Chapter Seven
even whey they are awake. We go to the movie theaters precisely

to have "day dreams" [in English J. It is perhaps for this reason that
I enjoy going to the movies in daytime, and in the spring and sum-
mer seasons. Especially in between the two seasons when one feels
a bit sweaty, [cinema] can best induce all kinds of fantasy. Return-
ing home, these fantasies still linger in one's mind while in bed,
communicating with dreams in sleep. In the end, it becomes hard
to know whether it is dream or film, but only leaving a lingering
beautiful illusion in the mind. Film can indeed be called the dream
made by men with machinesP 1 I
Besides inspiring Tian Han through his writing and films, Tanizaki even
had a real role to play in Tian Han's realization of his "silver dreams." 32
During production of Going to the People, Nanguo Film and Drama Society
hosted a tea party for Russian writer Boris Pilnyak, and two Japanese
writers, Tanizaki and Sato Haruo, who were visiting Shanghai. Footage
of the meeting was allegedly included in the film.3 3 This encounter be-
tween the Chinese, Japanese, and Russian modernists is but one of many
occasions when Shanghai served as a hub for cosmopolitan networks in
the 1920s and 1930s. The Russian intellectuals saw Shanghai as a labo-
256 I ratory of revolution, whereas the Japanese modernists found Shanghai
to be an Eastern metropolitan center rivaling the West after much of
Tokyo was destroyed overnight in the 1923 Kanto earthquake.H
Tian's only fully realized silver dream prior to his "left turn" was his
script for Spring Dream on the Lakeside (Hubian chunmen9, Mingxing, 1927)
(fig. 7.2). The film, though nonextant, seems to have fulfilled his mod-
ernist reverie and bears striking affinity to Tanizaki's The Lust of the White
Serpent (Jasei no yin, 1921). Its use of psychoanalytical motifs and a corre-
sponding aesthetic style made this silver dream unique in the late 1920s.
When most Chinese films were either ethical melodramas or histori·
cal subjects, this poetically rendered psychological drama stood out as
modernist and Western. l 5 Directed by Bu Wangcang, known for his
"European style," and starring Yang Naimei, the famous modern girl and
trendsetter in Shanghai, the film presents a sadomasochist love triangle
between writer Sun Pijiang and two women. The male writer (played by
rising matinee idol Gong Jianong) is frustrated by his love for a stage ac-
tress (played by the famous female impersonator Mao Jianpei) and goes
to the dreamy lakeside of Hangzhou. There he finds solace in the icy
beauty Li Yibo (Yang Naimei), whom he first encountered on the train
and who reappeared in his dream. Li turns out to be a woman with a
penchant for beating her love objects. She whips him until he bleeds and
then licks his blood off with her tongue like a vampire. He indulges in the
7.2 Spring .Dream 011 the Lakeside ( 1927). (Coimesy of the China Film Archive)
I 2s1
painful pleasure. The usilver dreamu motif is foregrounded in a scene
when he is shot in the arms in his dream. 36 When he wakes up in the
morning, he returns to Li Yibo's house, seen in the dream, only to find a
silver-haired old woman there. "How mesmerizing this is! Just within a
blink of the eye, rouge is turned into gray hair," an enthralled critic
comments.37
According to the synopsis and reviews of the film, mirrors were fre-
quently used to enhance the haunting atmosphere and psychological in-
tensity. Mirrors reflect the unstable relationship between reality and
dream, functioning as devices of metamorphosis between different states
of mind and temporality. Tian's modernist daydream is realized as a cin-
ematic fairy tale about the painful transformation of modern male and
female identity. Sun Pijiang's character stands for a confused masculin-
ity caught between desire for both conventional love and anomalous
pleasure, between city life and the genteel pastoral landscape. The two
modern girls, one consumed by her worldly ambitions and the other an
ethereal phantom, are both presented as femmes fatale and hence Sun's
impossible objects.
The cult of the unobtainable modern girl seems to have traveled to ur-
ban China from Japan in the late 1920s. Xu Xiacun's short story, "Mod-
ern Girl" (titled in English), offers an unsentimental sketch of a Japanese
Chapter Seven
Mo-ga, Xinzi, a cafe waitress who has resurfaced in Shanghai's foreign
concessions.,s The story places the modern girl squarely in midst of the
urban scene and film experience. The narrator Mr. S encounters Xinzi
while strolling on the bustling Sichuan Road before a movie showiI/-8·
Descending from the bridge over Suzhou River and entering the jungle
of restaurants and department stores, he feels suffocated by a "crudely
manufactured urban air." He observes that while cars and trams are
screeching ahead on the paved street, the "crowd let themselves get
sucked into brightly decorated movie houses and Japanese dance halls
that send out strands of Jass [sic] musfc." "Mr. S!" Xinzi calls him in Jap-
anese. Taking her to a tearoom, Mr. S (alias Eureka) recalls his meeting
with her years ago in Tokyo.
A "true modern girl" and a Francophile, Xinzi also writes poetry, and
is an avid fan of Rudolph Valentino. Mr. S describes her features as de-
void of the usual Japanese feminine beauty; rather, the creator of "this
sculpture" seems to have mistakenly used angular male lines on her,
with flat chest and buttocks. Although her NBebe Daniel" hairstyle looks
impeccable, her generic round face can be found on any advertisement
and her big hook nose makes her look like an old woman. The reader
learns that she is promiscuous, often dating several men at once. Aban-
258 I cloning her student boyfriend, she hangs out with older men. In the end,
Xinzi becomes an enigmatic figure; her gender identity is as ambiguous
as her cultural identity. The cosmopolitan modern girl gets lost in Shang-
hai's urban jungle just as the Chinese male flaneur once did in Tokyo. Be-
cause the brief encounter occurs before the movie Mr. S has planned to
see, the reader is left with an uncertain feeling that this could well be a
"silver dream" that he has conjured up.
PINK DREAM
The leitmotif of the modern girl, or temptress, and male fantasy takes
on a more domestic visage in Cai Chusheng's film Pink Dream (Feng-
hongse de meng, Lianhua, 1932). The film has been historically seen as
Cai's last petty-bourgeois indulgence before he converted to the progres-
sive camp. Cai was reinstated as a master of the left-wing cinema in the
early 1980s. particularly due to his award-winning Fisherman's Ballad and
his phenomenally successful postwar melodrama, A River Flows East ( Yi-
Jiang chunshui xiangdongliu, 1947). His films before his "left turn," how-
ever, manifest a mixture of Zheng Zhengqiu's slow-paced ethical melo-
drama and Tian Han's aesthetic romanticisrn. 39 Decidedly anchored in
the urban space of Shanghai, Pink Dream's narrative was also structured
around a male writer and his two women. The film opens with these in-
troductory intertitles:
lntertitle 1: In a corner of Shanghai, our literary artist Luo Wen is... •

working hard.
Intertitle 2: The beautiful pink dream has finally disappeared in the >
deep night. What remains is but a faint trace of smile in Lud Wen's
lingering dream.
After a series of superimposed flashbacks of their romantic youth, the

film quickly cuts to a scene showing the routines and oppression of
everyday life in the city (for instance, the lack of money to pay rent). Like
many other melodramatic films made in this period, the male protago-
nist is torn between family obligations and erotic temptation, work and
pleasure. Luo Wen and his family live in an ordinary Shanghai longtang
apartment. While he tries to conjure up a romantic novel, his wife
teaches classes in the room next door to support the family.
When the writer's desire for romantic and sexual fulfillment seems
frustrated by the sterility of domestic life, he directs his gaze to the flick-
ering city outside the window, as though the city's nightlife would sup-
ply the erotic stimulants he sorely needs. To get inspired, he opens a
trendy magazine and finds a picture of the "social flower" Uiaojihua) Li
Huilan. The next shot cuts to the real-life modern girl, as though Luo's
desiring gaze has brought her to life. As the camera tracks backward, they I 259
are already in a dance hall, soon to meet. Lou quickly falls in love with
Li, who is presented as a figuration of the city's temptations. She lives in
a luxurious art deco apartment where she entertains her suitors, dressed
in semitransparent flowing gowns, although how she affords this life-
style remains a mystery. Luo's newfound "pink dream" takes him into
the world of pleasure and fantasy, in the form of nightclubs and the mod-
ern apartment of the "worldly and seductive" modern girl. 40 In a reveal-
ing scene, sitting on a couch in the apartment, Luo flips through a copy
of London Life while Li flaunts her legs, striking a pose similar to the for-
eign model in the magazine. By conquering the foreign-flavored Shang-
hai "flower," Luo has tasted a European dandy's erotic pursuits (fig. 7.3).
After a series twists and turns, Luo Wen wakes up from his prolonged
"pink dream" and reunites with his chaste wife, who has written the
novel The Tears of an Abandoned Wife under his name during her self-
imposed exile in a country school. 4 • Meanwhile, the modern girl, mar-
ried to Luo briefly, has eloped with her new beau with his advance for a
novel about their romance, called Paradise. Of course, the real paradise
turns out to be domestic bliss, not the ephemeral "pink dream." By and
large the film is a typical Mingxing production, rooted in the melodra-
matic tradition cultivated and perfected by Cai's mentor Zheng Zhengqiu.
The film was made in the midst of the Japanese attack of Shanghai.
Cai, shocked by the bombing, postponed the film while engaged in the
Chapter Seven
7.3 Pink Dream (1932). (Courtesy (Jf the China Film Archive)
260 1
collective production of an explicitly patriotic film, Share the Burden of the

National Crisis (Gongfu guonan, 1932), which he codirected with Sun Yu,
Shi Dongshan, and Wang Cilong. 42 Afterwards Cai completed Pink Dream.
Despite its implicit social critique, the film was met with harsh criticism
from left critics. Together with several other films that centered on the
question of moral degeneracy in the city, the film was accused of smack-
ing of "importsn (polaiping)-that is, Western lifestyle and Hollywood
film-and of cultivating a modeng (modern) look, while also intending to
criticize it. The "happy end" (English original} and the large number of
dance hall scenes-a cliched trope in most urban films of the period, or
a cipher for both Shanghai's spectacular metropolitan culture and its
danger-were singled out as instances of American influence. 43 Another
critic also found Cai's indulgence in things that are "good to look onlyn
troublesome (English in original), referring to the "beautifuln shots of
women's legs, semitransparent dresses, and a new car in which the mod-
ern girl rides. 44 Lu Si, a hard-line critic, pointed out that while the chaste
wife was a "feudal" figure, the modern girl represented the "metropoli-
tan leisure class that was underdeveloped but already morally bankrupt."
In short, she was a "social parasite, a plaything." Lu Si admonished the
screenwriter to say goodbye to these subjects about "flowers, the moon
and my lover," and to speak instead for the "oppressed and weak nation,"
turning entertainment into a movement to help realize a "bright and
great new epoch." 45
In the eyes of the left critics, Tian's "silver dream" and Cai's "pink
dream" were waning symbols of the feudal or bourgeois demons that
ought be exorcized from Chinese cinema, along with the me>dern girl
and the chaste domestic woman. They demanded that the filmmakers
dispense sentimental humanism and the attendant expressive form of
melodrama, characterized by hyperbolic plots, contrast of good and evil,
reliance on coincidence, retribution, and happy ends. After the 1932
bombing, which pushed filmmakers of different generations and back-
grounds to embark cm the "progressive path," the trope of "waking up"
became common in their films. Tian Han, the famous "cinemafan" and
"daydreamer," became a forerunner of the left turn.
Tian Han's convers.ion took place as early as 1930. Lu Mengshu, the
former editor of Silver Star, asked him to contribute a follow-up essay on
cinema to the new film magazine, Dianying, as part of an effort to launch
a new cinema movement. The result was "Waking up from the Silver
Dream," in which he rejected Tanizaki's "Day Dream" theory and em-
braced the ideological (yishi) nature of cinema. 46 He also renounced the
rise of Japanese jingoism and celebrated the Soviet Republic, the only I 261
"proletarian" homeland in the world. He cited several incidents that
helped cause his change of heart. 47 During a twenty-fifth anniversary
celebration of their victory in the Russo-Japanese war, more than one
hundred Japanese school children were killed or injured in a film pro-
jector fire in a dance hall. "They had planned to send them to die fight-
ing in the battlefield but accidentally killed them in the cinema," wrote
Tian Han. He concluded that the war films that the children saw and the
ideas to be inculcated in them were by no means "beautiful dreams" but
"evil propaganda" controlled by the imperialists. Tian's realization of the
sheer political use of cinema as a means of war mobilization in Japan pro-
vided a major trigger for his conversion. His earlier interest in the ontol-
ogy and aesthetics of cinema now gave way to a certain instrumental use
of the medium for sociopolitical purposes. In the next few years, he put
his new conviction to practice, churning out film scripts one after an-
other and becoming one of the most prolific left-wing screenwriters.
THREE MODERN WOMEN
Three Modern Women (Sange modeng niixing), directed by Bu Wangcang,

was Tian's quintessential contribution to the remade silver dream. 48 Sig-
nificantly, in his new cinematic vision, the two types of women recon-
Chapter Seven
figured as three models. They were all single, urban professionals with
varying degrees of "moderness," while the "happy ending" in marriage
and family was replaced by a combination of tragic outcomes and somber
sociopolitical awakenings. The complexity of the modern girl was fleshed
out by the triple constellation, while their sexuality was ultimately ban-
ished from the scene.
Tian's renewed Jove affair with cinema aptly takes place within the
film circle. The male protagonist Zhang Yu (played by Jin Yan) is a movie
star torn between three modern women (rather than a wife and a lover),
between personal pain and collectivekonsciousness, between the lure of
the metropolis (in particular, the world of cinema) and the calling of the
nation. Here the multifaceted image of the modern woman makes Tian
Han's tale different from previous commercial and Butterfly-inflected
metacinematic films, such as Amorous History and Two Stars ( 1931). The
modern girl, either a phantom femme fatale as in Spring Dream or a cari-
catured worldly "social flower" in Pink Dream, took on multiple faces: a
"sentimental girl" (Chen Ruoyin) who commits suicide out of her un-
requited love for the movie star, the "femme fatale" Yu Yu who has all
the paraphernalia (fashion dress, car, mansion) and sexual appetite of a
modern girl, and finally the virtuous and progressive telephone operator
262 I (Zhou Shuzhen, played by Ruan Linyu) whom the movie star jilted in
their hometown. 49 The screenwriter took pains to anchor this quadran-
gle love story in the political exigencies of the nation.so As in his other
scripts, the September 18 incident in Manchuria in 1931 and the Janu-
ary 28 attack in Shanghai in 1932 constitute the metanarrative motiva-
tion through their structural presence. Shuzhen moves to Shanghai after
the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and finds work as a telephone oper-
ator. By chance she encounters Zhang Yu, who fled their arranged mar-
riage earlier and became a movie star in the city. Zhang Yu's awaken-
ing from his silver dream and playboy lifestyle is attributed to Zhou's
guiding him into the "real" world. The narrative shifts from the interior-
ity of male fantasy to the expansive urban milieu that includes the bat-
tleground, the slums, a worker's evening school, factories, and docks-
in other words, a larger social and political world beyond "flowers, the
moon, and romance" (fig. 7.4).
The ambition of the film lies in its redefinition of the term modeng by
divesting its connotations of urban leisure, consumerism, glamour, and
decadence. As with his scripts for Maternal Light (Muxing zhiguang), Color
[Se], and Children of Troubled Times (Fengyun ernii) written in this period,
Tian Han strove to demonstrate his new "social consciousness," pursuing
the possibility of using art for political ends.s 1 During a crucial scene in
Three Modern Women, Zhou Shuzhen spoils Yu Yu's fashionable party by
I 263
7.4 Three Modern Women (1933). (Courtesy ol the China Film Archive)
delivering a speech about the plight of people in the Northeast under Jap-
anese occupation. Moved, the movie star pronounces (as the writer's
mouthpiece) that the true modern woman should be one who is "most
independent, most rational. most courageous, and most concerned about
the public welfare." Chen Ruoyin's subsequent suicide during the shoot-
Chapter Seven
ing of a film with Zhang and Yu Yu's moral bankruptcy pave the way for
the emergence of Zhou as the embodiment of a new type of modern
woman, desexualized while politicized. In the end, even though Zhang
and Zhou reach a mutual understanding, they become more like com-
rades rather than lovers.
Despite the references to national salvation, the use of militant rheto-
ric, and the fashioning of a progressive modern woman, ultra-left critics
still found fault with Three Modern Women. Tian Han was praised for cre-
ating a transparent political vision of collective mobilization in several of
his scripts devoid of a romantic plot, fot example National Survival (Minzu
shengcun), Golden Age (Huangjin shidai), and Song of Victory (Kaige). 52 Those
structured around urban youth and the fate of their love lives in a tur-
bulent epoch, however, retained vestiges of the modeng look, especially in
characterizing different types of modern women. In order to expose the
vacuity of the material modern girl and the emergence of the utopic New
Woman, the screenwriter seemed to find it imperative to set the "waking
up from the silver dream" story in the metropolis and its dream factory.
While acknowledging the film as a progressive "social problem drama"
and applauding the new modern woman articulated through Zhang Yu,
the critics found the "negative• exposure outweighed "positive" descrip-
264 I tion. The negative aspects are multiple, including the emphasis on the
luxurious lifestyles of the fashionable urbanites and their romantic en-
tanglements; the large amount of overly literary and ornately displayed
intertitles; and above all, the flawed characterization of the "most mod-
ern woman" Zhou Shuyin. They would have liked her to be a true blue-
collar proletariat (rather than an educated telephone operator, an em-
bodiment of modern technology), who lived in miserable conditions and,
of course, did not wear a perm (which the star Ruan Lingyu did). They
would have also been more satisfied if the decadent Yu Yu had .been
scripted a bad ending (perhaps also a suicide) and if the movie star fell all
the way down with her.53
NEW WOMAN
These demands were answered by New Woman, directed by Cai Chusheng

(and written by Sun Shiyi) two years later. With this film, Cai completed
his Hleft turn," leaving behind his pink dream for good. While the triple
women configuration remains, 54 the quadrangle romance is disposed of.
The change of the imported term modeng toxin (new) marks a paradig-
matic shift in the representation of modern urban women. The latter
term explicitly reconnects with the May Fourth discourse of women's
liberation as part of the Enlightenment project and has less to do with
urban modernity. The cliched "social flower" disappeared altogether and
7.5 New Woman (l 935). (Courtesy of the Chlna Film Archive)

I 2Gs
was replaced by a repressed married middle-class housewife-an old
classmate of the protagonist. And the sentimental girl has been changed
to the struggling professional woman Wei Ming (again played by Ruan
Lingyu), who teaches music in a school. She also writes a novel (point-
edly titled The Tomb of Love) but ultimately commits suicide out of despair
(but not for love). The telephone operator from Three Modern Women is re-
fashioned here as a true working class woman with a proletarian name
Li Ahying, who teaches at evening school rather than studying. Li, as the
paragon of New Woman, does not have a perm and is portrayed as a mas-
culinized strong woman who physically overwhelms a man who tries to
take advantage of Wei. Whereas the angular physique and boyish charm
of the Modern Girl in Xu Xiacun's story were traits of an androgynous yet
sensuous female sexuality in the modern age, Li is a cardboard figure
devoid of any sexuality (fig. 7.5). This is literally reflected in her giant
shadow, powerful yet immaterial, on the lon9tan9 wall near their resi-
dence in one of the key scenes. Even some leftists thought the screen-
writer and the director had gone too far to create such an "abstract"
"ideal" character without real flesh and blood." 55
0
The film has been treated in considerable detail by several recent stud-
ies, especially with regard to the startling reverse mimesis of Ruan
Lingyu's star text (and her suicide shortly after production) with regard
to the ambiguous feminist stance of the left-wing filmmakers. 56 As we
Chapter Seven
have seen in Pink Dream, the male writer is clearly at the center of the
film and naturally the "owner" of many subjective shots (or erotic fan-
tasies). In New Woman, Ruan Lingyu's character stands at the center stage
(though only to die there), highlighting several different women'sHves;
she is also granted numerous subjective shots. .
In a key sequence, Wei's awakening is cinematically projected firston
a live performance inside the Seaside International Dance Club. Per-
formed by two Caucasian (likely Russian) dancers, the show has the man
whipping the woman in a stylistic fashion. Wei, half drunk, sees herself
in the Caucasian dancer in prison cYothes and chained feet. The pain
inflicted on the dancer's skin is so visceral that a tactile, bodily identifica-
tion takes place here. Her embodied vision is carried into next sequence,
when the street view on the car window fades into flashback of her life.
Though deploying cinematic techniques similar to Pink Dream's, these
hallucinatory projections serve entirely different functions. The petty
bourgeois sensibility and illusion of this quasi-modern girl is shaken off
completely in the process, as if cinema afforded her an extraordinary sen·
sory capacity to see through reality and reexperience the past. If New
Woman achieved a more thorough reshaping of the modern girl than
Three Modern Women, it does so by turning dancehall culture into a the-
266 I ater of cruelty and a transcultural allegory of women's fate. Yet, ironically,
the gender play of a modern girl erotically whipping an effeminate dandy
in Spring Dream is turned upside down here. Wei Ming is not only physi-
cally and psychologically abused but also ultimately forced to commit
suicide, just as the actress Ai Xia (on whose life the film was based) did.
And Ruan Lingyu was soon to follow on March 8, 1935, shortly after the
film's release. 57
The conversion experience of these writers and directors, Tian Han
and Cai Chusheng in particular, appears inexorably bound to the
transfiguration (and death) of the modern girl on the one hand, and the
"awakening" of the male writer or artist figure on the other. The ex-
orcizing of the modern girl, as if she is a demon in a nightmare (often
through her association with nightlife), guarantees the metamorphosis of
the literary dandy into a progressive, if not quite revolutionary, subject.
The seductive forces of Shanghai nightlife and its mythological embodi-
ment in the modern girl retreated as male screenwriters, directors, actors,
and critics rose to the social and political challenges of the day. The ex-
perience of awakening is brought into optical and class consciousness and
made literal by a newly encoded cinematic vernacular centered on the
trope of the "dawn" or "morning," which harked back to the ethos of the
Enlightenment movement.
Indeed, many films made in 1933-34 are explicitly structured around
the new temporality of an energetic "morning" that belonged to work,
not leisure, and hope, not despair. In early 1933 Cai Shusheng published
an essay entitled "Morning Light" (Zhaoguang), in which he pronounced
his disentanglement from the "nightmare" of the past. He wrote: "When
I msh out to the staircase still shrouded in the dim air caused by the night
fog coming from outside of the window, my vision begins to perceive the
first ray of morning light of 1933."58 In the same year, he completed
Morning in the Metropolis (Dushi de zaocheng), which used the melodramatic
plot of a capitalist's two sons' diametrically opposed fates in the service of
a class allegory. The kind of petty bourgeois sentimentalism evident in his
early works is entirely disposed. The remaining partying scenes are de-
picted as the denizen of the metropolis designed to trap innocent women;
the evil figure now is the depraved playboy, the capitalist's legitimate son.
The film had a successful run of eighteen continuous days after its re-
lease.59 With Fisherman's Ballad, New Woman, and Lost Lambs (Mitu de gao-
yang, 1936), Cai's pink dream forever faded. He descended down the
night-fog shrouded "staircase," marched into the street, and trained his
camera on the victims of, and potential rebels against; an unjust society.
THE MANY FACES OF MODERN SCREEN
Film-related journalism became a battleground in the early 1930s as nu- I 267

merous intellectuals of different political and social orientations tried to
influence this important aspect of mass culture. Cai Shusheng's above-
cited essay "Morning Light," in which he declared his "left turn," was
published in the inaugural issue of Modern Screen in March I 933. Unlike
the motley of trade journals and fanzines, this modernist magazine stood
out as a well-designed and sophisticated publication that took cinema se-
riously. This seriousness, however, was more concerned with aesthetic
modernism than with political mobilization and hence became the target
of polemical critique from left critics.
While left film critics had dominated the art and film supplements of
major periodicals-and in some instances created their own film maga-
zines (for example, Film Art in 1932), 60 trade journals and popular fan
magazines continued to flourish. Compared to the 1920s, the fan maga-
zines of the 1930s had a conspicuously modern look in graphic design
and a heightened consciousness about the imbrication of the cinema in
urban modernity. An art deco-inspired international style, began to re-
place the previous straight-forward "cover.girl" or "cover-boy" style, as
the December 1932 issue of Screen Weekly (Yinmu zhoubao, published by
the respectable liberal Eastern Publishing House) shows. Fashionably
dressed modern girls and dandies stroll leisurely on the street of a futur-
.istic metropolis crowed with skyscrapers and expressways (see fig. 7. I).
Many such magazines were as ephemeral as the urban life and the
Chapter Seven
268 I
7.6 Inaugural issue of Modern s,·reen, featuring Ruan Lingyu.
celluloid dreams they celebrated. Modern Screen was first published on

March l, 1933 (fig. 7.6), and only ran (intermittently) until June 1934.
This magazine was particularly noteworthy for its apparent "highbrow·
approach to cinema, its flagrant modernist name and design, and, most
crucially, its debate over the so-called soft film. Despite its cosmopolitan
style, its editors (Chen Binghong [Benjamin Chan), Liu Na'ou, Huang Ji-
amo and others) prided themselves on the fact that their high quality
magazine, featuring sixteen pages of exquisitely reproduced photos, cost
only twenty cents-a one of a kind phenomenon in the business of film
journalism. The eight thousand copies of its first issue sold out in less
than ten days, so the editors decided to add two thousand more for the
second issue.6 1
The magazine assembled an impressive team of contributors-in fact,
a mixed company of liberal critics and leftist filmmakers and actors, in
addition to its own contributing editors. Shu Yan, a critic active in the
left-circle, for instance, contributed articles. Leading directors who were
instrumental in the New Film Culture movement, such as Cheng Bugao,
Sun Yu, and Shen Xiling also regularly published in the magazine. Sun
Yu even held a small column called "Cinematic Chop-Suey Shop" (dian-
ying zasuiguan}, in which he offered his reflections ori the current state
of Chinese cinema in the form of a miscellaneous essay (zawen). Rising
stars including Ai Xia, Li Lili, and Gao Zhanfei (who played the dandy
writer in Pink Dream) also penned essays or poems as modern women
and men of letters off-screen. 62 On the whole, the magazine cultivated a
cosmopolitan look and refined taste, catering to the educated urbane
movie fans. •· . ·•. . ·. ··. I 269
The modern cinephiles were also given a primer for all the necessary
accessories of modern life through the magazine's carefi.lUy,designed and
worded advertisements. The commodities and lifestyles adv'ertisedwere
often tied to cinema. For instance, Hujiang Photo Studio; located on the
Bubbling Well Road, called itself the Artistic Palace of Photos for the
Modern Girls, the Treasure House of Photographic Images of M6dern
Stars, and claimed to provide numerous images for the ma:ga:zfae: Sports
products and venues are patronized by Li Lili and Wang Reninei, two new
Lianhua starlets standing for the "healthy beautiful" body cJlture of the
New Life movement (fig. 7.7). Li Lili also lent her bright white teeth and
handwriting to ads for toothpaste. Other stars graced makeup products,
such as nail polishes, with cinematic close-ups of their hands and fingers.
The Rolls Self-Winding Watch and the Buick car recurrently associated
themselves with the modern girl. Female stars and moviegoers, more
than their male counterparts, were presented as both embodiments and
consumers of the machine age characterized by speed and the commod-
ity desire it fueled. The overwhelming presence of feminine faces and
body parts, seen in ads and graphic embellishments for articles, gave the
magazine an especially soft look and feel.
The ostensible appeal of cosmopolitan consumption cultivated by the
magazine (which was not atypical for popular press at the time) was
Chapter Seven
270 I
7.7 Li Lili: the ·great jade pillar,'' or the embodiment of athletic beauty. (Modern Screen)
oddly juxtaposed with a lofty mission. According to Huang Jiamo's inau-

gural editorial, the magazine's major objective was to elevate Chinese
cinema's cultural status. Despite their ultimate differences that caused the
soft film debate, the modernists and left critics agreed upon the impor-
tance of building a viable national cinema to resist Hollywood's imperial
cultural dominance. They also agreed on the necessity of rescuing Chi- 1
nese cinema from the "low-level taste" of previous film trends, in partic-
ular martial arts and costume dramas. In other words, both sides wanted
to focus on the contemporary condition of the city and its inhabitants.
Huang opens his essay in an optimistic spirit: "In China, cinema has be-
come widespread. There are movie theaters in every large city as well as
small towns. It has obviously taken over drama, attracting a youthful
China .... After a decade or so of pioneering work, Chinese cinema has
entered the stage of maturation." He underscores that the unpopularity of
foreign sound cinema provided a great opportunity for Chinese cinema.
With it, China could produce films that would compete with imports. Not
only would they help Chinese viewers to promote national products
(tichang guohuo), Chinese products could also be exported, thus "spread-
ing the light of the nation• ifayang guoguang). Yet such products should
be of high artistic quality and thoroughly modern. Huang reasons:
Today, the general public-the general modernized (modenghua)

young men and women all regard cinema as the greatest solace and
highest degree of enjoyment of in their life. In addition to attend-
ing the movies, they also need a good film magazine to serve as a
regular movie guide, companion of study, and reference for judg-
ment in order to raise their consciousness about modern film art.
This is because cinema is not simply a product for leisure. It is the I 271
synthesis of art-including literature, drama, fine art, music, and
science (such as electronics and optics). Thus forms the most ad-
vanced kind of modern entertainment. At the same time, it also
serves as the sharpest weapon of education and propaganda. The
arts are her soul, whereas science is her bone structure; thus she is
the crystallization of the new arts of the twentieth century.63
From the second issue on, however, Modern Screen began to make its
agenda more explicit. A series of articles by Huang and Liu Na'ou, the
magazine's two leading voices, launched an aesthetic theory of film and
spectatorship while criticizing the ideological critique in vogue. In a nut-
shell, their views of cinema were informed by convictions in the primacy
of film form and sense, and in cinema's capacity to alleviate modern
people's pain and ennui through laughter, sentimentality, and vicarious
fulfillment of erotic desire.
In June and July 1934, left-wing critics of several news supplements
staged an attack on the soft film advocated by Modern Screen. The polemics
largely concerned relationships between technology and ideology, aes-
thetics and politics, and the notion of the "masses" (dazhong). The mod-
ernists saw the latter as increasingly valorized by the left as a. uniform
spectatorship for a national cinema. Several authors in Modern Screen
Chapter Seven
complained about the "misuse" or "abuse" of the term and iconography

of the "masses" in Three Modern Women and Daybreak. The "workers" in
such films. in their view, were wholesale imports from Soviet films-
and as such offered unrealistic depictions of the Chinese life. 64 For the
modernists, the "masses" were a broad social spectrum embodied in the
moviegoers. They defined the metropolitan audience (dushi guanzhong)
as patients suffering from neurasthenia and modern malaise who sought
remedy in the movies. These remedies, neither ancient nor imported,
could "dissolve phlegm and clean up the [badJ energy" or cleanse the in-
testines and nourish the stomach.'' 65 /
The modernist's contention that the Soviet-styled puluojino with rev-

olutionary figures was fashionably opportunistic was not altogether
groundless. Their advocacy of an apolitical, "pure" art cinema for the
sake of sensuous indulgence, however, ultimately betrays their "glau-
coma-infected vision, "66 fixated on the aestheticization of everyday life.
Leading left critics Xia Yan, Tang Na, and Chen Wu indicted soft film for
its indulgence in bourgeois sensibilities, decadence, and escapism in the
face of a national crisis. The attack from the left was motivated in part by
a sustained reaction against "soft" romantic melodramas and martial ans
films. 67 In fact, the modernists also detested these popular genres as "feu-
272 I dal" and "low-taste."
The advocates of the "soft film" commonly claimed, "cinema is ice-
cream for the eyes and sofa for the heart and the mind" (dianying shi yan-
jing de bingqilin, xinling de shafayi). The sentence appeared in Huang
Jiamo's essay, "Hard Film versus Soft Film," published in the December
1933 issue of Modern Screen (fig. 7.8). 6 3 As the focal point of the contro-
versy, it deserves a close look. Only one page long, the article consists of
five short sections. The much-debated quote is found in the opening sec-
tion. Huang's basic justification for the slogan is readily given in the sec-
tion title: °Film is made of soft celluloid" (film negative in Chinese is
called "soft film," or ruanpian). Owing to the medium's specificity, Huang
asserts, film as representation of the human drama ought to sustain its
"power of entertaining attractions." In the second section, "Chinese [soft]
film has turned hard film," Huang laments the fact that contemporary
Chinese cinema has become "starched" or "hardened" by overt ideologi-
cal interests and left-wing "isms," turning cinema into a propagandist in-
strument while depriving it of its entertainment appeal. Huang argues
that, although this "hardened" cinema is supposed to educate and even
mobilize the people, it has in fact alienated both the popular and the
more educated audiences because of its unabashed political preaching
and romanticizing of the "masses." The argument goes thus: "Modern
viewers are rather straightforward people. They are practical and have
little patience for pretentious preaching. After they are just liberated
1 273
.8 Huang Jiamo's essay, "Hard Film versus Soft Film." (December 1933 issue of Modem Screen)
rom the burden of daily responsibilities, they go to movie theaters to

eek momentary enjoyment. They never expect to receive uncalled-for
essons and responsibilities.· What these modern viewers need are "soft"
ind "transparent" films that show the "beauty• of real life and infuse in
1eople a sense of joy. Huang's views are blatantly self-righteous about the
Chapter Seven
need to make "feel good" movies, such as comedies, for urban dwellers
who have to endure mental and physical assault outside the movie the-
ater. Some "hard" films full of "revolutionary slogans," in his eyes, lacked
substance and suffered from "emptiness and anemia."
What exactly was the nature of the "soft film" advocated by editors of
the Modern Screen? If hard film was never uniformly hard (in the form of
emotional excess and decorous sets and costumes), then it seems doubt-
ful the soft film was as soft as both its advocates and detractors claimed.
Instead of this opposition, other historically specific terms of reference-
such as film style, reception. star text, tnd indeed, cinematic modernity
-suggest a more complex controversy. A closer examination of the es-
says and graphic design, as well as the films they refer to, reveal an abun-
dance of contradictions that suggests much more was at stake than a
mere polemical exchange of metaphors.
THE SPEED OF FLESH: ANATOMIZING THE SOFT FILM
A famous Shanghai dandy with an ambiguous racial background, Liu

Na'ou was the more prolific and sophisticated architect of Modern Screen.
Well-versed in several languages, his contributions in the magazine cover
274 I a wide range of aesthetic topics in film theory and criticism, including
"The Problem of Depth Description in Chinese Film" ( l: 3), "On Choos-
ing (Film] Subjects" (1:4), "On Film Rhythm'' (1:6), "The Structure of
the Camera: A Treatise on the Mechanics of Camera Position" ( l: 7), and
"Interpretations of European Classical Films" (1 : 3). In one article, Liu
points out that the verbose intertitles of some hard films (especially those
with a rural theme or setting) contradict their mass orientation because
the majority of Chinese, in particular peasants, could hardly read. Liu ad-
vocated a visual language, telling stories through the interplay between
light and shadow, mise-en-scene, editing, and other cinematographic
properties. He goes as far as to suggest that, with the decline of the llstar
system" in Hollywood and the "director system" in Europe, one should
anticipate a cinema centered on the "camera system," which would em-
phasize the materiality of the medium. 69 This celebration of cinema as
the aesthetic and cultural synthesis of the machine age-its soft desires
and hard gears-renders the label "soft film" somewhat ambiguous.
Similarly, the hard film was not always a direct reflection of hard-line
leftist dogma. These aspects of ambiguity and layers of mediation call for
an alternative argument that places the two camps in ambivalent relation
rather than in diametrical opposition to each other.
Liu's most entrenched criticism of hard film rests on formal ground.
Indeed, the discursive split between the soft and hard films was largely
drawn along the line between form and content, the question of tech-
nology and the meaning of urban modernity. Because most left critics
were not directly involved in film production and came mainly from lit-
erary backgrounds, their writings were by and large centered on the-
matic representations and dramatic characterizations of the social world.
They were primarily concerned with utilizing narrative to mobilize the
masses (often conflating the movie audience with the abstract notion of
the •revolutionary masses") toward national salvation; the medium itself
only served this objective. In Lu Si's view, "form and content" could not
be separated.10
Liu regarded cinematic form as foundational to the medium and is
unique. In another article, under the original French title, "Ecranesque, •
Liu Na'ou argues that speed and motion constitute the quintessential
form of the cinema. He writes, ·the cinema is the art of motion arising
from the combination of artistic sensibilities and sdentific rationality. Just
as [modern] architecture embodies the purest form of the rationality of
mechanical civilization, that which can most uniquely represent the so-
cial environment of mechanical civilization is the cinema." This passage
is instructive for understanding the soft aesthetic beyond its glossy ap-
pearance in the magazine. Rather than isolating the cinema as a pure aes-
thetic object, Liu was convinced that cinema's synthetic power to repre 0
sent and recreate reality was embedded in its material base and concrete
social infrastructure. The architectural metaphor and passion resonated
with a wave of new Shanghai theaters, such as the Grand (Da Guan9min9)
on Jinansi Road, the Metropol (Da Shanghai) on Yu Qiaqing Road (Xizang
zhonglu), and Cathy (Guotai) on Joffrey Road (Huaihai zhonglu). These
new entertainment venues redefined the Shanghai skyline (fig. 7.9).
These and other theaters, along with the new skyscrapers, were. part of
the reconstruction project in the aftermath of the Japanese bortibing. 71
Before the city was shell-shocked again in 1937, Shanghai emerged as
the most dazzling metropolis in the East. The streamline aesthetic, ac-
centuated with vertical lines and neon lights echoed and amplified the
international aesthetic of the machine age. Films made in the period,
whether soft or hard, scrambled to capture the urban landscape's glitter-
ing allure. Many films' title sequence simply became a condensed city
symphony flaunting the seductive skyline and the hieroglyphic neon
writings.
How did Liu and his cohorts reconcile the seeming contradiction be-
tween the soft look they advocated (and made) and the hard gears of film
technology and social engineering it represented? To be sure, the soft
aesthetics' apparent hard dimensions should not be confused with the
overt political content the hard films depicted. Instead of a hairsplitting
Chapter Seven
216 I
7. 9 A cinema built in the 1930s: the imernational style of the Metropol (The Builder l, no. 3
(1933); architect: Zhao Shenchen).
analysis of both sides' often self-contradictory rhetoric, the magazine's

overall graphic design offers unexpected insights.
An abundance of illustrations embellish Modern Screen. At the outset,
the images betray a passion for a soft look embodied by the numerous
carefully crafted nude or seminude pictures of Chinese or Western movie
stars and models. These images manifest the prevalent fascination with
the so-called fleshy feeling (rougan} of the modern girl-with her mix-
ture of sensuality and energy, primitive aura and modern flavor, erotic
appeal and athletic power. The cult of flesh apotheosized here sometimes
borders on soft porn, as shown in the drawings illustrating Huang Jiamo's
article, 'Soft' Film versus 'Hard' Film." The article title is "presented" by
0
a maiden with flowing hair, her hands holding a bundle of fabric over her
private parts. At the end of the article, a woman's plump arm and a leg
are crossed together with celluloid lace accentuating the sensuality of lier
curving limbs. These close-ups of female body parts (lips, eyes, or legs)
framing the text share a seductive vernacular with the ads for riail pol-
ishes, stockings, and other adornments of the modern female body. The
soft aesthetic thus appears feminine, or hyperfeminine, yet with a twist
as the body parts with their streamlines also invoke parts in a machine.
The frequently featured nude or seminude portraits were taken by edi-
torial members. They prided themselves as skilled photographers or film-
makers and presented these images as "art."
Both anonymous and noted film actresses were subjects of the elabo-
rate nude photography. Veteran director Dan Duyu, who began his ca-
reer in the early 1920s and shot the sexy swashbuckling beauties in Cave
of the Spider Spirit, contributed several nude photographs. With elegantly
posed women against pastoral backgrounds, the pictures are meant to be
studies of "light and shadow.'' Another eye-catching studio nude study I 277
features actress Hu Shan (cousin of the Queen of Cinema Hu Die). With
her bare back facing the camera, Hu Shan's face turns to the viewer with
an obvious pride in her own body. This is a modern girl self-assured about
her phot0genic, streamline curves (fig. 7.10).
The nude as a legitimate artistic subject had only been established in
China after Liu Haisu, the French-educated modern painter and princi-
pal of the Shanghai Fine Arts Academy (the first Western style art school
in China), won the legal battles to use nude models in the l 920s.72 As
an arbiter of Western inspired modern art, Liu may have succeeded in
making a distinction between nudity and pornography, respectable art
and the sex industry. The triumph did not, however, belong to Liu alone.
The entry of the well-proportioned female body into public view in~
advertently signaled not only the birth of a new profession for women,
but more importantly, affirmed the centrality of female body in modern
imagination and social change. The incident coincided not only with the
increasing public presence of Chinese women as full-fledged social sub-
jects (though still employed as "objects"), but also with their growing
consciousness and control over their body. This was best exemplified in
the life and work of Pan Yuliang, a former prostitute-turned-art student
of Liu and, after a few years studying in Europe, a professor at the Shang-
hai Fine Art School and the Nanjing Central University. Pan's nude stud-
Chapter Seven
ns I
7.10 "The speed o! flesh": Hu Shan. (Modern Saeen)
ies (of herself and other women) appeared in the first National Art Ex-
hibition in Nanjing in I 929. 73 Journalists who were trying to damage her
public image dug up Pan's past as a prostitute and a concubine of the man
who redeemed her from brothel. Clearly, the moralists resented her
subject matter as much as her radical transformation from a lowly pros-
titute to a prominent modern artist and public figure. 74 Pan's fate was re-
markably similar to actress Xuan Jingling's, as detailed in the opening of

this book.
The controversy over nudity was also part and parcel of a larger de-
bate over "beauty"-or what constituted a beautiful life-in the late
1920s. The advocates and practitioners of the "beautiful life,· influenced
by a mixture of romanticism and neoclassicism, held the view that nu-
dity was a crucial agent and symbol of a modern, sensuous, and fulfilled
life. In his book The Beautiful View of Life, Zhang Jingsheng, the sensa-
tionalized champion and theoretician of this lifestyle, recommends nu-
dity as a way of attaining a healthy, aesthetic body. Zhang's views are un-
abashedly antitraditional, at times verging on eugenics. He argues against
having shame in one's own body and suggests that bad clothes not only
harm body but also inhibit natural socialization between the sexes. Body
beautification begins by practicing nudity, which allows the body to
reembrace nature and strips away civilization's confines. However, this is
not easily done in a country like China where males and females were
traditionally not supposed to court or touch publicly. He prescribes dis-
cretion yet perseverance:
In a society like ours it is certainly difficult to practice nudity pub-

licly. Only in moonlit night one could take a walk in the open, un- I 279
populated space alone or together with one's family or close friends.
When inside one's own room, one should form the habit of prac-
ticing nudity. If there is bed suitable for sleeping nude, one should
do so. It will make one's body feel happy, and also save money
spent on clothes.1s
If Zhang's nude aesthetic stems from a romantic return to natural state

of being, the nudes in Modern Screen celebrate urban civilization, incor-
porating the romantic ethos into the machine age. Dan Duyu's pastoral
nudes and other carefully crafted seminude studies in theatrical or Heth-
nic" costume reveal a curious blending of primitivism and modernism,
the soft flesh and the hardware of phot0graphy. Beside static studio
works, which might have been provided by the photo shops advertised in
the magazine, there are far more snapshots of scantily dad movie stars
engaged in sports, dance, or other physical activities in Modern Screen. The
editors seemed particularly fond of stars .in swimsuits, both male and fe-
male, on the beach or not. The aesthetes of the soft film found their quin-
tessential form in the "athletic and beautiful" body, which combined the
erotic appeal of both organic nature and material civilization.
The cult of the nude signaled the entrance of a new constellation of
screen actors who, despite their on-screen images as oppressed peasants
Chapter Seven
or workers. were marketed for their Hollywood-style physiques and ath-

leticism. They were not just movie stars, but modeng creatures embody-
ing lifestyles associated with "self-winding" watches, Buick cars. and mo-
torbikes. One contributor to Modern Screen simply equates modeng with
stars in terms of their unique physique: "He (or she) is no fragile 'sick-
man of the Orient,' nor is he (or she) a fat person with a heavy head and
swollen body. He (or she) is tall, with firm muscles, bright and clear eyes
and eyebrows. and strong l.imbs. He (or she) possesses a realistic, strong
beauty of a human body [rentimei], can perform graceful and tender
movements, but can also perform virUe and forceful actions." 76 The soft
film aesthetic was obviously derived from the contemporary interna-
tional discourse and praxis of nude painting, photography, and nudism.
which centered on the transformed epistemological and aesthetic status
of the body and modern technology in the 1920s and 1930s. In more
synthetic and tangible forms it registered how the body-especially the
female body-was at once liberated from reproductive functions but
trapped in the second nature of machines, including the camera. The soft
aesthetic gave expression to a new physiognomy and sexual appeal char-
acterized by hyperfemininity, androgyny, and machine aesthetics in Chi-
nese metropolitan centers.
280 I The quintessence of the machine aesthetic, of course, was speed. But
its soft or erotic countenance required bodily energy and form. In "On
Film Rhythm," Liu Na'ou again emphasizes that it is the "form of art, not
just content, that reflects the epoch." This form is defined in terms of
temporality and kinesthetic movement. Speed, the annihilation of space
by time, was a chief hallmark of modernity. According to Liu, it is not
speed per se but the "sense of speed" (kuaigan), or the sensation it in-
duces; that defines the appeal of cinema. This sense of speed, which in
turn generates rhythm, may be obtained by driving a Roadster, dancing
to jazz music, or watching a movie. Liu prefers the terms movie and mo-
tion pictures to film or cinema for the connotation of movement. n
The analogy between dance and movies makes particular sense; the
cult of social dance in the industrial era, as Deleuze noted, partly derived
from the cult of the machine. wherein the human body was incorporated
into the metallic and mechanical rhythm of the modern era. 78 Cinematic
form, generating the twin-pleasure of the "sense of flesh" and the "sense
of speed," thus corresponds to the very physiognomy of a mass-mediated
urban life. characterized by the intensification of desire, commodification
of social relations, and consumption of (leisure) time. Social dance be-
came so popular that it became a kinetic icon; in China's jazz age it was
conceivably a gigantic sensory machine of the crowd. As an antidote to
alienation, boredom, and isolation. ballroom dancing and cinema be-
_Fighting over the Modern Girl
came the quintessential forms of mass enjoyment, accentuated by the

spread of the gramophone. At the same time, the systematic commodifi-
cation of this commingled form of metropolitan pleasure, embodied in
the dancing hostess, turned it into a covert sex-industry and an emblem
of urban modernity. Many of the diligent cinephiles were also dance
maniacs. Cheng Bugao, director of Wild Torrent and Spring Silkworms, was
famous for his dance passion. Treating dancing almost as a form of field-
work, Cheng found that nthere is so much to savor when one holds a
dancing hostess, listening to her telling life stories full of sad or happy en-
counters, reunions and separations." 79
Prior to Liu's direct involvement in cinema, the intertwining of flesh
and speed, of embodiment and technology was already well articulated
in his fiction writing in the New Sensationalist mode. The Sensationalists
(including Xu Xiacun, author of nModern Girl" and Shi Zhecun, author
of "At Paris Theater," and Mu Shiying) we_re Shanghai literary dandies
influenced by their Japanese contemporaries, especially the so-called
xinkankakuha writers Yokomitsu Riichi, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Yasunari
Kawabata, and Kataoka Teppei, in addition to the French writer Paul
Morand. They sought to create a new, sensuous prose form portraying
Shanghai urban life, using a host of modernist and cinematic techniques.
Liu was the group's fountainhead. Reportedly half-Japanese and half- I 281
Taiwanese, Liu received his formative education in Japan and was fluent
in Japanese and had a good knowledge of French and English. Arriving
in Shanghai in 1924 to attend a French Jesuit University, Liu was a typi-
cal Shanghai cosmopolitan emigre. He quickly improved his Chinese,
translated several Japanese writers, and became an ardent practitioner
and publisher of the New Sensationalist writing. 80
His collection of short stories, Scene (Dushifengjingxian, 1930), 81 can-
vasses the urban landscape of Shanghai and a motion-charged lifestyle of
modern girls and dandies who frequent urban venues such as cafes,
dance halls, and movie theaters. An advertisement for his book of stories
in La nouvelle litterature (Xin wenyi), a journal edited by Liu himself, offers
a succinct description of the work and Liu as the literary dandy and
aficionado of modern life: NMr. Na'ou is a sensitive man. With his special
talent, he wields a sharp scalpel to dissect airplanes, movies, jazz, sky-
scrapers, eroticism, the high speed of long-bodied cars, and the mass pro-
duction of modern life."s2
True to this advertisement, the book is like a collection of musings on
these modern venues, vehicles, and actions. Almost unfailingly, each
story features the encounter between a modern girl and a dandy, both
often with ambiguous national or racial identities. 8 3 The pace at which
the relationships develop and dissolve is as fast as the sports cars they
Chapter Seven
drive or the jazz tunes they dance to, and as ephemeral as the fashion
they wear. The dandies are fascinated with the modern girl's exotic looks
and with the tempo of urban fads they embody. But ultimately, the
dandies find themselves outwitted or overpowered by the girls, whose
"sense of flesh" prove too materielle and whose cultural complexity prove
too hard to penetrate. s4
"The Two Who Suffer from the Lost Sense of Time" in Scene captures
the pregnant mixture of speed and flesh. 85 The story opens at the horse-
racing track in downtown Shanghai, where a dandy called H catches a
glimpse or, rather, a whiff of a perfuITl'!d girl in the midst of an intense
race. He turns around and sees a "sporty modern woman whose elastic
muscles softly vibrate under French silk as though she was doing light ex-
ercises." Both have bet on the same horse and win. They quickly find
themselves walking out of the racing court and stroll down the street as
lovers. "Taking walks is an inseparable element in modern courtship, be-
cause it's the only way to demonstrate the existence of ephemeral love,"
intones the narrator. They stop at a cafe, then pass the three "monster-
like" department stores on Damalu (Nanjing Road). On the way, His en-
thralled by the sight of a Frontenac 1929, but he reminds himself that he
has a "fair sex" to attend to at the moment. They soon land at a dance
282 I hall, in time for the tea dance. Rivaling another dandy called T, H seizes
the chance to waltz with the girl. While swirling to the music, H tries to
persuade her to leave the dance hall with him to get rid of the meddling
T. Her reply startles him: "Ah, you're a real kid. Why have you been so
clumsy-eating ice cream, taking a walk, all those nuisances. Don't you
know that lovemaking should be done in a car and in the wind? .. , I have
never spent more than three hours with a gentleman. This is already an
exception."86 This modern girl is obviously living and moving at a much
faster pace than both dandies, who have lost the "sense of time." She has
welded her sexuality into a sports car, her body into the machine, which
inspires in the dandy both desire and anxiety. With her fashionable
"opera-bag" in hand, the girl swiftly leaves the two men for another ap-
pointment. As in other stories in Scene, the despondent dandies are left
feeling not so much embarrassed as alienated by their inability to catch
up with the "feel of speed." For them, the city and the modern girl are
often interchangeable, at once alluring and menacing. Yet the dandy who
indulges in urban material culture and libidinal economy is, for Liu, also
a potential revolutionary, like Baudelaire's flaneur.
Liu's enthusiasm for the cameraman's centrality in modernist film aes-
thetics evokes Dziga Vertov's theorization of the "kino eye.» Vertov's rev-
olutionary flaneur incorporates the technology of movie camera to give
direct representation to urban life (in Moscow) as lived, nonalienated
modern experience. The Hperfectible eye" of the camera, more ntruthful"

than the human eye, can capture the Hfeel of the world" and potentially
change the world through critical production. 87 Vertov's name often
graces Modern Screen. Stills of his documentary Enthusiasm display a curi-
ous collage of Hmechanical civilization" Uvde wenming), sports culture,
and primitive tribal dance. Other Russian film theorists and directors are
also frequently cited. In an article on the Hmaterial" (or subjects) of film,
Liu cites Pudovkin to support his argument that "film as a new art ought
to possess its own unique newness .... As a new expressive form, cin-
ema has its own particular grounding, its own language." 88 Similarly, the
production of a modern Hsense" mediated by mechanically induced
movement also evokes Eisenstein's fascination with biomechanics and his
experiment with "expressive movement as an acting style inspired by
0
machines.
Liu's emphasis on cinema's ontological (or photographic) uniqueness
resonates with the international avant-garde's intervention in the me-
dium's formal possibilities as an instrument for artistic revolution, giving
life back to art. On the other hand, the Chinese modernists' love for
Hollywood, their seemingly aberrant taste in "low genres (such as phys-
0
ical comedy and the musical), and "classicist" nude pictures reflect the
ambiguous genesis of Soviet cinema, which actively appropriated Amer- I 283
ican cinema. As Yuri Tsivian's study suggests, works by Kuleshov, Gardin,
and others at the turn of the 1920s demonstrated a visible Americaniza-
O
tion" in the speed of editing, closeness of framing, and above all the adop-
tion of "American montage." 89 At the same time, the intellectuals' fasci-
nation with "cinematic pulp fiction"-for example, Eisenstein's interest
in serial queen dramas-exemplifies the interconnection and persist-
ence of two Americanisms in the transition from an old to a new politi-
cal and cinematic regime.
The dialectical relation between classical cinema and modernism,
and between the Hollywood vernacular and avant-garde in the Russian-
Soviet film is germane to the contention and interrelation among the
competing Shanghai moderns. Shanghai filmmakers too tried to create a
"contemporary" Chinese cinema befitting its era and in dialogue with in-
ternational modernism. The ideological divide between them was made
dear, however, after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The left-wing
embraced nationalism and an anti-Kuomintang approach, whereas the
modernists tried to escape it by clinging to aesthetics. The former in-
creasingly associated Hollywood-and indeed most foreign cultural or
political powers-with the enemy. The modernists, some with strong (in
the case of Liu even with umbilical) ties to Japan, were more attracted to
cosmopolitan fl§nerie than patriotic rhetoric. They choose aesthetics over
Chapter Seven
politics, the dance-machine over war machine, celluloid dreams over ur-
gent reports from the frontline in Manchuria or the slums in the city. In
that regard, their consuming passion for the soft aesthetic, in some mea-
sure, turned into a form of escapism. It came dangerously close to anaes-
theticizing social and political consciousness at a time when the demo-
cratic promise held by mass culture and cinema was seriously challenged
by the rise of fascism and the exigencies of the war across the interna-
tional horizon.
GIRL IN DISGUISE, IMAGE IN DI1PUTE
While the left-wing screenwriters embraced a form of revolutionary

masculinity hardened by nationalism, the modernists were preoccupied
with apotheosizing the modern girl as the hybrid emblem of the machine
age and cosmopolitan consumption. Like their counterparts, the mod-
ernists also put their theory to practice. Among the handful of films on
which Modern Screen editors moonlighted as screenwriters or directors,
Girl in Disguise (Huashen guniang, Yihua, 1936) exemplified the soft film
for both sides of the debate.
Girl in Disguise is a crowd-pleaser with mixed elements from Zheng
284 I Zhengqiu's ethical melodramas (minus the tragedy) and Hollywood's ro-
mantic comedies. But its popularity had much to do with its Hqueer" plot,
in which Liying (played by Yuan Meiyun), a girl from Singapore, poses
as a boy named Shouben (which means "guarding the origin") when she
visits her lineage-obsessed grandfather in Shanghai. The masquerade and
mistaken gender identity create comic, embarrassing situations. Along
the way, a young woman falls in love with the "girl in disguise," while the
"boy" becomes infatuated with a Shanghai dandy (fig. 7 .11). Playing
with the flexibility or artificiality of gender identity, Girl in Disguise capi-
talizes on the appeal of Shanghai's androgynous fashions in the 1930s. It
became an instant hit when it was released in the summer of 1936, serv-
ing as a palatable Hice cream for the eyes• to thousands of moviegoers
who sought refuge from heat-and from national or personal troubles-
in the air-conditioned theaters.
Unlike other films mentioned in this chapter, the film was a talkie; the
implementation of sound was near completion. Its sound track gives this
soft film an added appeal aimed at pleasing the petty urbanites' senses.
Secondly, several years after the 1932 bombing of Shanghai, the city's
economic and cultural life had not only rebounded but also seemed
to reach a new high point. New skyscrapers and cinemas rose, nightlife
flourished, and more people and commodities flowed in and out of the
city. By then, Modern Screen had ceased publication, and the left-wing film
7.11 Gil'/ in Disgttise: the pleasure of cross-dressing. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
criticism had also lost much of its foothold in the press. At the same time, I 285
the debate over soft film was giving way to discourse on creating a "na-
tional defense" cinema in the face of the imminent all-out Japanese in-
vasion. Girl in Disguise cinematically materializes the modernists' persist-
ent fascination with the chameleon-like modern girl while the business
of national salvation was left to the patriots.
The central concept, according to its creators, is the persistent prob-
lem of gender bias or discrimination in Chinese society, even in a high-
modern Shanghai. Liying assumed double gender identities the moment
she was born because her parents were obliged to produce a boy to cure
the patriarch's illness caused by anxiety over genealogical discontinuity.
At home in tropical Singapore, however, she is the beloved daughter of
her parents and the envy of her friends as she grows into a beauty. When
she becomes eighteen, the patriarch orders her parents to send the
"grandson" to Shanghai to prepare for his career as the future heir.
A commotion of activities ensues. In order to transform Liying into
Shouben, a tailor makes suits for her and a barber chops off her long hair.
Liying boards the steamship for Shanghai with a wig packed in her
luggage.
If her girlhood seemed easy and carefree in Singapore, Shanghai
proves to be a metropolis of confusing desire and, paradoxically, a strong-
hold of traditional patriarchal forces as well. Liying's double life gets her
Chapter Seven
entangled in unexpected familial and social situations. The grandfather

loves his only grandson so much that he wants him to sleep in the same
bed-as he and Liying's father once did. She is also taken to the Yong'an
Department Store to shop for shaving blades, although she has no need
for any male toiletries. A matchmaker brings would-be brides' pictures
for Shouben to make his picks. While Liying enjoys her androgynous
look and to some extent the "same-sex" flirtations with girls and boys,
she eventually finds all the procedures to remold her into a male heir un-
bearable to say the least. She uses every possible moment to reclaim her
femininity, particularly by "impersonat,lng" a female role during a Peking
opera performance on the patriarch's birthday.
The film's critics engaged neither the provocative representations of a
Singaporean Chinese girl's gender trouble nor her troubled relationship
to her "native" city of Shanghai. Inevitably, Liying's identity is revealed.
In a soft shot framed diagonally to stress the shocking revelation and its
dizzying effect, the grandfather glimpses her breasts protruding under
her pajamas when he wakes to Liying's scream in a nightmare. After the
initial shock, the grandfather quickly comes back to his senses and ac-
cepts Liying the granddaughter, who promptly changes into a qipao dress.
Meanwhile, a telegram from Singapore announces the arrival of a real
286 I son. Thus all ends well: the gender confusion is resolved and the patri-
arch gets an heir (fig. 7.12).
Girl in Disguise's detractors found it a typical "low-taste" crowd-pleaser
with nothing but a few "meaningless games" and "c:;omic gags." The gen-
der-bending elements were dismissed as part and parcel of "ice-cream for
the eyes" formulated to "anaesthetize" the audience in a time when the
fate of the nation was at stake.90 Another critic simply discredited the rel-
evance of gender bias critique, arguing that the "recent total collapse of
the rural economy has forced traditionally 'heavily' valued men also to
the point of mere survival." "Their status is as pitiable as that of women's.
Thus the custom of 'valuing boys over girls' has been alleviated ....
Therefore, [this old saying] does not mean so much anymore, because
women are no longer looked down upon." 91
While the film's ending clearly caters to the entrenched patriarchal
values that persist even among residents of a metropolis, the proposition
that gender bias in Chinese society was no longer a relevant problem is
not only disconcerting but historically inaccurate. The implicit argument
in such an observation is that class was a more urgent and "contempo-
rary" issue, whereas the gender question was by that time passe and had
been resolved by modernization. Moreover, this critic saw the new urban
proletariat or underclass as a primarily male social body, oblivious to the
fact that modernity had created new gender hierarchies while reinforc-
7.12 Girl in Dis9uise: the pressure of family values. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
ing old ones. Certainly, the rapid urbanization and industrialization gave
women unprecedented opportunities to enter the workforce and various I 287
public arenas, but the gender bias fostered and institutionalized by time-
honored cultural norms has retained a firm place in the Chinese con-
sciousness until this day.
Girl in D1's9uise symptomatically exposes gender trouble in a mod-
ern city despite the seeming liberation of modern girls (and boys). The
modern girl portrayed by the New Sensationalist fiction tends to be a hy-
perbolic imaginary creature, or. rather, the modernist dandy's projec-
tion of his contradictory cosmopolitan fantasies involving a playfulself-
emasculation. The cultural and cinematic vernacular employed by Girl in
Disguise spoke to an audience consisting mostly of petty urbanites rather
than highbrow fiction readers and connoisseurs of avant-garde aesthet-
ics. The medium's commercial requirements evidently pushed soft film
advocates to tilt to the prosaic entertainment end of the spectrum of their
aesthetic, showcasing its fleshy content more than speedy mechanic
form. The cinematic modernism was less about Liu's formal concerns
than about the appearances or vernacular registers of modern life, such as
fashion, makeup, urban milieu, and transportation. 92 Yet, through its
preoccupation with gender and sexuality in a world city, the film high-
lights one of the chief concerns of the New Sensationalist writing. If the
modern girl in their textual inscription and abstraction seems rootless,
floating, and unbounded by marriage and family, the more mundane and
Chapter Seven
concrete troubles Liying/Shouben encounters create comic and ironic ef-

fects appealing to audiences of popular cinema.
"Disguise" becomes the inevitable tactic with which the modern
woman negotiates these conflicting demands on her gender role. Th.e
constant shifting in and out of male or female accouterments does not
simply constitute frivolous comic relief but in fact reveals the real
predicament of the modern girl. She feels straightjacketed by prescribed
old gender norms on one hand, and the impossibility to freely experi-
ment with androgyny and female intimacy on the other. A couple of car-
toons published in a trade journal at tpe time capture both the fascina-
tion and apprehension about the "girl in disguise." One of them depicts a
woman embracing a "man." The caption: Just one step further, that Miss
0
will surely be disappointed. For the handsome Mister will turn out to be
a girl in 'disguise'!" Another one by the same cartoonist portrays a group
of bare-chest men staring at a fully dressed young "man," sweating pro-
fusely under the scorching sun. The caption: "'.Girl in disguise' can only
fan herself strenuously in summer, because she cannot bare her chest as
others. If she did that, she would reveal her true form!" 93
Female androgyny, cross-dressing and same-sex intimacy are attrib-
utes of the modern girl that captivated intellectuals and petty urbanites
288 I in 1930s urban China. 94 Young women flaunted their androgynous fash-
ion, often copied from their screen idols, on the street and in photo
studios. The cross-dressing woman was at once seen as a spectacle of
freakish curiosity and a sign of cosmopolitanism; she was censored or
"corrected" when perceived to threaten patrilineage. The real problem
with Girl in Disguise was not. as one critic claimed, that "it had nothing to
do with contemporary life." Rather, it had everything to do with the gen-
der question and urban modernity in that period. But the film's provoc-
ative premise was ultimately undone by its narrative framing. The edgy
sexual politics embedded in the film gets compromised at the end, when
a son is promptly delivered to fill in the position of a male heir, disquali-
fying Liying. The modern girl with dubious gender and social identity has
been reformed into a good girl, while same-sex affection has been re-
placed by heterosexual courting rituals, complete with a matchmaker.
SUN YU'S °CHOP-SUEY" STYLE
No discussion of the 1930s contentious film culture would be complete

without assessing Sun Yu's contributions; he was actively involved in-
and denounced by-both modernist and left circles. In many respects,
Sun's work exemplified and redefined vernacular modernism by negoti-
ating and venturing beyond competing modernist claims and expres-
sions. A full assessment of his output before the outbreak of the war in
1937, when Sun left Shanghai for his hometown Chongqing, is not pos-
sible here. 95 Rather, I try to place this auteur's work in relation to the
questions raised above. I focus on his writings in Modern Screen and some
features of his films that formed a consistent lyrical visual style, investi-
gated the transition to the metropolis (and beyond), and romanticized
revolutionary cosmopolitanism.
Enamoured with both literature and film, Sun had something in com-
mon with Tian Han and Liu Na'ou, respective figureheads of the hard
and soft film camps. Yet he was not entangled by the love-hate senti-
ments that most Japan-educated intellectuals felt toward their host-
country-turned-enemy. Sun had a solid Sino-American education that
allowed him to delve into both classical Chinese poetry and American-
style filmmaking. His studies in Jazz Age America imparted a combina-
tion of youthful energy, poetic romanticism, social concern, and an un-
stinting optimism to his films. He grasped the essence of the medium and
the demands of his epoch, resulting in a succession of works that helped
create the Lianhua "visual style" and a progressive cosmopolitan strand
of Shanghai cinema. 96
The inaugural issue of Modern Screen also launched Sun's column, "The
Cinematic Chop-Suey House" (Dianying zasuiguan) .97 In a series of essays, J 289
the "poet of the silver screen" articulated his alternately passionate and
abrasive views on cinema, society, and politics. These writings covered a
wide range of topics and shed important light on his "writings" on the
screen. In "Auspicious Opening/ Sun spells out the sources for the met-
aphor "chop-suey house" and its hybrid content: a northern style side-
walk vendor-made stew made of chopped lamb and oxen entrails and
strong spices. Transplanting it from northern China to the streets of
Shanghai, Sun believed this quotidian dish was exactly what people
without fur coats needed on a cold winter day-cheap but heartwarm-
ing, nourishing and energizing. This hearty domestic dish would appeal
to Chinese filmmakers and moviegoers because their hearts had turned
"cold" by the sluggish development of Chinese cinema. He candidly ac-
knowledges the vernacular origins of his recipe:
The kind of things sold at the Cinematic Chop-Suey House will of

course be disorganized, unstructured: there are intestines, stom-
achs as well as theories about techniques, sketches of life; there are
goat heads, perhaps also dog meat; there is something sweet, some-
thing sour, perhaps also something hot. For those who come to eat
the chop-suey at my little shop, don't hope to find sea cucumbers
or swallow nests because my shop does not have these. But if your
Chapter Seven
heart has turned cold, please do come .into my little place to get
warmed up. 911
This "chop-suey" caters to customers of modest means. The mixing of

northern food and southern service indicates a certain kind of popular
yet spicy cinematic aspiration for the country as a whole. But creating
such a quotidian feast to help revitalize Chinese cinema and restore
warmth in the Chinese audiences seems a tall order. Sun makes dear his
reluctance to subject this home-style enterprise to any lofty ideology. In
"My Mission," his second essay, he doet not compare his profession as a
director (and a writer) with a priest, a great statesman, or a master edu-
cator who professes to save the nation. Instead he identifies himself with
a little chop-suey shop vendor, who does not have a trendy "ism" to spice
up his chop-suey stew.
His six extant films-Wild Rose ( Ye meigui), The Blood of Passion on the
Volcano (fluoshan qingxue), Little Toys (Xiaowanyi), Daybreak (Tianming),
Big Road (Da lu), and Queen of Sports (Tiyu huanghou)-were made within
four years in the aftermath of the l 932 bombing. At that time, the film
industry was changing drastically. The intensified political climate and
modernization process in Shanghai left indelible marks on this group of
290 I thematically and stylistically consistent works.
Taken together, these works may be seen as parts of a larger work
unified by female protagonists usually played by either Li Lili or Wang
Renmei, two rising stars with athletic sexiness and youthful energy. This
consistency may als<l be attributed to the fact that Sun himself wrote
most of the scripts, which did not subscribe to any single ideology. Simi-
lar to many films of the time, these films almost unfailingly follow the
trajectory of youths migrating to Shanghai from pastoral villages. They
are motivated by the oppression of feudalism and imperialism, and lured
by urban modernity. The country, at least in its predestruction state, was
usually the fountainhead of poetry for both the protagonist and the film-
maker, whereas the city was the bastion of sin, the laboratory of modern
subjectivity and revolutionary ideals. Nearly all of the films (with the ex-
ception of Queen of Sports) focus on the working people on the bottom of
0
the society." 99 We witness how the country girls and boys transform into
sophisticated urban subjects. They become workers, students, prostitutes,
social flowers, athletes, artisans, bohemian artists or revolutionaries.
They were the true faces of Shanghai: migrants from the Jiangnan region
famous for its lush fields, waterways, silk, and rice.
Wild Rose, his earliest extant film, contains many of these features that
extended into subsequent films. Written in the wake of September 8,
1931, which marked the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, it portrays
Fighting over the Modem Girl
a uhealthily beautiful and patriotic girl in a fishing village" near the

mouth of Wusong River (today's Huangpu River). 100 Xiaofeng (played by
Wang Renmei) is the "commander" of a contingent of children playing
soldiers around the village. Jiang Bo (Jin Yan), a student of the Shanghai
Fine Arts Academy from a rich urban family "discovers" the new image
of China's daughter and, of course, his own Cinderella in the barefoot,
healthy, and naturally beautiful Xiaofeng.10 1 (The two actors tied the
knot within two years.) He paints a portrait of her and eventually takes
her to the city after a fire kills her father and destroys their home-an
obvious allegorical reference to Japanese aggression.
Xiaofeng's entry to the city on Jiang Bo's automobile is a significant,
albeit cliched, element in the city film idioms. The modern vehicle car-
ries the country girl into the urban wonderland and she is led to shop for
clothes and get a perm. The sequence is reminiscent of similar sequences
in Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and Vidor's The Crowd (1928). Adorned with
an artificial rose Jiang gave her, Xiaofeng has magically turned into a
modern girl. However, upon her arrival at Jiang's palatial modern home,
her fradulant urban identity is exposed when she throws away her high
heels and goes barefoot. Her silk stockings slide down her strong legs in
front of the outraged patriarch.
The couple is promptly driven out of the house and forced to support I 291
themselves, living on the bottom rung of the society. They move into a
longtan9 where several families share a simple row house. (Sun was the
first to use a manually operated crane-up device to shoot the cramped
housing condition vertically.) 102 The couple's nuptial home is a make-
shift structure on the rooftop but yields a generous view of the city's sky-
line that reminds Jiang of his sojourn as an art student in Paris. 10, Jiang
joins his friend Xiao Li (played by Zheng Junli) to paint billboards on the
street while Xiaofeng serves as the team's cook. The gendered-division of
labor here remains traditionally coded, but the four of them form a com-
munal family, a kinship that recurs in Big Road (and several Chinese films
later on, such as Street An9el [ 193 7] and Crows and Sparrows [ 1949]).
Of course, such a fairy tale home proves fragile and is soon torn
apart by poverty and misfortune. Jiang cannot sell his "Wild Rose" por-
trait. Xiaofeng picks up a wallet on the street, which accidentally sends
Jiang and his comrades to jail. In order to have Jiang freed, Xiaofeng
asks Jiang's father for help. He agrees, but on the condition that she
leave her love. Xiaofeng subsequently "disappears· to become a textile
worker, only reappear again at the film's "bright tail," when the four
friends are united on the street, marching to join "volunteers" for the war
against (Japanese) invaders. Jiang Bo jumps out of a dancehall window
to join the patriotic parade, indeed prefiguring the trope of passing from
Chapter Seven
"night[life]" to "morning" or from the dream factory to the social real-

ity of the street. The country's nostalgic poetry is thus rewritten, super-
imposed by cadences composed in tune with the city's rhythm and
the time's spirit. The last poetic intertitle indicates: "Like four children,
they march forward, arm in arm, on the life's path with smiles and
courage." 104
More interested in lyrical distention than narrative cohesion, revolu-
tionary romanticism than ideological dogmatism, Sun created his films as
though he was connecting self-sustaining poetic stanzas into a loose
verse. Each of these parts, often set irl disparate geographical locations
(country and city, China and elsewhere), carries different genre markers
and politically "incoherent" messages due to shifting formal structures
and often dramatic changes in characters' action (with little if any psy-
chological motivation). It is as though the films were intended for varied
audiences, and as such they convey and process competing aesthetic and
ideological orientations. Such a chop-suey style is most evident in Blood
ofPassion, also made in 1932, which received mixed reviews. Perhaps Sun
Yu's most fantastic film, its plot seems like a poetic concoction rather than
a realist tale of a young peasant's international journey toward self.
reinvention.
292 I The plot can be divided into to two symmetrical parts according to its
geographical distribution and drastic narrative rupture. The first, smaller
part is set in the typical Jiangnan country, whereas the second, more fan-
ciful part takes the characters to an exotic volcanic island in Nanyang.
Like Wild Rose, the film begins in an idyllic setting, Village of Willow
Flowers. A series of shots in soft daylight depict the timeless serenity and
beauty of the countryside: rippling lake, swimming ducks, plowing wa-
ter buffalos, herds of sheep, and farmers pumping the waterwheels for ir-
rigation. Song Ke (played by Zheng Junli) is a young farmer who helps
his father farm and plays with his beloved sister Lihua (fig. 7 .13 ). But this
lyrical landscape is soon ravaged by an evil landlord who orders the ab-
duction of the sister and the killing of the father. Song must flee the vil-
lage but vows to eradicate all nmonsters among humanity."
Years later-as the film enters the second part and a different mode-
Song appears in an entirely foreign tropical setting: a cabaret bar. The is-
land, with a bustling port and the bar full of drunken American soldiers
and local hooligans, strikes the viewer as a miniature Shanghai. Yet the
exotic location, especially the volcano looming large behind the town,
gives the film a touch of the fantastic and allegorical. The location's sen-
sual appeal, while allowing Sun Yu to employ "soft" elements to titil-
late Shanghai moviegoers, suggests his (and Lianhua's) desire to continue
courting the Nanyang audience. Rather than simply turning into a prole-
7. l 3 The Blood of Passion on the Volcano ( 1933): idyllic countryside. (Courtesy of the China
Film Archive)
tarian in the city, Song Ke is refashioned as a cosmopolitan subject with I 293

a political passion that outstrips both patriotism and parochialism. De-
scribed as the Hman who never laughs," he attends more to his old local-
ized identity than to an abstract national allegiance. While both parts of
the film contain progressive elements that fuel revolutionary passion,
they are also suffused with the poetry of nature and love, though with
different nuances and intensities. The innocence Song lost he redeems
through revenge and eroticism.1os
The second half's revenge and romantic narrative create an impres-
sion that the characters have been reincarnated from the first half of the
film. The latter presents an afterlife, an alternate world-one that is not
necessarily better but offers possibilities for retribution and redemption.
Not only does Song reinvent himself as a cosmopolitan anarchist, but for
some unexplained reason the villainous landlord finds his way to the is-
land as well. The symmetrical structure is further reinforced by the ap-
pearance of Liuhua (who bears the namesake of Song's village and is
played by Li Lili, Sun's leading lady for many subsequent films). Liuhua's
name, background, and her naughty way of wrinkling her nose remind
him of his dead sister. Yet she is obviously a modern girl by virtue of her
profession as a cabaret performer (dancing in Hawaiian-style straw skirt,
and again, barefoot) (fig. 7.14). In terms of iconography and screen per-
sona, Li Lili's character (as with her next role in Daybreak) is almost a
Chapter Seven
7.14 The Blood of Passion on the Volcano: the lovers reunite on the beach under the moon.
(Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
294 I replica of Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930)
and Dishonored ( 1931). She uses makeup and plays a gramophone; in a
soft scene she plays the record with her toes. Liuhua falls for the Hman
who never laughs" and tries to win his heart with wine and sensual danc-
ing under moonlight on the beach. But Song holds back his desire: "The
revenge is not done yet, and so I cannot accept your feelings." True to the
film's title, he eventually carries out his revenge on top of an active vol-
cano. After a strenuous struggle amid rolling rocks and flowing lava,
Song manages to push the "monster" into the burning crater (fig. 7.15).
While the eruption abates, the lovers reunite on the beach. Song holds
Liuhua in his arms, walking toward the ocean under tropical moonlight.
He is finally ready to consummate their passion; the "man who never
laughs" is also finally able to smile again.
The hyperbolic plot, radical incongruity between diverse narrative
components, and erratic character transformation (rather than develop-
ment) in both Wild Rose and Blood of Passion demonstrate Sun's distinctive
brand of vernacular modernism a la cinematic "chop-suey." While his
creative energy and progressive outlook were welcomed by the left crit-
ics, the romantic sensibility and poetic elements in the films were
deemed "unrealistic" or plainly foreign, the latter singled out as the com-
mon Nmalaise" of Lianhua productions.1°6 A review in Chenbao accused
Wild Rose of being "poisonous" because of its "worship of individualism,
7 .15 The Blood of Passion on the Volcano: revenge on the volcano. (Courtesy of the China Film
Archive)
advocacy of aestheticism, and sentimental humanism." A flower like

"wild rose," the critics contended, would "intoxicate the audience so I 295
much that they would turn numb." With regard to Blood of Passion, they
criticized the "foreign style" fencing in the duel scene and Li Lili's erotic
dancing in the straw skirt. 107 Su Feng's review in the same paper simply
disparaged the use of the volcano as a "novel and curious" but "unreal,"
"unnecessary" setting. Song Ke's name was considered too literary, not fit
for a farmer. (Simple but also stereotypical peasant names Song Ah-da or
Song Dabao were suggested as alternatives, revealing the critic's own pa-
tronizing view of laborers.) The critic expressed his annoyance at the
hints of fashion, such as Zheng Jun!i's moden9 perm and Li Lili's makeup,
as unbefitting progressive characters. Above all Su Feng was critical of
Sun's lack of class consciousness, despite the latter's prnfessed concern to
"depict the suffering of the lower classes." He saw Song Ke's revenge as a
merely incidental case and thus hardly representative of class struggle.
In his memoir written decades later, Sun again defended Blood of Pas-
sion's ending:
[T]he young peasant Song Ke I created may look like a "superman''

who engages in a personal protest and strife. What I had in mind
was, if a farmer from a poor remote village was portrayed as a ma-
ture, political leader armed with progressive thinking and the con-
sciousness of relying on the great power of organized masses to
Chapter Seven
topple the ruling class, then Song Ke would no longer be just an

ordinary young farmer with a rebellious spirit. 1os
This kind of less-than·ideal representation of the proletarian hero or

heroine may not have conformed to the ideological agenda of the dog-
matic left critics. But through the combination of their ordinary or im-
perfect action and romantic yearnings, Song Ke's and Liuhua's images, at
once idealist and worldly, transcended the divides between the real and
fantastic, the rural and urban, the local and global. As such they catered
to a particular transnational spectatotship that craved recognizable cul-
tural references {the village) and cosmopolitan imaginaries {the volcanic
island). Such a cinematic "chop-suey'' is made of a recipe that would
stimulate both the mind and the body, releasing daily anxiety as well as
galvanizing hope for a better tomorrow.
Sun Yu created h.is corpus and style against a spectacular but also
spectacularly uneven urban modernity. In the first half of the 1930s
Shanghai was a city full of promised fortunes and fame, as well as abject
poverty and brutal violence. Sun aimed to expose these drastic contrasts
and to instigate possible transformations in everyday life and social struc-
ture through a particular film language. This cinematic vernacular is
296 I composed with rapid shifts in locations, tones of narration, and character
transformation. His films incorporated American genre modes, such as
urban melodramas of King Vidor and Frank Borzage and sports/campus
films that flaunted "YMCA-type" youthful body and energy. 109 On the
other hand, Soviet montage theory and techniques further enabled him
to articulate social contradictions and utopian aspirations.
While other filmmakers had to wake up from their "pink dream" or
"silver dream," Sun embarked on making progressive yet romantic cellu-
loid dreams for the masses-including workers as well as other petty ur-
banites. As Ding Yaping points out, Sun's commitment to both social
progress and cinematic innovation led him to create a particular film lan-
guage that may be called "unofficial/popular discourse," which for my
purpose, may be reformulated as a "vernacular discourse." 1 10 The popu-
lar cinema of the 1920s, in particular the phenomenon of the martial arts
film, had opened up a discursive space that was not explicitly politically
charged {though never apolitical). The cinema of the 1930s, inflamed by
pervasive patriotic fervor and marked by the "left turn," saw radical
changes in film culture. Sun was quick to perceive and articulate this
change by updating both the form and content of cinematic vernacular
modernism.
In conclusion, the animosity between the left critics and the mod-
ernists appears to be founded upon diverging views of cinema's political
instrumentality versus its entertainment function. This chapter has

shown that the seeming polarity in fact masks complex exchanges and
interaction between the two camps that cannot be reduced to diametri-
cally opposed views on questions of content versus form, politics versus
aesthetics, or art versus market. The left critics and filmmakers were also
interested in formal elements (montage, in particular}. while the mod-
ernists were hardly oblivious to the dominance of capitalism and colonial
presence in China. They shared an ambivalence toward Hollywood cin-
ema and a fascination with the Japanese and European avant-garde,
though to varying degrees and for different reasons. These conflicting yet
overlapping forces spurred rivalries among different cultural communi-
ties, as well as creativity and competition that shaped the "golden age" as
an assemblage of competing temporalities.
Ultimately, the polemic skirmishes and film practices address the crit-
ical question of spectatorship and the identity of Shanghai cinema in a
politically volatile time. The modernists celebrated cosmopolitan, promis-
cuous (sexually, culturally, and politically speaking) character of Shang-
hai cinema, whereas the left critics (more than the left-wing filmmakers)
tried to streamline it into a national cinema and a political weapon. The
competing formulas they offered through criticism, translation, scripts,
and actual films offered antidotes to the alienation and fragmentation of I 297
everyday life in a Shanghai engulfed by modern splendor and misery:
champagnes and perfumes alongside blood, sweat, and garbage. The me-
dium of cinema, which until the turn of the decade had been primarily
used for entertainment and enlightenment outside the intellectual main-
stream, was now charged with the burden of radical social change to save
the nation. More crucially, and disquietingly, the war between hard and
soft films yielded a cacophony of explanations of the sensory and politi-
cal economy of the time embodied in the fate of the modern girl and her
sexuality; she had to be objectified or domesticated, one way or another.
Sun Yu's works, while also products of this contentious time and milieu,
went further in explor.ing the progressive potential of vernacular mod-
ernism while refusing to surrender to dogmatism.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SONG AT MIDNIGHT
ACOUSTIC HORROR AND THE
GROTESQUE FACE Of; HISTORY
298 I AS XINHUA COMPANY'S 1 first conscious attempt at a horror film

(kongbu pian), Song at Midnight (Yeban gesheng, 1937) generated massive
interest and trepidation. The film is obviously modeled on Rupert Julian's
The Phantom of the Opera, the sensational horror film released by Univer-
sal Pictures in 1925, which features Lon Chaney (dubbed as Lang-que-nei
in Chinese) in his most famous role.2 It departs significantly from the
silent American antecedent, however. Ma-Xu Weibang's (1905-61) 3 ver-
sion transforms both a nineteenth-century Parisian Gaston Leroux novel
and a Hollywood horror flick into a modern Chinese gothic tale with an
ambiguous political and aesthetic message (fig. 8.1).
Song at Midnight retains several key elements of the original: the for-
mula of romance plus horror, the disfigured face, the sexual obsession,
the allusion to a revolutionary past, the use of the architectural space of
a theater, and finally, the shadowplay effect. In the Chinese version, not
only do all the characters take on Chinese names and historically specific
identities, the sound track foregrounds and materializes the singing that
the silent predecessor lacked. The American version, despite its flirtation
with shadowplay and other elements found in Weimar cinema, is largely
filmed in the Hollywood paradigm. Although heavily indebted to the
American film for thematic structure, stylistically Song at Midnight shows
more affinity with German expressionist drama and cinema. In a curious
way, Song at Midnight stands as an instance where both European and
I 299
8.1 Ad for S0n9a1 Midnight (1937). (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
Chapter Eight
American influence on Chinese cinema converged and diverged. Adap-

tation as mimetic act occasions a process of deformation and reformation,
which constitutes, in essence, a particular Nhorrific" form. The film's hor-
ror and violence, amplified by its haunting soundtrack and eponymous
theme song, echoed contemporary feelings of uncertainty and fear on
the eve of the Sino-Japanese war.
Song at Midnight dramatizes an itinerant troupe's strange experiences
in an abandoned theater (fig. 8.2). Interestingly, the film's horror effect
and its commercial success were enhanced by the use of the Lyrical The-
ater for its premiere. 4 Its February 1937 release created a sensation in
Shanghai, as the popular silent film actor Gong Jianong recalled:
Before Midnight officially premiered at the Lyric Theater, Zhang

Shankun {the producer}. who knew the importance of publicity,
had a huge portrait of the disfigured character hung up in front of
the theater gate. Green bulbs were used for the eyeballs in the de-
monic face, further increasing its hideousness and the sense of hor-
ror. The following day, a newspaper reported that a child had been
scared to death {by the portrait], and this immediately received lots
of attention. Zhang Shankun seized the opportunity and spread
300 I the news further, stirring up the whole of Shanghai. The premier
of Midnight was timely. Newspaper advertisements for it carried the
phrase nPlease don't take your children with you/ which stimu-
lated the curiosity of the audience all the more, and they rushed to
see the film. The film was sold out for more than thirty days at the
theater, and held the box-office record for domestic-made films in
1936. Jin Shan and Hu Ping became popular stars instantly, and the
director Ma-Xu Weibang solidified his peculiar status as the au-
thority on the horror film. The foundation of the Xinhua Company
was thus solidified by Midnight.'
The sensational effect produced by the superimposition of the phantom

singer's grotesque face on the facade of the Lyric Theater proved to be an
effective strategy for galvanizing the audience's appetite for reverse
mimesis and sensory stimulation. The "projection" of the singer's body on
the architectural structure (particularly a cinema) also underscored the
tension-ridden relationship between body and space, the abject and the
representational, in the film and in the horror genre in general.
Given the film's mass appeal and its influence on later film history,
both the film and its context tell us much about the interaction between
film culture and national culture in that immediate prewar period. The
dynamic yet often conflicting relationship between the film's visual style
and its acoustic qualities reveal the unresolved tensions between silent
Song at Midnight
8.2 The abandoned theater. (Courtesy or the China Film Archive)
and sound film, as well as between the various ideologies and aesthetics I 301
competing at this crucial moment in Chinese culture. Produced at the
demise of the silent period, Son9 at Midnight not only provides a dark and
grotesque view of its epoch but also urgently provides an alternative to
mainstream "national defense" films. It attempts to reconcile silent and
sound film and to legitimize a popular art cinema in the midst of a na-
tional crisis. The phantom lover's scarred face and the disembodied voice
are the uncanny sites at which unconsummated desire and incomplete
history resurface and erupt.
The main plot unfolds in the same theater in two time periods: the
early Republican period of the 191 Os and a decade later with the return
of the repressed love and traumatic memory. Thus the film presents itself
as a historiographic project in which repressed history and memory are
embodied in the hero's disfigured face and the heroine's mental derange-
ment. This cinematic historiography is emphatically somatic and visceral,
writing this strong tale of modern China in "the most physiological of
genres," one that thrives on "preliterate, somatic modes of knowing." 6
The repetition, or rather revision, of history and its troubled redemption
(through the "awakening" heroine) points to the vulnerability of this
bodily inscribed history. Moreover, the film's constant allusion to the his-
torical kinship between theater and cinema-especially the reference to
the early New Drama, a catalyst for the emergence of Chinese cinema-
also makes this film a meditation on film history.
Chapter Eight
The richness of Song at Midnight springs as much from its implosive

textuality as the multiple historical dimensions wrought on the skin of
the film. Laborer's Love (1922) provided the possibility for probing the
"beginning" of early Chinese cinema in the teahouse milieu and :an
emerging film world within the broader vernacular culture. As a ro-
mance that ends in horror and destruction rather than a matrimonial
happy ending, Song at Midnight registers the impeding end of an era,
which, however, refuses any simple closure.
I
THE THEATER OF SOUND AND FURY
The aftershocks of the arrival of sound at the end of the l 920s lasted well
beyond the mid-l 930s. 7 Sound functioned as a critical catalyst in the
golden age of Chinese silent film. The advent of sound highlighted and
complicated the linguistic application of the vernacular in cinema. It trig-
gered a new tide of public discourse on cinema's ontology and ideologi-
cal function, as well as a series of sound experiments that reshaped the
sensorial experience in and outside movie theaters.
The desire to naturalize the mechanical correspondence between the
articulation of sound and its source generated both excitement and anx-
302 I iety about the aesthetic efficacy and social meaning of this new acoustic
"dominant," to borrow a term conceived by the Russian linguists, to in-
tegrate sound and meaning into an "inseparable whole" in the study of
poetry. Roman Jakobson, the leading voice of the prague school of lin-
guistics and semiotics, defined .it as "the focusing component of a work of
art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components ....
It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure." 8 In
other words, the acoustic dominant does not exist in isolation; it is part
of a dynamic system when it interacts with other elements and brings
about structural change. Moreover, the notion may be applied to the "art
of a given epoch," beyond the poetic work for which the term was first
conceived. In this spirit, I apply the concept to the advent of sound in
Shanghai cinema and its impact on the transforming film world. While it
ended a long silent era, the new acoustic dominant also signaled a new
beginning in Chinese film history with mixed repercussions.
The ascendance of the acoustic dominant in Chinese film history be-
tween 1930 and 1936 was characterized by a heterogeneous body of
practice. Not only did silent films continue to be made and perfected,
early sound film was also divided by a number of technologies-ranging
from the use of phonographs, separate wax disks, and finally movie-tone
film stock. This was in part carried over from the sound practices of silent
film. American observers in the mid- l 920s reported, for instance, that
Song at Midnight
during the showing of a domestic film in a Shanghai theater, a Russian

orchestra played foreign music, "being in toto a peculiar conglomeration,
including music from Madam Butterfly, and from other musical plays."
(The presence of a Russian orchestra is hardly surprising as many Rus-
sians fled the 1917 revolution and came to live in Shanghai.) In some
theaters in Tianjin, however, "music ... is sometimes offered through the
medium of a phonograph, upon which Chinese or foreign pieces may be
played." Because foreign music was still rather alien to the Chinese au-
dience at large, in strictly Chinese theaters only Chinese records were
selected.9
Indeed, in the films of this period, the line between silent and sound
is hard to draw. Although many perceived the arrival of sound as an
assault on the "great deaf" -as silent film was fondly called at the time-
this reaction was complicated by a mixture of wonder and awe. The on-
set of sound, along with the coming of age of the music-recording indus-
try, radically redefined the meaning of the body in cinema and resulted
in a reordering of the sensory hierarchy in the larger arena of vernacular
culture. Many silent and early sound films used sound to embellish vi-
sual attraction and dramaturgy rather than to conceal the process of nar-
ration. The "song and dance" film (gewu pian), a genre foregrounding the
body in motion, for instance, had much music and was the most apt ve- I 303
hide for early sound experiments.
The ascendance of the acoustic dominant, extending more than a half
decade, coincided with the onslaught of Hollywood sound films in the
Chinese market on one hand and Japanese military invasion on the
other. The implementation of sound proved an intense cultural drama at
times bordering on horror and violence. Sound thus became an impor-
tant component in the formation of a certain #aesthetic of emergency"
that accompanied the emergence of the left-wing cinema and then the
"national defense" cinema. A strand of these cinemas (such as Sun Yu's
and Cai Chusheng's films) was popularized through the use of sound
and, in particular, the invention of the theme song. Some theme songs
became hits, generating sensations beyond movie theaters. Moreover,
they also served the purpose of mobilizing the masses' political con-
sciousness and commitment to the patriotic cause. The most celebrated
examples include "Song of the Big Road" (Dalu9e) in Big Road, "The Song
of the Graduates" (Biye ge) in Plunder of Peach and Plum ( 1934), and the
"The Marching of the Volunteers" (Yiyongjun jinxingqu) in Children of
Troubled Times (1935). The last was adopted by the People's Republic of
China as the national anthem.
The transition to sound necessarily brought the issue of speech into
the forefront. Early sound experiments hardly attended to dialogue, but
Chapter Eight
rather focused on inserting musical numbers into narrative space or sim-

ply used them to display the aural spectacle. Some later attempts at pro-
ducing films with "total dialogue" (quanbu yousheng duibai) tried obses-
sively to reproduce dramatic speech (as many sound film actors came
from spoken drama backgrounds) at the expense of diegetic absorption.
The same happened with the use of sound effects. Many early sound
films neglected sound effects altogether, producing a ghostly quiet
diegetic space in which characters deliver disembodied lines, whereas
other films, devoid of pronounced diaJogue, used sound effects for comic
relief or to create a particular ambiance. These divergent attempts at in-
corporating or excluding speech, sometimes simply for technical or fi-
nancial reasons, speak to a polyphonic conception of sound cinema.
The end of the silent period .is commonly designated as 1936, after
major Chinese studios succeeded in making synchronized #total" sound
films (which include musical score, speech and sound effects), and after
most urban theaters had completely installed sound equipment. How-
ever, silent films continued to be made sporadically until 1938 and were
shown in small theaters or rural areas for many years afterward. Silent
film's memory and aesthetic sensibility were carried over into the sound
era, despite the increasingly marginal status of that form.
304 I Notably, the companies heralding sound experimentation had also
been the chief players in the martial arts film craze. Hu Die, Xu Qingfan,
and Wu Suxin, among other actresses made famous by their roles as
martial heroines reinvented themselves to fit into their new sound film
roles. 10 Their early sound productions manifest a passionate initiative
similar to the initiatives channeled into creating martial arts special ef-
fects; such as the spectacle of flying. The first Chinese sound" film using
0
a wax disk, The Singing Girl Red Peony (Mingxing, 1930), starring Hu Die,
is a story about a Peking opera actress whose quest for personal happi-
ness ends in tragedy. The film boasted Peking opera tunes sung by the
protagonist. The second experiment, The Singing Beauty (Yu meiren, You-
lian, 1931 ), also contained musical numbers, which were advertised as
the film's chief attraction. Both companies used different names for their
sound productions. Mingxing used "Minzhong" while Youlian used
nYimin." Though their quality was far from ideal. the early sound films
turned out to be hot commodities. The exhibition rights of Red Peony were
bought by Nanyang distributors for more than ten times the price of
a silent film. Singing Beauty, though not the "first" and lacking a com-
plete sound track, still made a profit five to six times more than its silent
production. 11
The results of these experiments were uneven. Various efforts were
made to improve the quality of acoustics and synchronization. Hu Die re-
Song at Midnight
calls that Red Peony was made in cooperation with the Pathe recording
company in Shanghai. The recording proved to be a difficult job; it took
five or six attempts before a line was properly recorded at the same pace
as the image track. The projection situation was often comedic when the
disk and the film played out of sync. 12 While Red Peony used postrecord-
ing on wax disks, Singing Beauty tried the reverse, producing the sound
disk first and then playing it during the shooting. However, because of
the differences in the speed of the phonograph, the camera and the pro-
jector, the "synchronization" of sound and image track turned out to be
an ordeal. 13 Moreover, strictly speaking, both were only partial-sound
films. Red Peony lacked sound effects, whereas Singing Beauty, due to
financial constraints, left much dialogue and musicunrecorded. Tech-
nology was the main attraction for these films, very much in the "dis-
play" spirit characteristic of early exhibition practice. In a sense, early
sound cinema can be seen as the next cinema of attractions (and distrac-
tions) wave, following the martial-arts film. ... ·. · .....
Dissatisfied with the wax disk's nonsynchronous effects, other com-
panies tried the sound-on-film technology with the help of foreign ex-
pertise. The first synchronized film (Kinotone), Peace after Storm (Yuguo
tianqing, Da Zhongguo and Jinan, 1931 ), was the result of a joint venture
by two small companies that sent a production team to Japan to use the I 305
equipment there (fig. 8.3). The event produced a big sensation in the me-
dia. A Chinese student wrote from Japan about his encounter vvith the
team, praising their effort to make a "complete sound film withsiriging,
dialogue, martial arts, and romance." With five musicians and tWo pho-
neticians working hard, the film will have "melodious music arid soft-
spoken dialogue, as well as all the sounds of the universe." Compared to
the "sandy" effect of the wax disk used in Red Peony, the quality of Peace
after Storm would be on a par with foreign talkies. 14 Movie Magazine car-
ried a picture of sample strips of the film to demonstrate the wonder of
acoustic celluloid; another picture showed the in-studio shooting with a
big boomer extended over the orchestra.' 5 One advertisement for the
film in Movie Weekly dramatized the event thus: "The· film has twelve
reels, and is 14, 134 inches long. It has 977 lines of dialogue, consisting of
6935 sentences. There are four original composed songs and other con-
temporary Peking opera tunes. The score contains twenty~six melodies
that are played according to the plot." 16 It seems the adoption of the syn-
chronized film stock also made possible the use of extensive dialogue, as
exemplified by the making and promotion of Peace after Storm. The ob-
session with the quantity of lines and musical embellishment suggest a
conception of sound film that still regarded sound as the attraction rather
as tool of narration. Because of its Japanese connection, however, the
306 I
8.3 Ad tor Peace after Storm. one of the early sound experiments. (Courtesy of the China Film
Archive)
Song at Midnight
public resisted the film after its release, and the Chinese film world re-
fused to credit it as the first domestically made synchronized filmP ·.
Tianyi proved its business acumen in the transition from wax record-
ing to synchronization. Shortly after its first sound film made on wax disk
(The Tolling Bell [Zhongsheng]) was destroyed in a studi() fire, it quickly
built a new glass studio and secured a loan for a sound camera from an
American company to make Spring Arrives in the Singing World (Gechang
chunse, 1931). Tianyi planned to produce the first film with the latest
technology-Movietone-and thereby establish its leading position in
sound film. Abandoning .its initial plan to travel to Japan, the company
hired two American cameramen at astronomical salaries and imported
the most up-to-date equipment from the United States.1 8 The film was
based on a successful New Drama piece called The Beautiful Dancing Girl
( Wun ii meiguniang) that was playing at the Xiaowutai Theater, a venue
the Shao family established in 1922. The film received mixed reviews.
The viewers had become more critical after the initial enchantment with
sound experiments wore off. While one critic questioned the authentic-
ity of the nativeness of the production; another viewer from Canton
expressed his disappointment with its incomplete song recordings. 19 A
more demanding critic pointed to its "squared" framing, overuse of close-
ups, and unrealistic or missing narrative elements. In the end, "it did not I 307
leave any deep impression on the audience except for the lingering sing-
ing." 20 Tianyi's costly experiment in synchronized filmmaking, however,
did not end the practice of partial sound film-either on wax disk or
sound stock, usually without a full score or sound effects. The terrain of
film production and exhibition remained largely nonsynchronous until
1936, allowing for the competition. coexistence, and combination of a
variety of technologies and aesthetics.
Technical ordeals aside, early sound films commonly privileged sing-
ing girls and self-reflexive references to the theater world. The musical
numbers were not usually integrated into the narratives but were sung
by characters playing characters and dubbed by famous vocalists, hence
the term xi zhong xi (play within a play). Indeed, the possibility of conflat-
ing the singing voice of an opera star (such as Mei Lanfang in the case
of Red Peony) and the face of a film star like Hu Die was one of the at-
tractions of the sound film. As Hu Die later recalled, after the release of
the film, her fans came to regard her as the original singer and invented
stories to explain how she learned Peking opera. As she noted: "I am
not Mei Lanfang [square], but Mei Lanyuan [round]. It was the round
gramophone record [yuanpan] that was singing for me!" 21
The anecdote underscores the permeability of the theater and film,
which became more pronounced with the advent of reproducible sound.
Chapter Eight
It also foregrounded the fundamentally asynchronistic relationships of
body, face, and voice in the cinematic space, despite the frenzy for syn-
chronization. The proliferation of the Chinese character for song (ge) in
early sound-film titles is indicative of a film culture captivated by the
sonic spell, and influenced by Hollywood musicals as well as traditional
Chinese opera. The split body of the screen actor and the singer in the
recording studio underscores the disunity inherent in what Mary Ann
Doane aptly calls the "fantasmatic body" reconstituted by technology. 22
Chinese cinema's romance with Peking opera has a long history. In
1905, the Fentai Photo Studio in Beifing filmed the Peking opera actor
Tan Xinpei, inaugurating what Mary Farquhar and Chris Berry call the
"shadow opera" tradition in Chinese film. 23 In 1920 and 1924, Mei Lan-
fang performed in several short films made by the Commercial Press and
the Minxin Company, respectively. The films consisted mostly of episodes
accentuating choreographed movement. 24 The early sound film once
more turned to Peking opera, only this time emphatically focusing on
the aural aspect. This cross-fertilization lent popularity to both art forms
and their stars. 25 Most of the early sound films embellished with operatic
tunes were modern tales about the melodramatic fate of the singer. The
play within a play formula allowed parallel unfolding of different kinds
308 I of theater practice (e.g., opera versus spoken drama), as well as the in-
terface of the theater world and the cinema world.
Two Stars (1931 ), an extant film with a partial sound track recorded on
wax disk, is a typical example of this doubling formula and uses a "star is
born" tale (fig. 8.4). 26 The "two stars" reflect the constellation of the the-
ater and film galaxies, also suggested by the comic moniker for the stu-
dio, Yinghang, literally the Milky Way. In the narrative, a film production
team on location in scenic Hangzhou overhears a girl singing who turns
out to be Li Yueying, the daughter of a recently retired Nanyang musi-
cian. The crew is so captivated that they summon another director from
Shanghai to see (and hear) if she is right for the starring role in his film.
The film within the film is structured around the process of shooting
a Peking opera about the Tang emperor Xuanzong's love for his concu-
bine. In the course of filming, the on-stage theatrical love story gets in-
tertwined with the backstage romance between the actors (famous opera
actress Zi Luolan opposite Lianhua's poster-boy Jin Yan). The constant
shift between classical costumes and modern fashion, the archaic Peking
opera sets and place of contemporary urban leisure (such as a miniature
golf course and dance hall) echoed the shift between silence and sound,
as well as the cinematic and dramatic. The long takes of the scene of Zi
Luolan singing in her operatic role are contained in rather static framing
redolent of a stage tableau as though the audience is suddenly trans-
ported to an opera theater.
Song at Midnight
8.4 Two Stars (193.\). (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
This scene of live singing is contrasted with a later scene when singing
becomes disembodied. At a company party celebrating the film's success, I 309
a tango dance is interrupted when a giant radio at the center of the dance
floor is turned on. The radio is broadcasting the film live from the theater
at the moment when the concubine starts to sing the opera tune. While
everyone listens raptly, the actress is saddened by the song because it
evokes her unrequited love for the actor. The radio reproduces the film
event as a sound event; at the same time, the recorded voice being played
at the theater uncannily returns, with a new layer of mediation, to the
source of its bodily origin. The singer listens to her own voice, now
loaded with her ambivalence.
The spectacle of singing in these early sound films proves to be rather
discontinuous and volatile. The fate of the singer in Two Stars, as in Red
Peony, is a tragic one. The female protagonist eventually renounces the
freedom and romantic love associated with the public articulation of her
voice. Red Peony loses her voice onstage after suffering from her good-
for-nothing husband's physical and psychological abuse. As a conse-
quence, she is demoted from being a top star to playing minor roles. In
Two Stars, the rising talent Li Yueying eventually leaves the urban "Milky
Way" riddled with both glamour and pain after a thwarted love affair
with the male star. Similarly, Singing Beauty and Spring Arrives to the Sing-
ing World portray the unhappy endings of singing girls' backstage lives. In
all these instances, the voice of the singing girl is the source of both at-
traction and eventual (self-)destruction.
Chapter Eight
The dramatic conflict is often predicated on the conflict between the

public and the private, usually in the form of a woman's career and her
personal life. and between free love and moral strictures imposed by so-
cial norms, that is, arranged marriage or the sanctity of family. The voice
of the singer thus becomes the site of both dramatic and social tension as-
sociated with new technology. Just as the female knights-errant in mar-
tial arts films embodied an anarchic tendency, charging the silent screen
with an exploding energy, the singing girl's aural excess both stimulated
and unsettled the still predominantly silent film scene.
As the advent of sound challenged/the practice of screenwriting, the
tension between the verbal and visual presentation in silent film was now
complicated by the relationship between image and sound. Significantly,
the voice of the singing girl in early sound films is often pitched against
musical writing. At the end of Red Peony, her tragedy is explained away
thus: "Hers is a hopeless case. It's all because she is uneducated and has
sung too many old opera tunes." 27 Illiteracy was a traditional stigma as-
sociated with majority of actors, who typically entered a theatrical troupe
instead of school as children due to poverty. Her singing is singled out as
the source of calamity, and she alone has to bear the consequences of her
gift, or rather, the public consumption of it. In a sense, singing is equated
310 I with orality, and thus is more in tune with popular culture than with lit-
erary culture.
Singing Beauty is another case in point. The film deserves a closer look
because it foreshadows many elements found in Song at Midnight. The
heroine again sings in a song and dance troupe; she is the object of de-
sire for several men around her, including the troupe's playwright. He is
so infatuated with her beauty and talent that he decides to write a play
especially for her. This play within the play is based on a classical Peking
opera (the legend of Xiangyu and his concubine Yu Ji) and offers a
mirror image of the romance between the actress and the playwright.
Upon learning that the singing girl has become engaged to the son of
the troupe's leader, the playwright leaves the troupe after a failed at-
tempt to disfigure his own face with nitric acid-a motif central to Song
at Midnight. Using acid to "liquidate" his handsome face is an act of
"concretizing or eternalizing love" (gu'ai), so his undying love would be
permanently etched in scars. However, his servant stops this act of self.
destruction. Instead, he goes into a voluntary exile only to become seri-
ously injured in a car accident, leaving him with a scarred face and a crip-
pled leg. Years later, when he meets the singing girl who is just about to
get married, his old scar bursts open and he quickly dies of both physical
and emotional pain (fig. 8.5).
The film ends in the death of the playwright who, before leaving the
Song at Midnight
8.5 The disfigured face in The Singing Beauty (1931). (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
"sordid" world for good, asks the actress to sing the songs he wrote for I 311
her. Overwhelmed by grief and guilt, she dies at his bedside, thus bring-
ing a romantic tragedy to a ,,perfect" conclusion. The playwright's un-
fulfilled desire is redeemed by the girl's remorse and a private perfor-
mance-returning the songs to him as a ritual sacrifice. The song that
brought her fame is now turned into a swan songfor an unrequited love.
The songwriter's death makes it imperative for her to die as well, for
without the authorization of his compositions, she remains voiceless.
The advent of sound provided the opportunity for cinema to actively
draw on various old and new forms: the "song and dance" theater, the
"beauty meets scholar" story of Butterfly fiction, and the Hollywood for-
mula of backstage drama. 2s In a transformation of an old motif the
beauty becomes the singing girl and the scholar the musician or song-
writer. This transfiguration was certainly mediated by sound, yet the per-
sistent melodramatic impulse (note that the Greek melos means "song")
demonstrates the roots of early sound film in the narrative conventions
of the vernacular culture at large. Technically, it also allowed the cine-
matic mise-en-scene of different bodies inhabiting the "same" sound and
narrative space.
The plight of the playwright cum songwriter demonstrated the di-
lemma the screenwriter faced in a new way of Ncomposing" for the
screen. Significantly, in the years following the first experiments, a group
Chapter Eight
of young composers and songwriters appeared on the film scene. Xian

Xinghai (1905-45}, Nie Er (1912-35), Ren Guan (1900-41), and An E
became important forces in creating Chinese film music. Among them,
Xian Xinghai composed the score and songs for Song at Midnight. As op-
posed to the scholar or literary writer that had dominated the silent
screen, the composer or opera playwright signaled the birth of a new
male subject. The female singer's success, once taking on a life of its own,
often proves to be too excessive to be contained by the original. and self-
centered, intention of the composer. The films' tragic endings thus raise
a fundamental question concerning/the relationship between the singer
and the writer, connected or divided by technology.
THEME SONG AS THE LOCUS OF THE NEW DOMINANT
The early sound films that situate the singer at the dramatic center in ef-
fect constitute an ambivalent discourse on the ontological meaning and
cultural implication of sound cinema. Yet, the singer's rise and fall cannot
be dissociated from the songs she transmits and popularizes. These early
sound films relied heavily on theme songs that was emblematic of the
sonic age, as a nodal point in a larger acoustic space where a set of leisure
practices converged. Some theme songs even become vital forces in mo-
bilizing the masses for national salvation. The theme songs circulated, in
a variety of forms, generating multifaceted mass phenomena that
redefined the meaning of movie-going and the theater as public space.
The eponymous theme song of Song at Midnight, like many others, not
only helped to draw audiences to the theater but eventually acquired a
life of its own, assuming the role of an aural memento by which the film
would be remembered decades later.
The symbiosis between the singing girl and the male composer, a
reflection of the troubled marriage between sound and cinema, is per-
haps best exemplified in Sun Yu's Wild Flowers ( Yecao xianhua; Minxin/
Lianhua, 1930}, the first film to use a theme song for quasi-diegetic pur-
poses.29 In the film a young musician (Jin Yan) discovers that the flower-
vending girl he rescued from a car accident (Ruan Lingyu} has a beauti-
ful "oriole-like" voice. He invites her to play the leading singer in the
opera he is writing. Her debut turns out to be an astounding success and
she becomes a star overnight. The musician proposes marriage, but the
girl, pressured by his rich father and fearful of ruining his future, feigns
disinterest. Toward the end of the film, weakened by her longing, she
faints and spits blood on the stage. Subsequently, she loses her voice. The
musician returns and comforts her by saying, "Don't worry. From now
on, let me be your voice."}O
Song at Midnight
The film has been regarded as an example of the ambiguous image of

the modern woman in Shanghai. 31 What I find most revealing about this
film is its unique place in the implementation of sound. Not only is its
subject matter preoccupied with the production of sound and tts recep-
tion, the film literally inserts a sound product-namely, the theme song
-in the diegetic space. Sun is best known for his films Daybreak, Queen of
Sports, Big Road, and other canonical films of the golden age. Little atten-
tion has been paid to Sun Yu's sporadic yet pioneering experiment with
sound in that period. Prior to his work with Lianhua, he had experi-
mented with the use of recorded music for his films. During the exhibi-
tion of Tears of Xiaoxiang (1928), a martial arts-magic spirit film, hear-
ranged to play recorded Chinese pipe music when a poem written in
archaic style appeared in an intertitle card. The poetic lines were thus an-
imated by the music and appeared to address the audience without the
visible presence of the speaking body. Years later Sun called the event
"perhaps the first film song in a Chinese silent film." 32 Of course, the use
of music in the movie theater was nothing new. Where there were no
musicians, recorded music was habitually used. 33 Sun's ingenious inno-
vation, however, was the first attempt to "synchronize" silent speech
with an external sound source, thereby carving out a momentary virtual
sound space in the diegetic space, while also carrying over the tradition I 313
of accompaniment.
Sun's play with both silent and sound techniques indicates an ambig-
uous moment in Chinese film history when disparate aesthetic practices
converged in the movie theater. He was completing his film education in
the United States at a crucial time for sound experimentation. The intro-
duction of Vitaphone in 1926, the release of Don Juan the same year, and
The Jazz Singer a year later are together commonly recognized as the mo-
ments inaugurating sound's full admission to cinema, despite the fact that
these early sound films are far from complete talkies. Returning to China
where the film industry was entering the heyday of silent film, Sun nev-
ertheless brought his exposure to sound film into his work. As in the case
of other national cinemas, China's protracted transition was partly deter-
mined by economic and technological disadvantage but also conditioned
by a certain political and aesthetic resistance t0ward American talkies.
American sound films had been shown at numerous first-run theaters in
major cities since 1929, but they were not welcome because of the unin-
telligibility of the language and lack of adequate resources for simultane-
ous translation. For example, one critic points to the unintelligibility of
not just English but also various accents and dialects in imported talkies,
so they were even more difficult to watch than foreign silent films. He
compared the frustration to watching a fine opera performance by Mei
Chapter Eight
Lanfang without knowing anything about Peking opera. 34 My interviews

with several old Shanghai moviegoers also confirm this. It was more of a
trend and as a way of showing one's social status that a certain audience
went to see the foreign talkies. (Later on, earphones were provided to
solve the translation problem.) The Chinese audience at large quickly re-
turned to the more comfortable environment of homemade silent films
and partial-sound films.
Sun's experiment in Tears of Xiaoxiang led him to create a full-fledged
theme song for Wild Flowers. Sun's penchant for enhancing the role of
songs in his films may have as well spilt.mg from his lyrical impulse. The
possibility of literally and musically articulating poems with the aid of
sound technology, however rudimentary at the time, seemed alluring not
only for expanding the sensory pleasure of cinema. It would also be in-
strumental for reviving the oral and tonal quality of classical Chinese po-
etry, which was supposed to be sung or chanted. When Sun wrote the
theme song "Looking for My Brother" (Xunxiong ci) for Wild Flowers,3 5
he employed a professional composer (his brother Sun Chengbi) to write
the score. The recording was contracted to the Great China Recording
Company with the two stars Jin Yan and Ruan Lingyu, and accompanied
by the Carlton Theater Orchestra, using a combination of Chinese and
314 I Western instruments. When the film was publicly shown, Sun spent
three days in the theater taking charge of the phonograph himself to en-
sure the "lip-sync" effect of the singing, before he could entrust the task
to the assistants he had trained.3 6
The theme song's contribution to the film's success went beyond the
confines of the auditorium. In fact, the theme song proved to be a com-
plex cultural event in itself. The film functioned at best as its surrogate
parent. Recorded in advance, the album Looking for My Brother was re-
leased simultaneously with the film. It was repeatedly advertised in, for
instance, Yingxi zazhi, a monthly put out by Lianhua's publishing divi-
sion.37 Issue number 10 from 1930 alone carried three advertisements for
the film-two of them about the song's appeal. Located in the inside
cover, promotional text for the film outlines several special features of
the film above the illustration of the embracing couple against Shanghai's
silhouetted modern skyline. 1n addition to the theme (juzhi), sets (bei-
jing), and comic relief (or interludes, chuancha), the theme song (tige) is a
main attraction. The advertising verse about the song reads
A play within a play

Looking for my brother over thousands of miles
Sung together by Jin and Ruan
It's both sad and empowering.
Song at Midnight
The reader is also promised that the power of the song is so strong that
the song will "wind around the roof beam of your house for three days"
after seeing the film. This description, somewhat hyperbolic due to the
use of a classical idiom, signaled the emergence of a mass phenomenon
that not only crossed the division between the public and private spheres,
but also significantly broadened the experiential horizon of the film.
The other large advertisement in the same issue of Film Magazine re-
lates the theme song to a different sensorial regime (fig. 8.6). The left half
of the page shows an illustration of the two stars singing, in costume. The
text indicates that the song sheet for the theme song, in both Chinese and
English, can be purchased at major bookstores and movie theaters for
twenty cents. The right half of the page, however, promotes the Xinyue
(New Moon) recording company, which produced the album. It lists
more than two dozen albums of original sound (yuanyin) recordings, and
includes "Looking for My Brother." The illustration immediately above
the list depicts, if in an overstated way, the emergence of a particular au-
dience. A young man dressed in a Chinese robe and vest sits in a rattan
chair with his head resting on a pillow listening intently to a huge record.
The "title" of the record is actually the trademark of the recording com-
pany, the New Moon. The central idea of the advertisement is spelled out
in the text below, under the rubric "A Shortcut for Learning a Song." I 315
Lamenting the difficulty of learning songs, the caption goes on to say that
"only the records of the New Moon company contain clear and accu-
rately pronounced sentences, and those wishing to learn new songs will
thus most likely succeed [by listening to them].»
Clearly, as illustrated by these advertisements, an emerging listening
subject, partially overlapping with the film spectator, began to occupy a
substantial place with considerable autonomy in the everyday world of
leisure consumption around 1930. The record's mass appeal lies in its
democratic potential-that everyone could learn to sing like film stars, if
not act like them. The theme song could be acquired separately from the
film and be played over and over again in one's living room thus trigger-
ing a gradual yet profound transformation in the structure of the cine-
matic experience as a whole. The theme song as a new attraction was
incorporated into the space of the film narrative and the theater, yet cir-
culated as a commodity in bookstores, music shops, and private living
rooms. It constituted the nexus of the "system" of "films, radio, and mag-
azines" in a restructured "culture industry." 38 As a cultural object that is
inherently mobile and malleable, the theme song functioned as a catalyst
in linking previously disparate urban spaces within a shared cultural ge-
ography of leisure consumption.
Because of its cohesive as well as destabilizing role in the transition to
316 I
8.6 Wild Flowers ( 1930): ad for the album with the theme song "Looking for Brother," and
other Xinyue albums (from Yingxi ;;a;;hi. vol. I. no. 10, 1930).
Song at Midnight
sound, the theme song crystallizes the new dominant in the Shanghai
film culture in the first half of the 1930s. Insofar as this epoch is highly
uneven culturally and technologically, it is also a "shifting dominant" be-
cause it emerges from the horizon of a cluster of "transitional regions" .) 9
-the silent film, multiple sound technologies, theater, the phonograph,
radio, magazines, and last but not least, the street. Theme songs were
played through loudspeakers in front of the theater as a strategy to en-
tice the audience. Gong Jianong recalled how, in promoting the film Twin
Sisters (Zimei hua, Mingxing, 193 3), Mingxing studio had the theater
playing the theme song "Lullaby" (Cuimianqu) in front of the Central
Theater where the film premiered. The passersby were told that one
could learn the song quickly by watching the movie. A song sheet was
also included in its premiere catalogue. The film was a huge success. An-
other sensationally popular film, Fisherman's Ballad (Yu 9uan9 qu, Lian-
hua, 1932), premiered at the Lyrical Theater and sold records of the
eponymous theme song before the film's release in order to rival Twin Sis-
ters Flowers. "So when the film was first shown, everywhere people were
already singing 'Clouds float in the sky above the sea .. .'" Both films ran
continuously for almost three months. 40
The ascendance of the new dominant had implications for the config-
uration of space and time in cinematic perception as a whole. According I 317
to Roman Jakobson, visual signs are organized for the most part in a ''spa-
tial dimension," whereas auditory signs (such as speech) are primarily
ordered temporally. 41 The theme song, stemming from the marriage be-
tween the visual art of the cinema and the auditory (as well as perfor-
mative) art of the theater, became a "transitional region" in which such
a spatial and temporal division collapsed. As an audiovisual experience
that exceeded the confines of the movie theater, it was mapped onto the
multiple temporalities manifested in its various incarnations or exten-
sions. As such, it intimated the emergence of an acousticized spectator-
ship that brought together nonsynchronous aesthetic tastes and social
experiences.
As a linchpin between the visual and the auditory regimes of percep-
tion and diverse narrative elements, the theme song became the site
where a particular libidinal economy was produced. The contemporary
slogan of the "union of sight and sound" (shengse lianyin), used liberally
in advertisements as well as popular discourse, is redolent with erotic
connotations. The indulgence in shengse-the enjoyment of music, songs,
dance, wine, and visual delight-has always been linked to sensual and
sexual pleasures in its idiomatic usage. Lianyin, on the other hand, liter-
ally means tie the knot," or "marriage.'' The amorous relationship be-
0
tween the singing girl and the composer-writer so prevalent in early

Chapter Eight
sound films may be viewed in light of this marriage between the senses
and the technologies that convey them. However, that romance, as we
have seen, is fraught with tension and subject to tribulations caused by
existing social and material conditions.
If the reproducibility of the visual image was at the heart of the uop-
tical unconscious" in the search for a film language in the early-mid
1920s, then the reproduction of sound-and hence theme songs-posed
a similar, though qualitatively different, shift in the 1930s. Both pro-
cesses witnessed a transformation from self-reflexive experimentation to
integration. In time, the status of m,ass produced copies became less a
challenge to authenticity than a widely accepted new order of things.
The implementation of sound generated multiple versions of duplica-
tion, as the movie theater became a dynamic and at times chaotic labo-
ratory. Much of the discussion provoked by the frantic yet innovative at-
tempts to "tie the knot" between the theater and the cinema on the one
hand, and sight and sound on the other, centered on the question of
fidelity or authenticity in various forms of synchronization. However, the
actual screening of a film often led to unexpected results that disrupted
a uniform experience because of differences in the theaters and in the
skills of projectionists and phonograph operators. Despite the rhetoric
318 I about the appeal of a reproduction of the original sound of a song, the lis-
teners' lived experiences of the song in different media and contexts ren-
der the notion of origin evasive; the contexts of the performance were
constantly fractured and multiplied. In fact, Jin Shan, who played the
phantom singer in Song at Midnight, lip-synched the songs to the famous
singer-composer Shen Jialun's recorded voice. Both Mei Lanfang and
Shen Jialun are thus the phantom origins of the singing roles on the
screen at the beginning and the end of the transition to sound, respec-
tively. In Shen's case, because the plot explicitly revolves around the re-
production of voice and identity in a haunted theater, the ambiguity in
the relationship between the original and the copied voice is doubly
played out on and off the screen.
The ambivalence toward the legitimacy of the singer as an authority
of knowledge makes the film an exemplary case for reflecting on the
complexity of film history at the closing of the silent period and the
golden age. The eponymous theme song of the film, with lyrics by
the left-wing playwright and poet Tian Han and music by Xian Xinghai
stems from the complex genealogy of the production and consumption
of early sound film generally and the theme song specifically outlined so
far. In the early partial-sound films, the presence of the singer as the em-
bodiment of the new dominant was always foregrounded, both techni-
cally and diegetically; it was even more so when mismatching resulted in
an unintended separation of the body from its sound space. The figure of
Song at Midnight
the singer and the importance of the theme song in Sona at Midnight,
however, assert their force through a deliberate mechanism of invisibil-
ity and the elusive movement of the grotesque ventriloquist. The theme
song seems more internalized by the diegesis or serves as an active nar-
rative vehicle, while the singing subject becomes radically disembodied-
by the disfigurement and his ghostly presence in the theater's attic. How-
ever, this narrative internalization of the singing coinciding with the
phantom's self-imposed internment in an abandoned theater is by no
means seamless. The interplay between the shadow and the body, be-
tween the onstage and backstage singing, between the image track and
the sound track, and between the past and the present yields a surplus of
meaning that demands careful disentanglement.
ACOUSTIC HORROR IN SONG AT MIDNIGHT
Song at Midnight is a film about the life of a theater-how it was resur-

rected only to become the stage of turmoil and violence once again. The
screenwriter cum director Ma-Xu Weibang, songwriter Tian Han, and the
main actors all came from theater backgrounds. The plot was also in it-
self a self-referential tale about a troupe encountering the haunting spirit
of an early theater practice in the aftermath of the Republican revolution I 319
in the 191 Os. The theater as a dramatic form here is neither traditional
Chinese opera nor the spoken drama, but a sinicized version of the West-
ern opera. The choice of this theatrical form is significant. The spoken
drama, a favored art form among the students and the urban petty bour-
geoisie at large, would have been a natural model for the sound film.
Instead it was based on a combination of the traditional opera and the
modern "song and dance" revue theater (gewu ju) that supplied ready-
made resources for the early sound experiments. 42 Musical numbers aug-
mented cinema's appeal without having to be rigorously incorporated
into the diegesis of a film. The sonic boom, at least at the initial stage, pro-
vided the occasion for the amplification and reordering of sensory stim-
ulation rather than narrative enhancement.
The shifts between the tableau presentation of theatrical singing and
the cinematic mode of backstage romance requiring more sophisticated
camera work and editing also created a new space for gender perfor-
mance. This space, as configured through the various early attempts to
insert traditional or modern opera singing into the narrative space of the
silent film is inherently heterotopic and shifting. In this cinematically
constructed "singing field," the boundary between various kinds of dra-
matic theater and the movie theater gets blurred. It was a space of con-
fusion as well as innovation. Although the advent of sound was initially
regarded by some filmmakers and critics as a regressive turn back to
Chapter Eight
when the cinema and drama cross-fertilized, the return to theater proved
to be a dynamic event.
In this sense, the trope of the face so crucial to the horror effect of the
film may be viewed in tandem with the use and abuse of face and surface
in the fictional and real drama alike. The interplay between the onstage
performance and the backstage drama is paralleled by the interplay be-
tween the outside (the theater front) and the inside (the auditorium).
The tension between the theatrical convention and filmic impulse, be-
tween the "cinema of attractions" and "cinema of narrative integration"
is replayed here in a sound film made a't the end of the silent period. In
Song at Midnight the insertion of sound, the singing voice in particular,
demanded a new way of organizing narrative space. The troubled sound
space in the film, evolving around the voice of the phantom singer, is
thus also the space in which the dramatic tension between face and voice,
surface and depth gets articulated. Because the grotesque face and the
disembodied voice form a symbiotic existence, and constitute the main
attraction and narrative nexus of the film, it is imperative to consider the
meaning of defacing in relation to the problem of voicing. The grotesque
face, which mirrors the gothic architecture of the theater, serves both a
living synecdoche of the physical setting and a key element of the mise-
320 I en-scene in the film.
Song at Midnight consistently invokes the aesthetic of shadowp!ay
characteristic of both early Chinese silent film and German expressionist
cinema. Indeed, the entire film, shrouded in the nocturnal Stimmung
(mood) created by shadows and veiled lighting, 43 pays stylistic tribute to
silent cinema. Song at Midnight begins with a few beams of light burst-
ing through leaden clouds while the camera draws us closer to a deso-
late theater. Accompanied by eerie music, the camera focuses on an an-
nouncement in front of the theater, inviting developers to demolish the
theater and build modern housing on the site (fig. 8.7). The announce-
ment is dated August 1926. In the ensuing silence, the camera pans
slowly around the ruined walls as if caressing a disfigured face and grad-
ually penetrates the building and the basement. An old hand with long
nails suddenly appears in the frame, holding an oil lamp. A huge shadow
is cast on the wall (fig. 8.8). In low-key lighting. the hunchbacked jani-
tor with long, disheveled hair is finally discerned in close-up. He opens a
letter and reads it slowly. The letter brings the news that the Angel troupe
is coming to stage a last performance in the theater. A gust of wind in-
terrupts him; withered leaves flutter on the ground. The camera then
cuts back to the facade of the theater looming in darkness, followed by a
shot of the interior of the tower covered with spider webs. A giant
shadow of a human figure in a long cape is projected on the wall.
The songs in the film ("Hot Blood" [Rexue] and "The Love of the Yel-
Song at Midnight
8.7 The theater is to be demolished . .. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
1 321
low River" [Huanghe zhi lian]) are themes of both the film and plays the
within the film-occupy much of the diegetic space. Their presence,
however, is predicated on the interplay, or shadow~play, between the dis-
embodiment and embodiment of the phantom who inhabits the theater.
The onstage singing is constantly disrupted or interjected by a voice aris-
Chapter Eight
ing from behind the stage. The sound track at times takes on a life of its
own and produces the effect of musical accompaniment. The disjunction
between the voice and its bodily origin, between the shadow and its sub-
stantive source is at the center of the unsettling relation between the the-
atrical and the cinematic, the silent and sound components in the film.
The director Ma-Xu Weibang started his career in the Shanghai film
industry during the heyday of the silent period and over time became
known for his indulgence in the strange and the esoteric (fig. 8.9).
Trained as a painter, he taught at the Shanghai Fine Arts Academy. He
joined Mingxing in 1924 as an actor and ai't designer. Besides designing
title cards and sets, he played several secondary roles and quickly rose to
the rank of assistant director, working side by side with Zheng Zhengqiu.
After leaving Mingxing, he became involved in small companies that al-
lowed him more directorial control.
The figure of the stranger and motifs of a deserted place and the noc-
turnal recur in his work. With The Stranger on the Love Scene (Qin9cha119
guairen, Langhua, 1926 ), Ma-Xu made his debut as a screenwriter and di-
rector. Although the film is not extant, a Langhua tekan (special issue) on
322 1
8. 9 Song 111 Midnight;s ··

director Maxu Weibang.
(Special issue on QingcJumg
911airen)
Song at Midnight
8.1 0 The Stranger on the

Love Scene ( 1926). (Special
issue on Qin9chan9 guairen)
the film, which contains dozens of still photos, a synopsis, and a script for I 323
the intertitles, provides a comprehensive view of it. 44 The most striking
feature, relevant to my analysis of Song at Midnight, is the figure of the
stranger (guairen) and his narrative function (fig. 8.10). Iconographically,
the strangeness of the man is marked by his physiognomic and sartorial
oddity, constituted through makeup or masquerade. An old man with a
long white beard, he wears an eye patch. He wears a top hat and carries
a stick, and his menacing figure is wrapped in a long, black cape-a cos-
tume associated with strange or uncanny characters in Weimar cinema
(e.g., Student of Prague, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu) and the Amer-
ican horror film, in particular, The Phantom of the Opera. In the film, the
stranger turns out to be a servant who tries to help his master and other
young people in obtaining their love. Interestingly, Ma-Xu chose to play
the stranger himself. Among other knightly deeds, the disguised match-
maker ghostwrites love letters and comes to the lovers' rescue in mo-
ments of danger. He usually contrives a pretext to leave his master's
house in the evening to carry out his missions under the cover of dark-
ness. In the end, after many twists and turns, the lovers are reunited and
the stranger's identity is revealed.
The strange and its enabling of romance proved to be Ma-Xu's endur-
ing passion. In the heyday of martial arts-magic spirit craze, he directed
and starred in The Stranger of Dark Night (Heiye guairen, 1928) and The
Chapter Eight
Stran9e Knight-Errant in the Deserted Pa9oda (fluan9ta qixia, 1929), both for
the Jinlong Company. In The Cry of the Apes in a Deserted Valley (Kon99u
yuansheng, 1930), a bizarre film about the abductions of young virgins
by men dressed in ape skins, Ma-Xu continued his exploration of the
strange in the liminal overlap between mystery and horror. His fascina~
tion with the deceptiveness of surface was further played out in the con-
trast between the ape-skin costume and Western suits worn by the men.
The violence toward women by modern scientific men and the shock ef-
fect it produced constitute the basic theme of this incipient horror film.
The moment of truth arrives when thef men are stripped of their hairy
ape-skin body suits. Again, Ma-Xu himself played the role of the "mys-
terious guest"-the modern knight-errant in a dark hooded cape who
comes and goes without leaving a trace. Very similar to the stranger
in The Stran9er on the Love Scene, he looms surreptitiously on the edge of
the main action yet functions as an active agent propelling narrative
progression.
The figure of the strange is inseparable from his ambiguous identity
and shifting movement in space. His double role as both an insider and
outsider endows him with the mysterious power to intervene at crucial
moments. However, this power is predicated on masquerade and invisi-
324 I bility; the stylistic articulation of which often takes on the form of shad-
owplay. In The Cry of the Apes, the audience is alerted to the presence of
the "mysterious guest" by the unwitting projection of his shadow on a
windowpane. The movement of the shadow not only announces his elu-
sive existence, but also comments on the instability of the narrative
space, as the truth keeps receding from the spectator's view: seeing is not
believing.
Shadowplay and its power to induce terror and suspense became
more complicated in Son9 at Midnight because of the incorporation of
sound. Significantly, on the three occasions in the film when the theme
song is heard, the phantom singer Song Danping never physically appears.
In fact, in bis first appearance the phantom singer is a combination of his
shadow on the wall and his disembodied singing voice. The song is heard
amid a group of shots of the deserted theater and the sound of rain, wind,
and the bamboo dock used by the night watchman. 45 The voice, ema-
nating from the giant shadow on the wall, generates deep echoes in the
theater. As the singing flows, the scene cuts to an equally desolate house
across the street and then to its balcony where a white-clad woman
emerges and listens intently (fig. 8.11). We realize that the song is ad-
dressed to her (because of the direct address "O, my girl" in the lyrics).
Her vacuous eyes and long, disheveled hair, clue us into her madness.
The gothic ambiance is accentuated by the presence of her companion, a
Song at Midnight
8.11 Li Xiaoxia with the wet nurse. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
hunchbacked old woman servant (her wet nurse) holding a flickering

candle. 46 As the story unfolds, we learn that the deranged woman is Li I 325
Xiaoxia, Song Danping's beloved from a decade ago.
It was in this very theater they fell in love-he was the actor on the
stage and she was the spectator in the balcony reserved for local notables.
The face-to-face encounter and eye contact in the space of the live the-
ater proved too dangerous in a society that still classed actors with pros-
titutes. A liaison between a landlord's daughter and an actor could not be
tolerated, let alone consummated. Her rich father denied them permis-
sion to marry, and a local tyrant who desired Li Xiaoxia had Song beaten
and disfigured with nitric acid (fig. 8.12). The attack ended Song's acting
career as well as the romance, for he would not let Li see his scarred face.
This dramatic turn of events caused Li to have a nervous breakdown. In-
stead of abandoning Li altogether, Song takes up residence in the attic of
the deserted theater; from there he glimpses Li in her house across the
street. Every night he sings "Song at Midnight" to console her. His disap-
pearance is thus compensated by his voice, which fills the theater every
night. Even as his body is reduced to a shadow, his voice is given spatial
depth and volume.
The past persists through Song's nightly singing, which is charged
with repressed desire. Although Li Xiaoxia is the intended listener, she
cannot determine the real source of the voice and the true identity of the
singer because of her insanity. The singing thus hovers in the border
Chapter Eight
8.12 Song Danping in the torture d1amber. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
space between the diegetic and nondiegetic, as exemplified in the three

326 I instances when the theme song is heard in the film. Sung in its entirety
at the beginning of the film, the lyrics of the song encapsulates the noc-
turnal Stimmung of the mise-en-scene while offering a poetic summary of
the plot:
Fireflies fly in the sky,

Foxes and rats walk on the high platform;
A human figure accompanies a lonesome lamp,
There is the third sounding from the night-watch man.
The wind blows sadly, the rain pours,
Flower petals drop randomly, leaves are fallen;
In this pervasive dark night,
Who is awaiting the daybreak with me? 47
The singer describes his "form" as being as "hideous as a ghost" but vows
to fight against the "feudal devil" to his "last breadth." The singer's exis-
tence is signaled by the shadow on the wall. The image track shows close-
ups of Li's expressionless face and her hunchback wet nurse, juxtaposed
with montage shots of lyrical imagery of the images mentioned in the
lyrics. 46
The second time, only the middle stanza is sung by Sun Xiao'ou, a
handsome young actor of the Angel troupe. After Sun traces the singing
Song at Midnight
8.13 Following the singing. Sun Xiaoou finds the phantom singer in the· attic. (Courtesy of
the China Film Archive}
I 321
voice to the attic, Song tells him the tragic story and asks Sun to disguise
himself as the youthful Song (fig. 8.13). Song directs Sun's view to the
balcony across the street and says, "Look! She is still there waiting for
me." Next, we see Li in a long shot walking in the woods toward the
source of the singing, which turns out to be Sun rather than Song. In the
woods shrouded in milky misty lighting, Li and Sun "reenact" the scene
in which Li and Song had their first tryst ten years earlier. The pattern of
repetition is unmistakable. Sun becomes Song's double or the embodi-
ment of the shadow. When day is about to break, Sun vanishes from the
scene just as a ghost or a vampire who cannot be exposed to daylight.
The song's last occurrence comes at the end of the film, after Song has
revealed his identity and his grotesque face to the man who destroyed his
love. At this point in the story, the tyrant is now about to violate Sun's
girlfriend Li.idie while Sun performs onstage. After the tyrant falls out of
a window and dies on the street in front of the theater, Song, like a deus
ex machina, descends to the stage on a rope suspended from the ceiling.
Song's unexpected reappearance creates a great commotion in the the-
ater. The audience, which turns into a frenzied mob, chases him to a des-
olate tower in the woods and sets fire to it, as in a ghost exorcism. In the
end, Song's burning body falls into the river, vanishing from the human
world altogether. His fall is illustrated by loud sound effects; the vibrating
Chapter Eight
sound waves echo the wild torrents. As Song's body is swallowed by the
waves, his last stanza of the theme song is drowned out-staged against
a sublime landscape filled with romantic pathos of Sturm and Drung (a
raging river, a heavy, leaden sky, and the dark earth). The rapid zoom-
out image track shows Sun and Li in a reincarnation of an earlier ro-
mantic passion, standing on a cliff before a st.:1.gy backdrop of a dawri sky.
In outlining the disembodied occurrences of the theme song in Song at
Midnight, my intention is to show that it serves as a metadiegetic vehicle
that at once functions as the dominant and eludes the confines of the
narrative space superimposed on the haunted theater. The etymology of
diegesis (narration) in Greek, as Michel de Certeau has shown, is rooted
in "itinerary," that which "guides" and "transgresses." It is made of move-
ments, "concerning the deformation of figures." Its operation transforms
static places (such as a tomb) into dynamic space with "transportable lim-
its."49 Unlike the film's other two songs embedded within plays, "Song at
Midnight" is a metatheme of the film as a play and the play as a film. It
animates a gravelike place and transforms it into a lived space for per-
sonal and collective drama. Hovering always at a remove from the image
track yet framing the film as a whole, the song exceeds the diegetic ab-
sorption of a single plot and becomes the nodal point of multiple narra-
328 I tives (both theatrical and filmic) and temporalities. The shadow as the
voice's carrier shifts constantly in and out of the body, as well as on- and
off-stage. In other words, the voice is the timeless "spirit," indeed a reve-
nant, who inhabits and enlivens the deserted theater, linking the past
and the present. The sublime power of the voice is predicated on the
body's invisibility; when the grotesque body actually emerges onto the
stage and exposes the disfigured face as a material evidence of a histori-
cal trauma, it quickly meets its ultimate destruction.
PERMUTATIONS OF THE GROTESQUE FACE
Among all the thematic and stylistic similarities, the grotesque face in
both the American The Phantom of the Opera and the Chinese Song at Mid-
night films serves as the material token of trauma and a metaphor (in its
etymological sense of "vehicle") for horror. The grotesque face of Lon
Chaney's phantom made The Phantom of the Opera so hair-raising and sen-
sational. Holding a skull in his hand, a stagehand describes the phantom's
face as a "leperous parchment" without a nose but with truncated eye
sockets ("holes") filled with dull-colored beads. The havoc that the phan-
tom wreaks upon the opera house makes headlines in the Parisian news·
papers. Similarly, Song Danping's disfigured face in Song at Midnight is the
pivotal point of a multilayered social drama.
Song at Midnight
The revelation of the grotesque face in both films announces not only
the surfacing of truth but also a crucial narrative transition, when the on-
stage drama and backstage romance intertwine. The phantom steps out
of the shadows and thereby realigns the voice and its bodily source-
with dire consequences. Early in The Phantom of the Opera, Erik an-
nounces to Christine that he is the one who "imparted the full measure''
of opera to her through his coaching behind the wall. "Soon this voice
will take form" to "command" her love. After he exposes his face, which
causes her to faint, Christine also physically disappears from the stage.
The film increasingly gravitates toward the backstage; depth and interi-
ority begin to replace, or overshadow, surface and frontality.
A similar pattern occurs in Song at Midnight. Song Danping's grotesque
face appears for the first time when Sun traces the voice. Instead of re-
vealing his face, which is veiled under a black cloth, Song shows the
young man two photographs of his youthful face from ten years ago. The
ensuing flashback (absent in the Hollywood version) quite literally un-
ravels the events leading to the disfigurement. In a long take, the gauze
that wrapped Song's injured head is unwound layer after layer, "an act
resembling the shedding of a cocoon, stressing his metamorphosis." 50
The still-blood stained face with swollen cicatrices frightens the people in
the room as well as Song himself. He walks to the mirror, shouting "Nor I 329
No!" By revealing his face and the historical truth beneath it to Sun,
Song's voice reunites with his body. This reunion is in part vicariously
carried out by the young singer, whose visage and voice resemble Song's.
Through this doppelganger, Song meets his deranged lover "in person"
for the first time in a decade.
Wolfgang Kayser's definition of the grotesque is relevant here: the gro-
tesque signifies the "fusion of realms which we know to be separated, the
abolition of the law of statics, the loss of identity, the distortion of 'natu-
ral' size and shape, the suspension of the categories of objects, the de-
struction of personality, and the fragmentation of the historical order." 51
The prominence of the grotesque face highlights the role that makeup,
and its ability to distort n•natural' size and shape" play in horror. It is per-
haps not surprising that Ma-Xu Weibang was often compared to Lon
Chaney. His passion for grotesque makeup and roles (as in The Stranger on
the Love Scene) won him the title of the "oriental Lon Chaney." Chaney
was known to the Chinese audience as the "man with a thousand faces"
(qianmianlang). 52 The ability to transform one face into a "thousand"
other faces is not simply a marker of an actor's flexibility; it underscores
a conception of the face as a locus for multilayered and fluctuating mean-
ing beyond "face" value. As a surface given to endless deformation and
transformation, the grotesque face is also isomorphic to the chameleon-
Chapter Eight
like film screen, which is open to all possible experience, including the
most inchoate and unspeakable.
The mirror, an important tool for make-up, finds its proper place in a
film about a phantom singer and his grotesquely made-up face, and his
double. The mirror was deployed as one of the key mise-en-scene ele-
ments in Weimar cinema, beginning with Student of Prague, in which the
mirror ceases to yield the student's reflection after he has sold his soul to
the devil. The mirror serves not only as the means through which the
grotesque face is revealed, but also the space where the ambiguous rela-
tionship between surface and depth, the ortginal and the copy, manifests
itself. Christine has to pass a mirror-door to enter the subterranean world
of the phantom, whereas Song encounters his own deformed face in the
mirror after the gauze is stripped away. The moment Song breaks the
mirror is the moment when he declares his "death" and never appears on
the stage again.
Rather than fashioning a mirror image of the Hollywood model, Song
at Midnight disfigures the original in many respects. This disfigurement
lies in a different articulation of the theater space and gender relations. In
terms of the spatial mise-en-scene, Song at Midnight turns The Phantom of
the Opera, quite literally, upside down. Instead of taking up residence in
330 I the mystic subterranean chamber, separated by the mirror door and lab-
yrinthine passages that form the nether world of horror, Song lives on
top of the theater-like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, which allows
him to linger in the human world and even to command an advanta-
geous point-of-view. He can see his beloved nightly through the window
and communicates with her by singing. The theater space in Song at Mid-
night is significantly simplified yet highly stylized. Moreover, the number
of characters and the size of the "audience" are also smaller, further ac-
centuating the stagy, expressionist look of the film.
Ma-Xu's aesthetic investment in the grotesque face was by no means
peculiar to him, although he was the one who perfected the horror genre
in China's prewar film industry. The fascination with the grotesque face
and the technique of facial makeup in the silent period peaked in the
martial arts-magic spirit film. This was in part because the genre's fan-
tastic tales demanded a more sophisticated use of makeup to present the
ghosts, spirits, and demons that populate these films. Film magazines at
the time carried numerous articles conceptualizing their importance or
introducing practical techniques of screen makeup. Hu Zhongbiao's "A
Study on the Makeup of Demons and Devils," for instance, offers a
lengthy deliberation on the aesthetic significance of "demons and devils"
in providing "spice" to stimulate the audience's "appetite." The author
also comments on differences in iconographical features of the other-
Song at Midnight
worldly creatures between the East and the West due to disparate reli-
gious backgrounds. The Western devil often has horns or a tail, whereas
the Chinese counterpart tends to have a protruding growth on top of the
head or long hair-tufts on the sides of the face. Hu offers detailed de-
scription of specific techniques of makeup, emphasizing the materiality
of the process, which involves the use of "makeup items" Uiazhuangpin}
or masks. Hu boldly predicts that a particular genre of "demon and devil"
film will become a lasting "spice" in the world of cinema. 53 Foreground-
ing the grotesque (male) face as a marker of artistry presented an impor-
tant challenge to a star culture in the early 1930s, when male dandies'
smooth pale faces dominated the film screens.
Against the background of the national crisis, the grotesque faces in
some films appear visibly invested with political meaning. In Hearts
United in Life and Death (Shengsi tonsxin, Mingxing, 1936), a left-wing
sound film scripted by Yang Hansheng and directed by Ying Yunwei
( I 904-67), 54 the grotesque face plays a pivotal role. Despite its overt po-
litical message and realist mode of narration, the film contains many
stock images of horror. Elements that later appeared in Sons at Midnight
include rats and snakes in a nightmarish scene, mirrors and photographic
effects to introduce the grotesque character,5 5 and, of course, visual play
with shadows. The film, like Sons at Midnight. is set in the period of the ! 331
Northern Expedition (Beifa, 1925-27). A captured revolutionary (Yuan
Muzhi) escapes from prison, and a young man (also played by Yuan) re-
turning from Nanyang is arrested because he looks identical to the revo-
lutionary. The revolutionary, whose face is scarred in a fire during escape,
returns to the city and meets the innocent young man's fiancee. Out of
guilt and sympathy, the revolutionary secretly leaves a sack of rice in
front of her door, recalling the figure of the knightly stranger in the late
silent film. Over time, the fiancee's political consciousness awakens un-
der the revolutionary's influence. At the end of the film, the revolution-
ary dies in a battle to free the prisoners. In his footsteps. the couple joins
the Northern Expedition army, marching to the front. In a striking end-
ing, the dead revolutionary seems resurrected; his larger-than-life
ghostly image is superimposed over the marching army. This image is
matched by the collective singing of the theme song, "The March of the
New China," on the sound track.
The permutations of the grotesque face and the figure of the double
in these films, Chinese or Western, weave together an intertextual ma-
trix from which Sons at Midnisht is derived and which it updates. This
chain of influence or confluence attests to the horror genre's interna-
tional appeal. which, as Carol Clover argues, is germane to the unique-
ness of the cinema in the production of sensation, or a certain ,,cinefan-
Chapter Eight
tastic." Focusing on its structural proximity to folklore or oral narrative,

Clover explicates why "cinematic conventions of horror are so easily and
so often parodied":
The free exchange of themes and motifs, the archetypal characters

and situations, the accumulation of sequels, remakes, imitations.
This is a field in which there is in some sense no original, no real
or right text, but only variants; a world in which, therefore, the
meaning of the individual example lies outside itself. The "art" of
the horror film, like the "art" of por,nography, is to a very large ex-
tent the art of rendition, and it is understood as such by [a) com-
petent audience. A particular example may have original features,
but its quality as a horror film lies in the way it delivers the cliche. 56
The incipient Chinese horror film, which Ma-Xu helped to consolidate,

constitutes one of the cinematic folktale genres that thrive on seriality,
variation, and transnational appeal, in a way similar to the martial arts-
magic spirit film. Song at Midnight was addressed to a knowing audience
with prior exposure to the genre in its various incarnations, which was
nonetheless inclined to be shocked by the unique, locally colored ways in
332 j which the Ncliche" was delivered.
One key aspect through which Song at Midnight alters the archetypal
tale and the grotesque face of The Phantom of the Opera and other Chinese
predecessors is the change in gender. The singer, both onstage and back-
stage, becomes exclusively male, while the singing girl is split in two: the
female spectator Li Xiaoxia and the young male actor Sun Xiao'ou. This
change is thought-provoking, not the least because the deprivation of
the female voice acquires a new expression. Song Danping is not just a
singer; he is the author of the songs and the plays staged within the film.
The voice of the singing girl in early sound films served as a symbol for
sound technology, and it was through her voice that she was presented
as object of desire. By the time of Song at Midnight, the sound film l_lad
passed that early stage romancing with the new medium. It was as if once
experimentation lost its novelty, the female voice lost its function as a ve-
hicle, bringing the actual behind-the-scenes songwriter to the fore to
sing his own music.
What remains troubling, however, is how the male singer represses or
defers his sexual desire and political commitment, which are perceived as
threatening to the social order. The hero's disfigurement is the price for
crossing several boundaries, between classes, writing and voice, art and
politics. Unlike the rich, handsome urbane writers who court poor sing-
ing girls in a number of early sound films, the male singer here comes
Song at Midnight
from a lower class. He is labeled a "plaything" (xizi), a derogatory term

traditionally reserved for actors, who sold their art if not their bodies.
Disfigurement did more than deprive Song Danping of his living as an ac-
tor; it also effectively dehumanized him. The nitric acid .literally
"branded" him as a "wild animal" (yeshou). After meeting his grotesque
face in the mirror, he asks the servant to tell Li that he is from now on
"dead"-"a ghost. a wild animal."
This deformation of a handsome face to a grotesque one is central to
the production of terror as "the ruling principle of the sublime. n Edmund
Burke in his post-Enlightenment aesthetic theory opposed the beautiful
to the sublime. As James Donald observes, Burke's theory of the sublime
is at the outset akin to Freud's notion of the "uncanny" and Todorov's po-
etics of the "fantastic." Burke locates, however, the source of terror in the
readily visible physiological form and immensity of nature rather than in
the illusive or abstract boundaries between the real and unreal. subject
and object, time and space: "He [Burke] invokes stormy oceans, wild
cataracts, dark towers and demons to convey the forces that overwhelm
human reason and imagination and produce a response of awe and ter-
ror: his sublime involves powerful emotions ultimately reducible to vis-
ceral processes of pleasure and pain." 57 In light of this physiological and
somatic reading of the sublime, it is possible to see the grotesque face as I 333
a "visceral" form of horror resulting from the collapsed boundary be-
tween culture and nature in modern consciousness. And this collapse is
borne out in the transformation o.f a physical theater, which, throughout
the film, undergoes animistic metamorphoses from a desolate castle to an
urban gathering place, and then to a house of violence once again in the
end. The theater as the "home" of the uncanny (unheimlich) is extended
to an awe-inspiring landscape montage (both visual and auditory) of the
jungle, torrential river, thunder and wind. For Burke, the sublime as an
emergent aesthetic category stood for a certain masculine sensibility in a
post-Enlightenment Europe. The transfiguration of the "beautiful" into
the grotesque face in Song at Midnight, set in the disenchanted post-May
Fourth period, may be seen as the moment instantiating the disfigured
male singer as a new aesthetic and political subject. Song Danping's
"beautiful" voice is superimposed on, or indeed "sublimated" in, the
mise-en-scene of horror. His identity as a talented actor and romantic
revolutionary is fractured by the disfigurement and his subsequent "bur-
ial" inside the theater living among snakes and spiders, whereas the the-
ater appears as a castle situated in an awe-inspiring landscape.
The sublimation of masculine desire and gender reconfiguration in the
film, however, demands further explanation in another direction, which
concerns the question of spectatorship. The change of the social roles be-
Chapter Eight
tween the romantic couple directs our attention to the image of the fe-
male spectator. Before her nervous breakdown, Li Xiaoxia used to oc-
cupy the balcony with her family. As a daughter in a gentry family who
enjoys going to the theater, hers is a typical image of the female specta-
tor who patronized teahouses or theater houses, and the movie theaters.
Romance between male actors and female spectators was a recurring
phenomenon that frequently scandalized the public. Before the tragedy,
we see her watching Song's performance through her binoculars. Her
amorous gaze is met by Song's eyes. The mise-en-scene and framing em-
phasize the act of looking and the erotic/nature of the theater as a public
space where different sexes and classes intermingle. The love between Li
and Song ends in personal catastrophe for both and results in the desola -
tion of the theater for a decade. Significantly, Li's active spectatorship is
replaced by her dedicated listening after Song's disfigurement. But iso-
lated and deranged, she listens from a distance to a disembodied voice.
This transformation encapsulates the industry's painstaking transition
to synchronized total sound cinema. Spatially, this transposition is artic-
ulated through the move from the balcony in the theater to the balcony
of Li's house; the pleasure of looking does not so much give way as to en-
hance the thrill of listening. As the theater becomes a grave for the de-
334 I faced hero, Li's palatial home is turned into a madhouse. At the end of
the film, she is released from her disoriented state, when she suddenly
awakens to the sound of the theme song. But this can only happen after
the audience turns into a mob, whose torching of the deserted tower in
the woods forces Song to jump into the river. The last sounds in Song at
Midnight no longer issue from Song's shadow or that of his double Sun
Xiao'ou but from an unidentifiable off-screen source. The aural sublima-
tion is now complete.
THE PHANTOM SINGER AS THE "RECORDER OF HISTORY"

The interplay between shadow and body, voice and face, in Song at M(d-
night is staged on the ruins of history as well as a theater. The phantom
figure's historical dimensions are strikingly concrete: as a reminder of the
Republican revolution in the early 191 Os and as an icon for the Northern
Expedition that ended the warlord period. The film itself was made an-
other decade later, in the midst of the movement for "national salvation."
There is an invisible sliding in periodization here. It was fairly common
for 1930s films to use the warlord period as a historical space character-
ized by a perpetual sense of crisis, allegorically projected onto the con-
temporary national emergency. This temporal indeterminacy, I believe, is
deliberate, since it allows the convergence and collision of distinctive his-
torical experience.
Song at Midnight
The film may thus be viewed in a larger historical frame.The first ap-
pearance of the theme song foreshadows the persistence of history and
its haunting spirit. The second stanza of the theme song contains these
ambiguous lines:
... I want to be forever the one buried in the grave

Buried together with my original name in the world
I want to be the recorder of history who survived the punishment
[xingyu shichen]
Who wrote exhaustively about injustice in the human world.
The allusion to the "recorder of history" is crucial for understanding the

song as a hermeneutic key to the film as a whole. The historical figure in-
voked here is no doubt Sima Qian of the Western Han dynasty, the first
historiographer in Chinese (written) history. His status as a tragic icon of
historical truth is commonly linked to castration, the punishment he re-
ceived from the Emperor Wu, who resented his defense of a Han gen-
eral's surrender to the Xiongnu "barbarians." After his release from
prison, Sima Qian devoted himself to completing his historiographic
project. 58 The archaic Chinese term for castration is "punishing by corro-
sion" (fuxin9), which echoes the corrosive disfigurement by nitric acid I 335
that befalls Song Danping. 59 In drawing a parallel between the castration
of the "recorder of history" and his own mutilation, which in effect im-
paired his masculinity, the phantom singer equates their deformities.
Sima Qian's imprisonment is thus projected onto Song's voluntary exile
in the deserted theater, the torture chamber of his soul.
Even more intriguing is the elusive allusion to his "original" name,
that is, his former self. When the young singer Sun Xiao'ou traces the
phantom voice to the attic Song reveals himself to be the famous revolu-
tionary actor Jin Zhijian. The literal meaning of the name, Has hard (or
enduring) as gold," obviously stands for both his revolutionary zeal and
his romantic devotion. The semantic richness of gold is given a specific
historicity when Song Danping tells the younger actor that his original
self, in the photograph taken in 1913, used to be a leader of the student
movement when he was at his "golden age" (huangjin shidai). But the
revolution was soon aborted, and he had to go underground by joining
the Qiuliu troupe under the pseudonym Song Danping, the stage name
under which he became famous. In the second photograph he presents,
he no longer appears as the student leader in his school uniform but as
an actor in a hooded cape.
The phantom singer's self-portrayal as a modem "recorder of history"
is enhanced by further evidence of historical sedimentation. If his evoca-
tion of the ancient historiographer seems a bit far-fetched, the allusion to
Chapter Eight
the catalytic change in politics and culture in the 191 Os endows the film
with historical immediacy. The troupe that Jin Zhijian (the youthful
Song) joined and used as a refuge is named Qiuliu (autumn willow). The
abortion of the Republican revolution in the early 1910s saw the dissolu-
tion of many New Drama troupes that had played a key role in dissemi-
nating ideas about democracy, republicanism, and modernity. One of the
most important troupes of that period was Chunliu (spring willow). The
troupe had been founded by a group of Chinese students in Japan in
1907.60 On the eve of the revolution, several important Chunliu mem-
bers returned to China, using drama as a n,a:eans of political mobilization
as well as popular entertainment.61 After Yuan Shikai (1859-1916) be-
trayed the Republic and enthroned himself as the emperor. his regime
suppressed the New Drama movement, which at that time had become
synonymous with revolution. Song Danping's exile in the gravelike the-
ater is thus metaphoric of the New Drama movement that died out or
went underground.
The connection between Chunliu and Qiuliu is made more explicit
when Song Danping presents Sun Xiao'ou with the play Hot Blood
(Rexue), which he had written a decade earlier and revised during his ex-
ile in the theater (fig. 8.14). One of the plays that the Chunliu troupe
336 I staged in Japan was also called Hot Blood (a.k.a. Hot Tears). At this second
moment of revelation, Song identifies himself as a writer and aligns him-
self more closely with the ancient historian. The play performed by
Chunliu and "authored" by Song Danping was an adaptation of a French
play inspired by the French Revolution. 62 By handing down a script of
Chinese and Western theatrical and revolutionary heritage, Song Dan-
ping's gesture also suggests the complex nature of the transmission of
culture and history. This gesture extends a metacommentary on the pro-
duction of Song at Midnight, derived from international sources. The play
has to be revised and restaged at different points of history because the
personal and collective experiences that underscore its popularity have
been restructured. The revised play is presented to the Angel troupe as a .
gift; its contemporary relevance will attract an audience back t9 the de-
serted theater before its demolition.
The motif of generational shift and heritage can be probed further in
relation both to film history and to another strand of the New Drama and
its representative figure, Zheng Zhengqiu. In the history of modern Chi-
nese drama, Chunliu represents the "foreign" side of the New Drama by
virtue of its origin outside China and its adherence to formal unity and
the use of standard Mandarin; it is the progenitor of the Western style
huaju, or spoken drama. Zheng Zhenqiu is, on the other hand, often as-
sociated with the "native" strand of the New Drama that stemmed from
Song at Midnight
8.14 Song Danping acting in rhe play Hot Blood. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)
student theater activities in missionary schools in urban China and

evolved into a more hybrid form. This native form of the New Drama lib- I 337
erally combines elements from Western spoken drama, the Japanese
new-style drama, and traditional Chinese theater. It is, on the whole,
more improvisational and entertaining. Comic interludes and im-
promptu speeches are common, and there is little inhibition against us-
ing local dialects during performance. Works in this style came to be
called civilized plays for their advocacy of modern values and lifestyle
while paying due respect to everyday reality.
Zheng Zhengqiu came to the fore of the theater world first through his
review column in the progressive newspaper Min Ii bao, and subsequently
through his acting, script writing, and directing. Although most prerev-
olutionary theater groups disbanded under either political or financial
pressures, Zheng's Xinmin troupe, which was associated with the Asia
Company and instrumental in making A Difficult Couple, thrived because
its popular plays featured earthy messages rather than outdated revo-
lutionary rhetoric. Zheng's innovative scripts and directing style, plus
his sensitivity to the audience and especially women's taste and ex-
pectations, were largely responsible for the revival of the civilized play.
This was later dubbed the "Jiayin Restoration" (Jiayin zhongxin; the year
1914 was a Jiayin year in the Chinese lunar calendar).6' The revived civ-
ilized play supplied both plot material and human resources to the nas-
cent Chinese filmmaking enterprise. With the founding of Mingxing in
Chapter Eight
I 922, the union between cinema and drama was complete, although
tensions persisted.
Zheng's chief contribution to the New Drama during and after the Ji-
ayin boom can be attributed to his ability to take the audience seriously
in his reform of drama's style and content. This resonates with Song
Danping's timely help to the Angel troupe as he presents them with an
updated version of an old play that might reverse declining audience
numbers and a difficult financial crisis. (The box-office revenues will sus-
tain the troupe for only five more days.) Zheng's phantom presence in
Song at Midnight is perhaps made more relevant by the fact that he had
died shortly before the production of the film, on July 16, 1935, at the
age of forty-six. The passing of one of the most important figures in early
Chinese cinema resulted in a collective mourning throughout the film
world in Shanghai. His death, together with the suicide of female star
Ruan Lingyu and the drowning of the film composer Nie Er in Japan dur-
ing the same year, marked a symbolic ending to the silent period.64
As a sound film that meditates on its symbiotic relation to silent film
and the New Drama, Song at Midnight presents the phantom singer as the
mediator between these different historical periods and aesthetic realms.
The phantom singer's multiple identities represent the formative decades
338 I in the history of modern Chinese drama and cinema. At once dead and
living, he is a witness as well as an agent of a history repressed and
repeated.
EMERGENCY EXPRESSIONS
The contemporary urgency created by the crisis in the North, where the
Japanese army was making a rapid advance toward the interior, is
couched in The Romance of the Yellow River, another play staged within a
film. Tellingly, the advertisement posted in front of the theater calls it a
"new style historical operetta" (xinxing lishigeju). The story, though set in
the Song dynasty under the threat of the Mongols from the North, is an
allegory for the contemporary national crisis. A boy from the south side
of the river is in love with a girl on the north side. The boy crosses the
river to meet his girl. While paddling in the river, he sings:
I'd rather be a fish in the Yellow River

Than a slave without a country
A wangguonu cannot act freely
A fish can still stir the waves
It can topple the Barbarian's ship,
It can stop them crossing the river ...
Song at Midnight
The phrase wangguonu (a slave without a country) was gaining high cur-
rency in the rhetoric of national salvation during this period, The love
story, presented in the broad mythic strokes of a folktale yet clothed as a
Western-style operetta, is an onstage version of the offstage romance be-
tween the phantom singer and his deranged lover, separated by a river as
well as social boundaries. The ancient patriotic fervor is mobilized to give
a historical depth to the anti-Qing Republican revolution and the anti-
Japanese war.
The incorporation of the play further underscores the historiographic
nature of Song at Midnight, which is permeated with a sense of repetition
and emergency. Not only does the film end with the eruption of the
crowd, which echoes similar endings in many "national defense" films
(e.g., Big Road, Children of Troubled Times, Hearts United in Life and Death),
the film as a whole is structured around a series of crises. Tian Hari "ed-
ited" Ma-Xu's script and wrote the lyrics, certainly giving the film a more
progressive discourse. However, the crisis expressed in the film is more
culturally embedded than simply politically informed. It works through
a range of anxieties regarding technology, film history, and multinational
aesthetics. Beyond the multiple layers of history that give the film its se-
mantic richness visceral impact, its formal expression in an aesthetic of
emergency deserves further examination. I 339
Two seemingly unrelated aspects in the film provide some entry
points to this question: the expressionist visual style and Angel troupe's
financial crisis. While the former speaks to an aspiration for making art
cinema, the latter suggests its difficulty in a time of political and eco-
nomic turmoiL Song at Midnight is, in fact, about the life of a theater. Af-
ter the ominous opening, the camera work, lighting, and sets are domi-
nated by an expressionist visual style. The distinctive feature of Weimar
expressionist cinema, generally regarded as the origin of the horror film,
is its antinaturalist narrative pattern and visual style. If dream, fantasy,
and delirium make up the basic narrative language of Weimar cinema,
the exaggerated sets irreverent of perspective and balance constitute the
skewed structure of expressionist mise-en-scene. "By comparison to the
then-established conventions of film imagery," such a space has been
viewed as "a world internally [gone] awry." 6 5
The space in Song at Midnight may also be described in such terms. The
mise-en-scene·s instability embodied by the Gothic theater is caused by
physical and social forces. The camera work helps to construct a nonnat-
uralist space resisting contiguity and symmetry, and the hyperbolic plot
is thus "justified" by an improbable space-the imaginary "theater" that
links the tower where Song sings to the balcony where Li listens. Besides
such spatial distortion, the image track is also replete with shots in
Chapter Eight
the catalytic change in politics and culture in the 191 Os endows the film
with historical immediacy. The troupe that Jin Zhijian (the youthful
Song) joined and used as a refuge is named Qiuliu (autumn willow). The
abortion of the Republican revolution in the early 1910s saw the dissolu-
tion of many New Drama troupes that had played a key role in dissemi-
nating ideas about democracy, republicanism, and modernity. One of the
most important troupes oi' that period was Chunliu (spring willow). The
troupe had been founded by a group of Chinese students in Japan in
1907. 60 On the eve of the revolution, several important Chunliu mem-
bers returned to China, using drama as a I)'leans of political mobilization
as well as popular entertainment. 61 After Yuan Shikai (1859-1916) be-
trayed the Republic and enthroned himself as the emperor, his regime
suppressed the New Drama movement, which at that time had become
synonymous with revolution. Song Danping's exile in the gravelike the-
ater .is thus metaphoric of the New Drama movement that died out or
went underground.
The connection between Chunliu and Qiuliu is made more explicit
when Song Danping presents Sun Xiao'ou with the play Hot Blood
(Rexue), which he had written a decade earlier and revised during his ex-
ile in the theater (fig. 8.14). One of the plays that the Chunliu troupe
336 I staged in Japan was also called Hot Blood (a.k.a. Hot Tears). At this second
moment of revelation. Song identifies himself as a writer and aligns him-
self more closely with the ancient historian. The play performed by
Chunliu and "authored" by Song Danping was an adaptation of a French
play inspired by the French Revolution. 62 By handing down a script of
Chinese and Western theatrical and revolutionary heritage, Song Dan-
ping's gesture also suggests the complex nature of the transmission of
culture and history. This gesture extends a metacommentary on the pro-
duction of Song at Midnight, derived from international sources. The play
has to be revised and restaged at different points of history because the
personal and collective experiences that underscore its popularity have
been restructured. The revised play is presented to the Angel troupe as a .
gift; its contemporary relevance will attract an audience back t9 the de-
serted theater before its demolition.
The motif of generational shift and heritage can be probed further in
relation both to film history and to another strand of the New Drama and
its representative figure, Zheng Zhengqiu. In the history of modem Chi-
nese drama, Chunliu represents the "foreign" side of the New Drama by
virtue of its origin outside China and its adherence to formal unity and
the use of standard Mandarin; it is the progenitor of the Western style
huaju, or spoken drama. Zheng Zhenqiu is, on the other hand, often as-
sociated with the "native" strand of the New Drama that stemmed from
Song at Midnight
8.14 Song Danping acting in the play Hot Blood. (Courtesy or the China Film Archive)
student theater activities in missionary schools in urban China and

evolved into a more hybrid form. This native form of the New Drama lib- I 337
erally combines elements from Western spoken drama, the Japanese
new-style drama, and traditional Chinese theater. It is, on the whole,
more improvisational and entertaining. Comic interludes and im-
promptu speeches are common, and there is little inhibition against us-
ing local dialects during performance. Works in this style came to be
called civilized plays for their advocacy of modern values and lifestyle
while paying due respect to everyday reality.
Zheng Zhengqiu came to the fore of the theater world first through his
review column in the progressive newspaper Min Ii bao, and subsequently
through his acting, script writing, and directing. Although most prerev-
olutionary theater groups disbanded under either political or financial
pressures, Zheng's Xinmin troupe, which was associated with the Asia
Company and instrumental in making A Difficult Couple, thrived because
its popular plays featured earthy messages rather than outdated revo-
lutionary rhetoric. Zheng's innovative scripts and directing style, plus
his sensitivity to the audience and especially women's taste and ex-
pectations, were largely responsible for the revival of the c.ivilized play.
This was later dubbed the "Jiayin Restoration" (Jiayin zhongxin; the year
1914 was a Jiayin year in the Chinese lunar calendar).63 The revived civ-
ilized play supplied both plot material and human resources to the nas-
cent Chinese filmmaking enterprise. With the founding of Mingxing in
Chapter Eight
slanted framing or filtered through a blurred lens. They are often ac·
companied by dramatic sound imagery, which intensifies the sense of
disorientation and crisis. After Song reveals his true identity to the young
singer, tilted shots begin to crowd the film space. Some examples:
• After the failure of the revolution, Song, escaping from perse·

cution, rides on horseback in the jungle through pouring rain.
The speed of the shot seems to force the frame to tilt. (Sound
track: horse hooves and thunder storm.)
• Li Xiaoxia has a nervous breakdo-Jn after learning of Song's
"death." (Sound track: drums)
• The villain threatens to shoot the young singer. Song comes to
his rescue. After revealing his grotesque face, he executes his
own revenge. (Sound track: orchestra in fast tempo, the noise
of the crowd.)
• Li hears the truth and sees a spinning blurred world. (Sound
track: shouting of the crowd.)
These fast and jerky shots generate both dread and excitement (fig.
8.15).66 The subjective slanted frame and blurred vision are especially
340 I pertinent for expressing Li's deranged state of mind-the liminal space in
which the division between past and present is suspended. The viewer is
repeatedly pulled into a world of madness and disorder. The frequency of
these scenes provides the film with a basic mood of distress and horror
effected by the stimulation of optical nerves rather than psychologized
characterization.
Such expressive visual coding is largely absent in most national de-
fense films, which resorted to a realist or even propagandist mode of nar-
ration. It is perhaps not so surprising that mainstream Chinese film his-
toriographies excluded Ma-Xu's works in the canon of the left-wing
cinema; instead, he is often labeled a filmmaker who indulged in petit-
bourgeois taste:
Sons at Midnight exposes, to a certain extent, the tyranny of the feu-

dal ruling class and depicts Song Danping's struggle against the feu-
dal forces. However, Song Danping's individual-centered heroism,
strife, petit-bourgeois fervor, and his "entangled" romance with Li
Xiaoxia, all of which the filmmaker endorses and eulogizes, are in-
compatible with the guiding ideology of the national defense film
movement. On the level of artistic expression, the director also
copies wholesale the style of Hollywood horror film such as Phan-
tom of the Opera. And this undermines what small valuable content
there is in the film.67
Song at Midnight
8.15 Emergency expression: lilted lraming. (Courtesy of the China Film Archive)·
Such criticism, informed by an ideology that favors socialist realism, sim- I 341
plistically opposes form to content. Any formal experiment that attempts
to seek alternative paths in negotiating the aesthetic and the political was
deemed dubious if not dismissed outright. The visual style and the
acoustic composition of Sona at Midnight are far from a simple mimicry of
Hollywood. The explicit borrowing of German expressionism and the
sedimentation of specific historical experiences give the film poignant
expressions of perhaps a combined optical and political •unconscious," 68
rather than a mere reflection of a preconceived agenda.
The relationship between form and content in the film is, to be sure,
a troubled one. A sense of competition pervades the film-between the
foreign versions and the Chinese adaptation, between German expres-
sionism and Hollywood illusionism, between the theater's tableau qual-
ity and slowness and the cinema's montage density and speed, between
silence and sound, between sensuous music and the mechanical speech
of standard vernacular Chinese, and between obsessive visual stylization
and hyperbolic political rhetoric. 69 A heterogeneous, uneasy mix of aes-
thetic choices and ideological avenues were available to the makers of
this and other films made at this time. This generation of filmmakers was
poised on the threshold linking the silent and sound film and had been
nourished by a modernist culture in the first half of the 1930s. Song at
Midnight presents an experiment that is innovative, thrilling, and politi-
cally stimulating while also commercially viable.
Chapter Eight
The second aspect concerns the financial crisis of the Angel troupe.
Significantly, the box-office crisis is bound to the social and physical in-
stability of the theater space and the whims of the audience. The stylistic
expressions of the aesthetic, technological, and ideological dissonance in
the film evolves toward the production of the last show, or swan song, as
it were, in the moribund theater. There is no narrative motivation for the
Angel troupe to arrive there on a stormy night. Besides sustaining them-
selves financially, the troupe tries to revive the theater and its surround-
ing community, so selecting an appropriate script is essential. The first
play, The Romance of the Yellow River, an/allegory for the contemporary na-
tional crisis, fails to attract a large audience; this may well have been a
commentary on the failure of some of the propagandist "hard" films. The
box-office returns barely support the troupe for a few days, and the local
people circulate rumors about the troupe's imminent bankruptcy; Hear-
ing that, the troupe director complains, "It's just too hard to know the
psychology of the audience here." The financial crisis thus reflects a cri-
sis of spectatorship. The phantom singer's script rescues the troupe and
resuscitates a large throng of spectators. The play, set during the French
Revolution, advocates the ideal of democracy and a more utopian world
community than Romance of the Yellow River. If the more nationalist in-
342 I fleeted Romance of the Yellow River, set in a mythological time and space,
stands for the national defense film, Hot Blood, with its translated cosmo-
politan message and modern style, seems to offer an alternative response
to the question of emergency and its aesthetic solution.
In the film, Hot Blood momentarily revives the theater the day it
opens-with the theater bathed in sunshine and crowded with an en-
thusiastic audience-it also brings about its doomsday. As soon as the
curtain opens, the onstage story and backstage drama begin to intersect
in a way that strangely repeats the past. The rapid crosscutting and chase
scenes propel the film's sense of emergency. When the villain falls to his
death in front of the theater, where he had disfigured Song Danpiilg ten
years ago, history comes full circle. And when Song Danping descends to
the stage, exposing his grotesque face, the line between past and present,
between representation and reality, collapses beyond repair.
The true horror of the film takes place when the audience becomes
transformed into a carnivalesque crowd. What do they want from the
theater? What do they want of the man with the grotesque face? As the
crowd rushes onto the stage interrupting and becoming part of the show,
the boundary between the proscenium and the auditorium devolves in
this emption of an anarchic social body. The drama quickly extends into
the realm of nature as the crowd chases the phantom singer into the
woods. The sound track is filled with shouting and drumming, while
Song at Midnight
Song climbs to the top of the tower only to fall like a dark angel of his-
tory in a Benjaminian sense: "His face is turned toward the past.... He
sees only one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls .it in front of his feet." 70
Although we do not witness the demolition of the theater, the burn-
ing of the tower serves as a metonym for its destruction and the revolt of
the masses. While the images of fire and an agitated crowd chasing an en-
emy were common endings for national defense films, the moral ambi-
guity of the relationship between the crowd and the phantom singer
makes it impossible to read the sequence as a replay of the theme of
national salvation. In fact, it bears more than a passing resemblance to
the ending of James Whale's Frankenstein ( 1931 ), in which the monster,
chased by a mob, climbs to the top of the mill and then falls into the wa-
ter. To take Song Danping, a former revolutionary and actor, for a na-
tional enemy would be misreading. Similarly, the crowd, with its unmo-
tivated violence, refuses to be viewed as a mobilized mass marching to
the war front or join the revolution. Rather, this crowd, at once chaotic
and energetic, evokes the grotesque body in the medieval carnival de-
scribed by Mikhail Bakhtin. 71 The grotesque body is a folk body that tem-
porarily defiles order and decorum. As a ritual body it also serves as the
site for transformation and history-making. The collapse of the boundary I 343
between the proscenium and the auditorium signaled the fusion of the
two halves of the grotesque body: the phantom and the audience. The
juxtaposition of revolution and revulsion through the hero's disfigure-
ment, as Yomi Braester suggests, "fleshes out the inner contradictions of
revolutionary utopia and underscores contemporary doubts about ap-
pealing to the masses. 072 Thus revolution is transmogrified into ritual vi-
olence, as in the aftermath of the French, Chinese Republican, and later,
the Communist revolutions. Horror, showing the unspeakable visually,
acoustically, and viscerally, is the aesthetic embodiment of history at such
moments of danger. It expresses an emergency operation-the search for
a cinematic language and an audience at a crucial juncture in film and
national culture.
Although Song Danping dies at the end of Song at Midnight, the gro-
tesque face endured. The disfigured face marked Ma-Xu's artistry and
was a deviant strand of the aesthetic orientation of the period. After the
war broke out, Ma-Xu stayed in Shanghai and made several more horror
films, such as The Haunted House (Guwuxingshiji, 1938), The Poetic Soul and
the Cold Moon (Lengyue shihun, 1938), and The Leper Girl (Mafeng nu, 1939} .
.(The latter centers around disfigurement caused by a sexually transmit·
ted disease and its spread. 73 } In 1941, Song at Midnight II (Xu Yeban ge-
sheng}, in which Song Danping makes a "homecoming," was released.
Chapter Eight
This time, the good-hearted phantom (looking more like Nosferatu than
Erik in The Phantom of the Opera) takes on a more sinister form and exe-
cutes more hair-raising deeds. The Autumn Crabapple (Qiu Haitang) made
in 1943 is again about a disfigured singing actor and his disenchanted
love. In 1947, Ma-Xu moved to Hong Kong, taking his mastery of horror
with him. Ever since, Hong Kong cinema has provided an immense body
of horror and phantom films, and Hong Kong has replaced Shanghai as
the chief dream factory in the Chinese-speaking world. 74
I
ENVOI
Thus founded on the rupture between a past that is its object, and a present that is
the place ofits practice, history endlessly finds the present in its object and the past in
it.f practice. Inhabited by the uncanniness that it seeks, history imposes its law upon
the faraway places that it conquers when it fosters the illusion that it is bringing
them back to life.
-MICHEL DE CERTEAU
SO MUCH HAS changed since the first foreign "electric shadowplay" I 345
arrived in a Shanghai teahouse in the summer of 1896, and since some
of the first films were shot in a photo shop's courtyard in Beijing in the
autumn of 1905. Most people who once contributed to the building of
a film world and thus to the remaking of a new China in the early de-
cades of the twentieth century have passed away; some died only re-
cently. Most films from that era have been lost to fires, wars, or the sheer
force of time. Yet something has remained in the form of memories, re-
incarnated in different registers and locations. Watching the vivid images
of select preserved examples of early Chinese films on the large screen in
Teatro Verdi in Pordenone, Italy, in the company of an international as-
sembly of silent film fans and scholars, or on the video screen in a cold
room by myself in the archive in Beijing, and now on the computer or
DVD screens in the comfortable setting of the living room, is to witness
the persistent apparitions of an early history. It is about seeing resem-
blance in difference, the past in the present. and vice versa.
The initial work for this book started in the mid-1 990s, on the eve of
the centenary of cinema and amidst the onset of a whirlwind of eco-
nomic and cultural transformations in China. I remember shuttling be-
tween three continents, from Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy, to
the dusty, "premodern" archives and libraries in Beijing and Shanghai,
and back to the University of Chicago where this project formed part of
Envoi
a vibrant wave of discussions on early cinema and modernity. Finishing

the book around the Chinese cinema's centenary, I felt that I had traveled
great distances, both real and imaginary, to get in touch with a historical
experience that keeps receding from our grasp as we traverse a minefield
of ever greater collective amnesia. The long process of completing the
book, however, inadvertently allowed my arguments to be measured
against the epochal change on the heel of a new century in China.
This change once again has remapped the city of Shanghai-the dis-
play window of Chinese modernity and its gateway to the world-and
also the material and spiritual topography of China as a whole. It was in-
deed uncanny to journey across building-zones in the city to get to li-
braries and archives. I witnessed, on the one hand, the tearing down of
old movie theaters and neighborhoods once inhabited by the people who
once saw the events mentioned in this book, and on the other, the erec-
tion of new skyscrapers and entertainment complexes (including several
multiplexes built by Hollywood companies). The Yangjingbang canal and
the entertainment district built on or around it almost a century ago is
now an expressway somersaulting over the city center, shooting, via
tunnels under the Huangpu River, right into the Pudong area, Shang-
hai's own, brand new "Manhattan." The Great World entertainment cen-
346 I ter, now closed for renovation and an uncertain destiny, looks dwarfed,
besieged by a web of elevated expressways and giant, cold commercial
buildings in the vicinity. How ironic that the Paris Theater on Huaihai
Road featured in Shi Zhecun's story (see chapter 2) is now the site of a
chic commercial building called Times Square. It's not clear whether it is
intended as a memorial of the bygone years or a hymn to the breathlessly
hectic present in the former French concession. The "New Heaven and
Earth" (Xin Tiandi), a popular shopping and leisure plaza and a product
of postmodern architectural facelift of the old vernacular housing, is only
a stone's throw away. And the dusty, dilapidated Xujiahui reading room
for classical documents and the Republican period materials is now
housed in the new, air-conditioned Shanghai Municipal Library on West-
ern Huaihai Road. The white towering building now is but one of many
solid markers designed to separate the past from the present.
Over the past decade, this revamped metropolitan space has once
again become a hotbed of mass culture. Teahouse culture seems to have
returned, accompanied by new variants such as KTV or movie bars show-
ing VCD or DVD movies and Internet cafes. While many unprofitable
cinemas have been turned into teahouses, coffeehouses, or nightclubs,
some have rebaptized themselves with the famous names used in old
Shanghai and remodeled their theaters into entertainment centers. Sev-
eral renovated luxurious viewing rooms (or mini ting) are complete with
Envoi
coffee tables, cocktails, and discreet lovers' seats (yuanyang zuo, "man-
darin duck seats") or family "balconies." Cheaper all-night shows also at-
tract restless youth and homeless migrant souls. TV dramas and films
based on the life of old Shanghai were among the latest fads in visual pro-
duction and consumption.
Nostalgia in the form of selective, reproducible old Shanghai images-
from fashion models to film stars, from art deco architecture to calendar
posters-fills the urban landscape, as well as overwhelming the urban
imagination. At the same time, history seems to have been held hostage
by an invisible hand, barring it from showing its scarred face. The pre-
vailing ideology today invites us to marvel at the spectacle of a postmod-
ern Shanghai and a postsocialist China with remarkable GNP growth,
and to attribute them to the grand design of a new market economy pol-
icy and to a partnership with the forces of globalization. We are asked to
celebrate a pure present, a clean slate, accentuated by the floods of light
on the Bund at night and by the fireworks on national holidays.
However, history tells us that modernization comes with a price. That
is partly why I choose to end the main body of the book with Song at Mid-
night, and .its lessons for history and historiography. The disfigured phan -
tom singer haunts us to this day because he is the undead who refuses
to allow us to forget the past, and a poignant reminder of the "spectral" I 347
nature of the present. This figure of the revenant marks the site of "dif-
ference" of the jarring and coevality of global modernity. It arrives, con-
stantly, in the form of the "ghosts of what had been past and the pre-
modern culture of reference that had not yet died, returning from a place
out of time to haunt and disturb the historical present." 1 Dipesh Chakra-
barty, in a similar spirit, lucidly characterizes this "historical difference"
as wedged in the inchoate space between the godless, disenchanted En-
lightenment narrative of modernity on the one hand, and the persistence
of a life-world still populated by gods, spirits, and magic powers on the
other; between an empty, homogenous time and a time full of ruptures,
fragments, and heterogeneity; between a universalist totalizing analytic
impulse set out to "demystify" ideology and a hermeneutic approach in-
vested in details and affect, locality and diversity. 2 And this space is not
so much the irreconcilable physical or discursive gap between the West
and the rest, as a shared world of thought and experiences irrevocably
connected by the Enlightenment legacy.
I see Shanghai and its cinematic legacy as an instance of this "differ-
ence"; it is a haunted site of modernity. Shanghai was and seems to con-
tinue as an uncanny "scandal" in the translation (and not transition, as
Chakrabarty stresses) of modernity between Europe and China, between
a lingering past filled with vernacular "superstitions" and rituals and a
Envoi
secular national culture represented by a May Fourth ideology. It is not a

matter of judging who is the villain and who is the victim, as both were
deeply implicated and intertwined in the same drama, however much
later historiography was tinted with the interests of the victors. Nowhere
was the convoluted translation more evident than in the makeup of the
metropolitan culture of Shanghai and its cinema-from the anachronis-
tic architectural collections to the worldly tastes of the petty urbanites to
the Yangjingbang legacy, both as regards language and culture. Shanghai
cinema as the embodiment of a mass-mediated vernacular modernism
was neither completely bad nor complete!# good, neither purely Chinese
nor a Hollywood copycat. The same may be said of that Chinese brand
of Enlightenment fastidiously translated and transmitted by elitist intel-
lectuals, operating through their ostensibly instrumentalist vernacular
movement.
If these two tendencies diverged in terms of approaches and effects,
they were united in a common pursuit of a form of modernity aimed at
democracy and renewed global visibility for an old country burdened
with distinctively ambivalent traditions. The May Fourth project, follow-
ing a time-honored pedagogical tradition, assigned the primacy to the
written word, which in actuality still eluded the masses. The builders and
348 [ inhabitants of a film world in Shanghai and beyond, however, seized
upon modern visual (and auditory) technologies as new mimetic ma-
chines that lent expression to the very process of modernization, and its
translation.
Like Yangjingbang pidgin speech, first produced in the rough transla-
tion and instant transaction between foreigners and locals at the moment
of Shanghai's emergence, vernacular modernism is hardly an oxymoron.
It is the very symptom and form of the effects of Enlightenment and
modern cosmopolitanism resulting from colonial expansions and the
spread of industrial capitalism, which upset and even inverted the rela-
tionship between the metropole and the periphery. Vernacular modern-
ism perceives cinema as a discursive and sensory apparatus enabling the
audiences to overcome the shock of the new and formulate their own
terms of mediation of modern everyday life. If Shanghai cinema had as
its unannounced agenda to "provincialize" Hollywood, it did so through
both the acknowledgement of the latter's indispensability as an inventor
of a new "universal language" and its inherent inadequacy when "spo-
ken" in other places.
Ideologically as well as pragmatically, Shanghai cinema had to devise
a vernacular that could negotiate both the lofty ideas of the nationalist
May Fourth New Culture movement (which sought to translate and
transfer European Enlightenment and scientism), as well as the Holly-
Envoi
wood cinematic idioms marketed as a global vernacular for the masses re-
gardless of class, gender, and race. It embraced many late Qing reformist
and May Fourth ideas such as women's liberation, public education, and
the "strengthening of the nation," while also, as an industry and a busi-
ness, catering to and cashing on popular beliefs in Confucianism, Bud-
dhism, and Daoism. It vehemently fought the incursions of Hollywood
cinema while also relishing in borrowing and transmuting its star sys-
tems, genre formulas, and special effects. Thus, it is hardly surprising that
the forms and genres that best exemplify vernacular modernism are
those "translatable" genres or "body genres" that made sense to the mass
audience, translated from both Chinese and non-Chinese repertoires,
such as the melodrama, the martial arts film, and horror. With its multi-
farious offerings-realist, fantastical. or otherwise-Shanghai cinema
provided easy-to-digest primers for modern life and its many competing
explanations, and new challenges. More importantly, emerging at a time
when all sensory and intellectual resources were undergoing radical
transformation, stimulated by modern technologies and ideas, the cin-
ema effectively became a "vernacular scene" for assembling and rehears-
ing various gender roles and fashioning new sociopolitical subjectivities.
Vernacular modernism is an assemblage of multiple temporalities and
sensibilities, as well as of content and form. It could be cultivated by in- I 349
dividual filmmakers, as in the case of Zheng Zhengqiu, Cai Chusheng,
and Sun Yu who articulated their personal visions for a collective expe-
rience, each in their own way. Unlike political modernism and literary
modernism that often fed into elitist and nativist agendas, vernacular
modernism is at once a representational and performative form aimed at
the masses. It accounts for their participation as both actors and specta-
tors in the construction of a technologically mediated modern world and
of their local, national, and global citizenship.
I have kept using the term Shanghai cinema rather than Chinese cinema
because just like the city that fostered it and the Hong Kong cinema that
followed in its footsteps, Shanghai cinema was neither completely na-
tional nor completely international. Shanghai cinema helped to amplify
and define a form of cosmopolitanism as a popular translation enterprise
mobilizing all sensory and semiotic resources, which, as seen in the Yang-
jingbang speech and its spatial practice (discussed in chapter 2), fore-
grounded the incommensurability, and the injustices, inherent in the
transition of capitalism to the non-Western world. Yet the "open-air"
translators and bricoleurs of the film world in Shanghai found ingenious
solutions creating their own grammars and glossaries that not simply
matched the imported categories, but also invented vocabularies and
new tools suited for asserting their own voices and interests.
Envoi
The writing of this history of early Shanghai cinema is in large mea-

sure inspired by such a translation. Not only did I translate piles of mate-
rials from Chinese into English, I also had to translate what for the most
part are vernacular materials into a scholarly language, or at least the
language of a self-appointed historian. It has been a daunting but also re-
warding experience. It forced me to juggle different approaches and to
search for the optimal pace and presentational style for this balancing act.
More crucially, it has compelled me to reconsider the relationship be-
tween the vernacular movement proper as part of the Chinese Enlight-
enment and the more diffusive, and sorhetimes subversive, vernacular
modernism created and transmitted through the cinema and the related
mass media, in addition to considering the relationship between Shang-
hai cinema and world cinema. I have also had to think long and hard
about why the unique physical and social infrastructure of Shanghai's
metropolitan culture matters so much in understanding these relation-
ships. Therefore, this nlocaln history is not merely a special guidebook to
my beloved native city and to a wonderJul film tradition. Its aim is also to
open a new form of conversation with certain towering themes in the ex-
isting historiography of modern China and, indeed, that of global moder-
nity as a whole. I believe the phenomenological politics and poetics of
350 I the body, of affect, and of memory, which is at the center of this book,
has something to offer for the reconsideration of the foundations of that
project.
For the French historian Paul Veyne, the assertion Nhistory does not
exist, is not so much a nihilist form of relativism as an admission that
N
history is not and cannot be a bounded, coherent, and closed entity to

be uobjectifiedn from a safe, uscientific" distance.:; Rather, borrowing
Genette's dictum, he reiterates that "it's diegesis and not mimesis." 4 While
I am passionate about getting closer to certain matters of fact, and about
tracing their genealogies and competing claims surrounding them, I am
not driven by any compulsive search for illusory scientific exactness. I do
not believe that anyone can ipso facto reconstruct history as it once was.
To do so would mean the past is dead and has no relation to the present
whatsoever. The very fragmentary nature of archival remains and the
scarred, multilayered urban landscape that houses the memories of the
past already pronounce that any history is necessarily mutilated knowl-
edge. I did not discover the history of Shanghai cinema in some sealed
tomb of the past, but encountered its vestiges and manifestations in the
troubled present. By virtue of being lodged in the now and here it irre-
sistibly shapes and constitutes our present and future.
ABBREVIATIONS
FZS Cheng Jihua, Li Shaobai and Xing Zuwen. Zhon99uo dianyin9

fazhanshi 'P ffll t::fJ.ft-~JI:. [History of the Development of Chinese
Cinema]. 2 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1981.
GJN Gong Jianong. Gong Jianong con9ying huiyilu ~,l~§j lelit,li.fk
[Robert Kung's Memoires of his Silver Screen Life]. 3 vols. Taipei:
Wemdng shudian, 1966-67.
LLWX Luo Yijun et al., eds. Zhon99uo dianyin9 lilun wenxuan 'P 1:§JJ.!11.1k
;l:,,i! 1920-1989 [Anthology of Chinese Film Theory and Criti-
cism]. 2 vols. Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 1992.
SSND Chen Bo and Yi Ming, eds. Sanshi niandai Zhon99uo dianyin9 pinglun
xuan -=-+~1\ 'I' IJ '<li:*.Ht-~~ [An Anthology of Chinese Film criti-
cism of the 1930s]. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1993.
WSDY Zhongguo dianying ziliaoguan {China Film Archive], ed. Zhon9-
9uo wusheng dianying 'P ffil ~~1:§J {Chinese Silent Film). Beijing:
Zhongguo dianying, 1996. I 351
WSDYJB Zhongguo dianying ziliaoguan [China Film Archive], ed. Zhon9-
9uo wusheng dianyin9 juben 'I'~ $.l\-~ '<tfJt•J ;ji;. [Chinese Silent Film
Scripts], 3 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1996.
WSDYS Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin. Zhongguo wusheng dianyin9shi 'f ~~~'it
§) JI:. [History of Chinese Silent Film]. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying,
1997.
YXSH Yingxi shenghuo §j/J~i.~ [Movie Weekly]
J
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History,• in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 262, 264.
2. Referred to hereafter as Amorous History.
3. Li Su yuan and Hu Jubin, Zhon99uo wusheng dianyingshi (History of Chinese
Silent Film) WSDYS, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1996). In the past
researchers had very limited access to extant material due both to inade-
quate management of the archive and tight government control of material
from the Republican period. FoJ'eign scholars have not been allowed to con-
sult such material until recently. I chanced upon the film while researching
at the China Film Archive in Beijing in the summer of 1995.
4. Some representative works in this trend are Roger Holman, ed., Cinema
1900-1906: An Analytical Sti,dy (Brussels: Federation Internationale des Ar-
chives du Film, 1982); John Fell, ed., Film Before Griffith (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1983); Jay Leyda and Charles Musser, eds., Before I 353
Hollywood (New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1987); Noel Burch,
Life to Those Shadows, trans. and ed. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990). The most representative work that maps out the pa-
triarchal structure of looking through the psychoanalytic method is Laura
Mulvey's seminal essay, •visual Pleasure and Classical Narrative,· Screen 16,
no. 3 ( 1975): 6-18.
5. For a concise sketch of the rise of early cinema as a critical concept, see
Thomas Elsaesser's, "General Introduction-Early Cinema: Fro!ll Linear
History to Mass Media Archaeology,• ed., Thomas Elsaesser, Early Cinema:
Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BPI. 1990). The volume contains some pi-
oneering studies on early cinema from multiple perspectives. However, it
does not concern early non-Western cinemas at all.
6. See, for example, Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Rep-
resentation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1989); Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent
Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Giuliana Bruno,
Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Film ofElvira Notari
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ann Friedberg, Window
Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993); Shelly Stamp, Movie-Struck GiJ'ls: Women and Motion Picture Cul-
ture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000);
and Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra, eds., .A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); Antonia Lant and Ingrid
Notes to Pages xvii-xxiii
Periz, eds.. The Red Velvet Seat: Women~ Writings on the Cinema. the First Fifty
Years (London and New York: Verso, forthcoming).
7. For a brief assessment of this emergent scholarship in China, see my article,
"Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage: Laborer's Love and the Question of Early
Chinese Cinema: in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943, ed.
Yingjin Zhang (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999}.
8. Since the 1980s, some European and Japanese scholars (e.g., Marie-Claire
Quiquemelle, Regis Bergeron, Marco Mi.iller, Tadao Sato. Fumitoshi Ka-
rima) have also produced some interesting work, mostly as catalogue essays
for retrospectives of Chinese film held in the early 1980s. See for example,
Centre de documentation sur le cinem, chinois, Ombres electriques: Pano-
rama du cinema chinois 1925-1982 (Paris, 1982}; Marie-Claire Quiquemelle
and Jean Loup Passek, eds., Le cinema chinois (Centre Georges Pompidou:
Paris, 1985); the National Film Center at the Tokyo Kokuritsu I<indai Bijut-
sukan (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), Chugoku eiga no kaiko
(1922-1952) (A Retrospective of Chinese Cinema, 1922-1952) (Tokyo,
1984); Chugoku eiga no kaiko (1932-1964) (A Retrospective of Chinese Cin-
ema, 1932-1964) (Tokyo, 1988); and Sun Yu kandoku to Shanghai eiga no
nakamatachi-Chugoku eiga no kaiko (Sun Yu and His Shanghai Colleagues:
Retrospective of Chinese films) (Tokyo, 1992).
9. Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin, Zhon99uo wusheng dianyingshi (History of Chinese
Silent Film) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1996).
354 I 10. Hu Jubin, Projecting a Nation: Chinese Cinema Before 1949 (Hong Kong Uni-
versity Press, 2003}; Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Cin-
ematic Left-wing Cinema Movement 1932-1937 (London: Rowman and
Llttefield, 2002).
11. For an early attempt to theorize nonsynchronicity, see Ernst Bloch, "Non-
synchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics," trans. Mark Ritter, New
German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 22-38.
12. Pririted in the programs of the Afanggong Theater for Amorous History,
parts l and 2, August 1931.
13. The reference to Lillian Gish is an allusion to Xuan Jinglin's real life story.
Her original name was Tian Jinlin. While in the brothel she used the nick-
name Xiao Jinmudan (little Golden Peony). The veteran director Zheng
Zhengqiu helped her to adopt the stage name Xuan Jinglin, obliquely al·
luding to Lillian Gish (Ganlixu, in Chinese transliteration). Tan Chunfa, [(ai
yidai xianhe-Zhongguo dianying zhifu Zheng Zhengqiu (The Pioneer-Zheng
Zhengqiu, the Father of Chinese Cinema) (Beijing: Guoji wenhua chuban
gongsi, 1992), p. 308.
14. These three films were actual Mingxing productions that year.
15. Zhong Dafeng and Shu Xiaomin, Zhongguo dianyingshi (History of Chinese
Film) (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi, 1995), p. 14.
16. Xuan Jingling, "Wode yingmu shenghuo" (My Life on the Silver Screen),
Zhongguo dianying (Chinese Cinema), no. 3 (Dec. 1956): 72-74. See also
Zhang Shichuan, "Zi wo daoyan yilai" (Since I Started Directing), Mingxing
banyuekan (Mingxing bimonthly) 1, no. 5 (1935). Zhang recalls first seeing
Notes to Pages xxiii-xxvii
Xuan as a little girl with pigtails riding donkeys in the New World amuse-
ment center, where he worked as a manager. Years later, while he was cast-
ing for the film Last Conscience (Zuihou de Jiangxin, 1925), he managed to
find Xuan, who had become a prostitute out of poverty, and asked her.to
play a minor role. After the successful release of the film, the company paid
two thousand Chinese dollars to redeem her from the brothel.
17. The social status of the company in particular and the film world in general
was significantly enhanced when Hong Shen ( 1894-1955), a Harvard-
trained professor of English and drama at Fudan University, joined Ming-
xing as a screenwriter. Hong Shen's decision to enter the nascent, yet lowly
film industry in the company of ex-prostitute Xuan aroused shock among
intellectuals, including his family and friends. Film at the time was still re-
garded as a low entertainment form rather than art. His action was labeled
by a Fudan colleague as "prostitution of art." Hong Shen was neverthe-
less resolute. See Hong Shen, "Wo de dagu shiqi yijing guo le ma?" (Has
the time of my drumming passed already?), Hong Shen quanji (Collected
Works of Hong Shen} (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1957), 4: 517. Xuan starred
in The Mistress '.s Fan (Shao nainai de shanzi, 1926), scripted and directed by
Hong Shen.
18. For a groundbreaking study on the "exhibitionist" mode of presentation of
early cinema, which challenges the prevalent "voyeurist" paradigm used
in studies of classical Hollywood cinema, see Tom Gunning, "Cinema of
Attractions: Early Film. Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," Wide Angle 8, I 355
no. 3 and 4 ( 1986): 63-70. Miriam Hansen has described such a presenta-
tional practice in terms of ·excess of appeal," "diversity and display," and
"public performance." See her Babel and Babylon, chapter I. A Cinema in
0
Search of a Spectator: Film-Viewer Relations before Hollywood."

19. Andreas Huyssen, The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture. l'ostmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), chapter 4, "The Vamp and
the Machine."
20. Walter Benjamin, "One Way Street,• Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol-
ume J. 1913-1926, eds., Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard
University Press, 1996), p. 476.
21. Due to the immense success, Xuan's salary was doubled for the first time.
The film was among the eight Chinese films brought to the Moscow Inter-
national Film Festival in 1935, which were then toured around major Eu-
ropean cities. See Hu Die, Yinghou shenya (The Career of the Queen of Cin-
ema) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin, 1986), pp. 163-67.
22. She actually made her second comeback to the screen in 1956, playing a
role in The Family (Jia) based on Ba Jin's famous novel.
23. Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the
(In)credulous Spectator," Art and Text 34 (Spring 1989): 31-45.
24. Zhong Yuan, "Guan 'Yingmu yanshi' hou" (After watching An Amorous His-
tory of the Silver Screen), Yingxi shenghuo (hereafter YXSH) (1931), l, no. 34:
15-17.
25. Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment:' p. 43.
Notes to Pages xxix-7
26. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "A Farewell to Interpretation." in Materialities of

Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press. 1994), pp. 398-99.
CHAPTER ONE
I. Foucault defines episteme as an "epistemological field." in which "condi-
tions of possibility" of a prevalent form of historical experience and knowl-
edge may be identified. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology
of the Human Sciences (New York, Pantheon Books, 1971), xxii.
2. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (Liveright Publishing Company,
1970; originally published by The Macm{llan Company in 1915). Miriam
Hansen finds the locus of this •universal language" or "visual Esperanto" in
the institutionalization of narrative cinema as a representational system
and the emergence, or construction, of a mass spectatorship. See her com-
ments on Lindsay's and others' views in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship
in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991 ),
pp. 76-89; and chapter 7, "Film History, Archaeology, Universal Lan-
guage," about Griffith's implementation of the utopian vision.
3. Miriam Hansen, "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as
Vernacular Modernism,· Modernism I Modernity 6, no. 2 ( 1999): 68.
4. Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London: Sage,
1994), p. 230.
356 1 5. Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre. and Excess" in Film Genre
Reader II. ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995),
pp. 140-58.
6. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinel·e Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East
and West (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 ). For a detailed
study of this literature's late Qing precursors and their relations to moder-
nity, see David Der-wei Wang. F1n-de-siec/e Splendor: Repressed Modernities of
Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997).
7. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., introduction to Cinema and the
Invention ofModern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 1
8. Ibid., p. 8.
9. Ibid., p. 10.
10. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and
Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986
[19771).
l l. Lynn Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1997), p. 7.
12. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), pp. 2-3.
13. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin Mc-
Laughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 416-55.
14. Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love ofPleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-
ofthe-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
Notes to Pages 8-18
15.Susan Buck-Morss, "The Fliineur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore: The
Politics of Loitering," New German Critique 39 ( 1986): 99-140.
16. Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure, pp. 180-81.
17. Ibid., p. 184.
18. David Bordwell, On the Histo1y of Film Style (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1997), pp. 141-46.
19. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema imd Its Contexts
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
20. Ibid, p. 65. According to Singer, the terrn was originally coined by Michael
Davis, a New York social reformer, in his book, The Exploitation of Pleasure
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 19 I I).
21. Ibid., pp. 90-97.
22. Ibid., pp. 294-95.
23. Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street," Critical In-
quiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 313.
24. Ibid., p. 321.
25. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railroad Journey, pp. 52-69.
26. Tom Gunning, "The Whole Town Is Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual
.Experience of Modernity," Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 19!.
27. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1968), pp. 220-22.
28. Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema," p. 312. ( 357
29. Ibid., p. 321.
30. Ibid., p. 329.
/31. Andre Bazin, "Charlie Chaplin," in What Is Cinema?vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 152.
32. See He Xiujun, "Zhang Shichuan he Mingxing yingpian gongsi" (Zhang
Shichuan and Mingxing Company), in WSDY; p. 1520.
33. Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment," p. 129.
34. Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography,· Screen 13 (Spring 1972
[1931]): 7.
35. Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema," p. 340.
36. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 36-37.
37. See Benjamin, "Flaneur," in Selected Writings, vol. l; Georg Simmel, "Men-
tal Life of the Metropolis," in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald
Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I 971 ).
38. Gunning, "The Whole Town Is Gawking."
39. Miriam Hansen, "America, Paris, and the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin)
on Cinema and Modernity," in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed.
Leo Charney et al., pp. 362-402.
40. Miram Hansen, "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as
Vernacular Modernism," Modernism I Modernity 6, no. 2 ( 1999): p. 60.
41. Ibid., 61-62. See also Yuri Tsivian, "Between the Old and the New: Soviet
Film Culture in 1918-1924," Grifjithiana 55/56 (1996): 15-63.
Notes to Pages 18-23
42. Miriam Hansen, "Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai
Silent Film As Vernacular Modernism," Film Quarterly 54, no. l (2000):
I 0-22.
43. Ibid., p. 14.
44. See for example, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Land-
scape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 85.
45. See the essays in Mete Turan, ed., Vernacular Architecture: Paradigms of Envi-
ronmental Response (Aldershot, England: Avebury, 1990).
46. Amos Rapoport, "Defining Vernacular Design," in Vernacular Architecture. ed.
Turan, pp. 76-77. Note that figure 4:2 in his anicle indicates that the "ver-
nacular" and the "popular" occupying thl broad middle in the continuum.
47. Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art,
1909-1923 (University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 141.
48. Ibid., pp. 142-43.
49. Bozkurt Giivenc;, "Vernacular Architecture as a Paradigm: Case Argument,"
in Turan, ed., Vernacular Architecture, pp. 286-88.
50. Sheldon Pollock, "Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History," Public Culture
12, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 624. For a recent collective effort to redefine cos-.
mopolitanism, focusing particularly on its affective, nonelite, and n<>n-
Western centered articulations, see Bruce Robbins, ed., Cosmopolitics: Think-
ing and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998).
358 I 51. Xiong Yuezhi and Xu Min, Wanqing wenhua (Culture of the Late Qing Pe-
riod), vol. 6 in SIJanghai tongshi (A Survey History of Shanghai) (Shanghai:
Shanghai renmf~. 1999), p. 496. For a list of select vernacular newspapers
published in Shanghai see pp. 501-2. See also Ma Guangren. ed., Shanghai
xinwen shi 1850-1949 (History of Journalism in Shanghai, 1850-1949)
(Shanghai: Fudan daxue, 1996), pp. 282-87.
52. Zhou Wu and Wu Guilong, Wanqing shehui (Late Qing Society), vol. 5 in
Shanghai tongshi (A Survey History of Shanghai). ed. Xiong Yuezhi (Shang~
hai: Shanghai renmin, 1999), p. 391.
53. Ma Guangren, ed., Shanghai xinwen shi. pp. 286-87.
54. The most established text that holds this orthodox view is Cheng Jihua,
et al., Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi (History of the Development of Chinese
Cinema. 2 vols.) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1981 ), hereafter as FZS. The
earliest serious treatment on early film history by Zheng Junli, an impor-
tant left-wing actor and director in the 1930s, is in retrospect a more nu-
anced and sophisticated account from a Marxist perspective. Yet in Zheng's
equally evolutionist chronology, popular genres such as the martial ans
film are dismissed and the left-wing political cinema is privileged. See his
Xiandai Zhongguo dianying shiliie (A Concise History of Modern Chinese
film), in Zhongguo yishufazhan shi (A History of the Development of Art in
Modern China) (Shanghai: Liangyou, 1936). For a critical assessment of
various approaches in Chinese film historiography, see Yingjin Zhang, in-
troduction to Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, pp. 5-12.
55. Ke Ling, "Shi wei 'Wusi' yu dianying hua yi lunkuo" (An Attempt at Draw-
ing a Contour for the May Fourth Movement and the Cinema) [1983), in
Ke Ling dianying wencim (Selected Extant Writings of Ke Ling), ed. Chen Wei
(Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1992), pp. 286-302. Ke Ling entered the
Shanghai film world as a left-wing writer in the early 1930s.
56. See Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy ofthe
May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986).
57. Chow Tse-Tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern
China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 59. The jour-
nal had only shifted to the use of the vernacular the year before, in 1918.
58. Walter Ong, Orality and Literary: The Technologizing of the Word (Meth um and
Co. Ltd., 1982; reprinted by Routledge, 1988). Ong's study has admittedly
a transhistorical scope rather than a focus on the impact of industrial capi-
talism and modern print technology on the orality-writing dynamic and
cultural identity. For a seminal study on the latter, see Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communites: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New
York: Verso, 1983).
59. See Nie Gannu, Cong baihuawen dao xin wenzi (From Vernacular Language
to New Writing) (Shanghai: Dazhong wenhua, 1936), pp. 48-53.
60. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 126-28.
61. In his book, The City in Modern Chinese Literqture and Film.- Configuration of
Space, Time, and Gender, Yingjin Zhang also attempted to apply. Benjamin's 1 359
concept to the Chinese context (pp. 128-33).
62. Walter Benjamin, Charles Bai,delaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High-Capitalism
(New York and London: Verso, 1983), pp. 109-45.
63. Ibid., "The Flaneur: passim. "Botanizing on the asphalt" is congruous with
"seasickness on dry land.· The latter appears in °Franz Kafka: On the Tenth
Anniversary of His Death,· in Tlluminations, p. 130. Both descriptions are
suggestive of Benjamin's conception of the cosmopolitan life as a manifes-
tation of a modern cosmology that violently juxtaposes the present and the
archaic, culture and nature. For an unconventional application of Ben-
jamin's idea to anthropological inquiries, see Michael Taussig, Mimesis and
Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993 ), espe-
cially chapter 2, "Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds,· pp. 19-32.
64. Lydia Liu gives two examples from two classical texts, Tao Qian's Soushen
houji (Sequel to Catching Spirits) and Cao Xueqin's Honglou meng (Dream of
the Red Chamber). In the first case, experience has to do with Chinese
medical knowledge related to divination. The latter example bas, however,
direct reference to sensory knowing connected to tasting, seeing and hear-
ing. See Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Moder-
nity. China, 1900-1937 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995),
p. 316. For a study on the uses or adaptations of the term in the modern
discourse and practice of Chinese medicine, see Xianglin Lei, "How Did
Chinese Medicine Become Experiential? The Political Epistemology of
Jingyan,· Positions 10, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 333-64.
Notes to Pages xxix-7
26. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "A Farewell to Interpretation," in Materialities of

Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and I<. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 398-99.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Foucault defines episteme as an •epistemological field/ in which •condi-
ti<>ns of possibility" of a prevalent form of historical experience and knowl-
edge may be identified. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology
of the Human Sciences (New York, Pamheon Books, 1971 ), xxii.
2. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (Liveright Publishing Company,
1970; originally published by The Micmillan Company in 1915). Miriam
Hansen finds the locus of this "universal language" or "visual Esperanto" in
the institutionalization of narrative cinema as a representational system
and the emergence, or construction, of a mass spectatorship. See her com-
ments on Lindsay's and others' views in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship
in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991 ),
pp. 76-89; and chapter 7, "Film History, Archaeology, Universal Lan-
guage," about Griffith's implementation of the utopian vision.
3. Miriam Hansen, ·The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as
Vernacular Modernism,• Modernism I Modernity 6, no. 2 ( 1999): 68.
4. Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (London: Sage,
1994), p. 230.
356 I 5. Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" in Film Genre
Reader II. ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press. 1995),
pp. 140-58.
6. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East
and West (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 )..For a detailed
study of this literature's late Qing precursors and their relations to moder-
nity, see David Der-wei Wang. Fin-de-siecle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of
Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997).
7. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., introduction to Cinema and the
Invention ofModern Lije (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1995), p. 1
8. Ibid., p. 8.
9. Ibid .. p. 10.
l 0. WoHgang Schivelbusch, Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and
Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986
(1977]).
11. Lynn Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1997}, p. 7.
12. Anne Friedberg. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), pp. 2-3.
13. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin Mc-
Laughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 416-55.
14. Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love ofPleasure: Women, Movies and Culture in Turn-
of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
Notes to Pages 8-18
15. Susan Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman, and the Whore: The
Politics of Loitering: New German Critique 39 ( 1986): 99-140.
16. Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure, pp. 180-81.
17. Ibid .. p. 184.
18. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Uni-
versity Press. 1997), pp. 141-46.
19. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2001 ).
20. Ibid, p. 65. According to Singer, the term was originally coined by Michael
Davis. a New York social reformer, in his book, The Exploitation of Pleasure
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1911 ).
21. Ibid., pp. 90-97.
22. Ibid., pp. 294-95.
23. Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street," Critical In-
quiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 313.
24. Ibid., p. 321.
25. Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Railroad Journey, pp. 52-69.
26. Tom Gunning, "The Whole Town Is Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual
Experience of Modernity," Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 191.
27. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion: in Illuminations. ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1968), pp. 220-22.
28. Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema: p. 312. I 357
29. Ibid., p. 321.
30. Ibid., p. 329.
/31. Andre Bazin. "Charlie Chaplin," in What Is Cinema?vol. l, trans. Hugh Gray
32. See He Xiujun, "Zhang Shichuan he Mingxing yingpian gongsi" (Zhang
Shichuan and Mingxing Company), in WSDY, p. 1520.
33. Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment," p. 129.
34. Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography," Screen 13 (Spring 1972
[1931)): 7.
35. Hansen, "Benjamin and Cinema," p. 340.
36. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 36-37.
37. See Benjamin, "Flaneur," in Selected Writings, vol. l; Georg Simmel, "Men-
tal Life of the Metropolis," in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald
Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 ).
38. Gunning, "The Whole Town Is Gawking."
39. Miriam Hansen, "America, Paris, and the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin)
on Cinema and Modernity," in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed.
Leo Charney et al., pp. 362-402.
40. Miram Hansen, "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as
Vernacular Modernism," Modernism I Modernity 6, no. 2 ( 1999): p. 60.
41. Ibid., 61-62. See also Yuri Tsivian, "Between the Old and the New: Soviet
Film Culture in 1918-1924," Griffithiana 55/56 (1996): 15-63.
65.For an informative study on Hu Shi's intellectual career, see Min-chih

Chou, Hu Shih and Intellectual Choice in Modern China (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1984}.
66. Hu Shi, ·wenxue gailiang chuyi" (Some modest proposals for the reform
of literature), Xin qingnian 2, no. 5 (January 1917); translation from Kirk '
Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-
1945 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 123-39. New
Youth published the first piece of fiction written in the vernacular by Lu
Xun in January 1918. Hu Shi first experimented with vernacular writing
and publishing when he studied in new-style schools in Shanghai as a
teenager, 1904-10, before he left for~merica. See Hu Shi, "Sishi zishu»
(An Autobiography Written at the Age of Forty), in Hu Shi zizhuan (Auto-
biography of Hu Shi), ed. Cao Boyuan (Hefei: Huangshan shushe, 1986
[1935]), pp. 54-62.
67. Translation from Kirk Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, p. 124.
68. Ibid .. passim.
69. In an effort to rescue vernacular literature from the past and •restore" its
canonical status or historical significance. Hu Shi wrote Baihua wenxue shi
(History of Vernacular Literature) (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1986 [1928)).
70. Translation from Kirk Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, p. 137.
71. Hu Shi, Changshiji (Experiments) (Shanghai: Yadong tushuguan, 1922
[1920)), pp. 91-93. The poem was written on October l 0, I 920.
360 I 72. According to this preface, the first three editions sold about ten thousand
copies within two years, a phenomenal number for a poetry collection
(p. 1).
73. Ibid., pp. 2-3; emphasis added.
74. See Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politi£'s of Reading between
West and East, chapter 4, "Loving Women: Masochism, Fantasy, and the Ide-
alization of the Mother." Bound feet did, however, play a concrete role in
Hti Shi's personal experience. Before he went to America, he was engaged
to a woman with bound feet whom his mother chose for him in his native
Anhui province. When he was studying at Columbia, he fell in love with an
American woman. Unable to absolve his feeling of moral obligation, he
married the Chinese woman upon returning to China.
75. The representative work of this approach is Christian Metz, Film Language
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974}.
76. Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997).
77. The term is coined by Michael Jackson, Path Toward a Clearing: Radical Em-
piricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989), as quoted in Thomas J. Csordas, "Introduction: The Body as Repre-
sentation and Being-in-the-World," in Embodiment and Experience: The Exis-
tential Ground of Culture and Self (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1994), p. 10.
78. Thomas Csordas, introduction to Embodiment and Experience, p. 12.
79. Vivian Sobchack, "Phenomenology and the Film Experience," in Viewing
Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut-
gers University Press, 1997), pp. 36-58. The article is taken from Sob-
chack's book, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
80. Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography" ( 1927), trans. Thomas Levin. Critical In-
quiry 19 (Spring 1993), p. 433.
81. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 71-72.
82. Steven Shaviro argues, "The cinematic apparatus is a new mode of embod-
iment; it is a technology for containing and controlling bodies, but also for
affirming, perpetuating, and multiplying them, by grasping them in the ter-
rible, uncanny immediacy of their images.... The body is a necessary con-
dition and support of the cinematic process: it makes that process possible.
but also continually interrupts it, unlacing its sutures and swallowing up its
meanings." The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
1993), pp. 256-57.
83. See Susan Buck-Morss, "The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception: A
Historical Account," in C. Nadia Seremetakis, ed., The Senses Still: Perception
and Memory as Material Culture (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994),
pp. 45-63.
84. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 24.
85. See Miriam Hansen's remarks on the textual history of the book in her in-
troduction to Kracauer's Theory of Film, vii-xiv. I 361
86. I<racauer, "Photography,• pp. 422-23; emphasis added.
87. Ibid., pp. 426-29.
88. See Thomas Levin's footnote, ibid., p. 423. Those theatrical productions
were said to be the forerunners of the "musicals.· See also Karsten Witte,
"Introduction to Siegfried Kracauer's 'The Mass Ornament," New German
Critique 5 (1975): 63.
89. Siegfried I<racauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Levin (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 77. This idea foreshadows the ob-
servation he made in the essay on photography, that "[f]or the first time in
history, photography brings to the fore the entire natural shell" (I<racauer,
"Photography," p. 422).
90. •Assemblage• and "body without organs" are two key concepts in Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari's collaborative works, developed fully in A Thou-
sand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1987). For Deleuze and Guattari, "assemblage· constitutes the
dynamic integration of the body and the machine in capitalist production,
which I find germane to Kracauer's conception of the "mass ornament."
91. Emphasis on •aesthetic pleasure• was original. As Karsten Witte rightly
points out, this legitimation is conditional. "It is valid only if the aesthetic
expression of the masses is not separated from the acknowledgment of their
political authority." The "mass ornament" as later deployed by the Nazi re-
gime certainly bespeaks its negative or reactionary orientation. "Introduc-
tion to Siegfried Kracauer's The Mass Ornament,· p. 64.
92. Siegfried I<racauer, The Mass Ornament, op. cit.

93. I<racauer, "Photography," pp. 435-36; emphasis added.
94. This view resonates with Benjamin's conviction of the cinema as being the
exemplary means for "the everyday reschooling for the mimetic faculty" in
modernity. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 29.
95. Karsten Witte, "Introduction to Siegfried I<racauer's 'The Mass Orna-
ment,'" p. 64.
96. Gongsun Lu, Zhongguo dianying shihua (Historical Accounts of Chinese Cin-
ema), Hong Kong: Guangjiaojing, 1976, pp. 50-52.
97. Wang Hanlun, "Yingchang huiyiht" (Memoires of the Film Studio),
Liangyou, no. 64 (December 1931 ): 32. I
98. The director Ren Jinping who introduced Wang to Mingxlng Company, de-
scribes her as someone who •enjoys (using] English ... [and] has extensive
social contacts.• She also worked as a private teacher for a family in Hong
Kong after leaving the typist position. Ren Jinping, "Wang Hanlun nushi"
(Miss Wang Hanlun), Dianying zazhi (Movies Monthly) 1, no. l (May 1924).
99. Wang Hanlun, ·wo ru yingxi j.ie shimo" (How I Entered the Film World),
Dianying zazhi 2, no. 1 ( 192 5).
100. Wang Hanlun, "Wode congying jingguo• (My Experience with the Cin-
ema), in WSDY. pp. 1471-75 (originally published in Zhongguo dianying no.
2, l 956J.
101. Zhang Shichuan, "Zi wo daoyan yilai," Mingxin9 banyuekan 1, no. 4 ( 1935):
362 I 16.
102. At the turn of the twentieth century, this practice was carried over to the
modern spoken drama and subsequently cinema for some time.
103. The term "taste for reality" is adapted from Vanessa R. Schwartz, "Cinema
Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-
Siecle Paris," in Linda Williams, ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 87-113.
104. For a comprehensive account of early Chinese film actresses including
some mentioned here, see Michael Chang, "The Good, the Bad, and the
Beautiful: Movie Actresses and Public Discourse in Shanghai, l 920s-
l 930s," in Cinema and Urban Culture, ed. Yingjin Zhang, pp. 128-59.
105. Gongsun Lu, Zhongguo dianying shihua (Historical Accounts of Chinese Cin-
ema), (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojing, 1976), pp. 39-41, 53-54.
I 06. There were two other famous modern girls known also by their ''foreign"
names-Miss A. A. (Ace Ace) and Miss S.S. (Shanghai Style). Miss. A. A.'s
real name is Fu Wenhao, and she also appeared in films. She was allegedly
the first Chinese woman to obtain a driver's license in the International Set-
tlements of Shanghai. Cheng Bugao, Yingtan yijiu (Reminiscences of the
Film World) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1983), p. 57.
107. Gong .Jianong congying huiyilu (Gong Kung's Memoirs of His Silver Screen
Life; hereafter abbreviated as GJN), vol. l, Taipei: Wenxing shudian, 1966-
67, p. 123.
108. Wang Hanlun, "Wode congying jingguo," pp. 1476-77. The original En-
glish title for the film is Blind Love. For a synopsis of the film, see Zhongguo
dianying ziliaoguan (China Film Archive), ed., Zhongguo wusheng dianying
juben (Chinese silent film scr.ipts), 3 vols. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1996
(hereafter WSDY.JB), pp. 1849-50.
109. See He Naihan's detailed reportage on Wang's trip to Ha'erbin, NNiixing
Wang Hanlun lai Ha xianji W (A report on the female star Wang Hanlun's
trip to offer her art in Ha'erbin), Xin yinxin9 yu tiyu shijie (Silverland I Sports
World), vol. 3, no. 21 (May 1930): 19, 21.
110. Paul Zumthor, 'Body and Performance." In Gurnbrecht et al., eds., Materi-
alities of Communication. (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994),
p. 224.
CHAPTER TWO
1. That is, after New York, London, Berlin, Chicago, and Paris.
2. All About Shanghai: A Standard Guidebook. with an introduction by H.J. Leth-
bridge, (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983; originally published by
the University Press, Shanghai. 1934-35), p. 1.
3. The following are some notable titles in Shanghai studies from these per-
spectives: Harriet Sergeant, Shanghai: A Collision Point of Cultures (London:
John Murray, 1998 [1991]); Betty Peh-T'i Wei, Shanghai: The Crucible of
Modern China (Hong Kong and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Christopher Howe, ed., Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Me-
tropolis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ); Elizabeth Perry,
Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford I 363
University Press, 1993); Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-
Centu-ry China: The View from Shanghai (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1991 ); Emily Honig, Sisters and Stran9ers: Women in the Shanghai Cot-
ton Mills (Stanford University Press, I 986); Frederik Wakeman Jr., Policing
Shan9hai 1927-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Bryna
Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in
Shanghai, 1853-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and
Christian Henriot, Shan9hai 1927-1937: Municipal Power, Locality, and Mod-
ernization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
4. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in
China, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999).
5. Other notable efforts include Zhang Yingjin's The City in Modern Chinese Lit-
erature and Film: Configuration of Space, Tim, and Gender (Palo Alto, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1996) and Shih Shu-Mei's The Lure of the Modern:
Writin9 Modernism in Semicolonial Shanghai (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2001).
6. It became a county seat more than seven hundred years ago and set up
a customs house three hundred years ago. Its ties with the surrounding
Jiangnan region, the source of raw material and goods as well as prospec-
tive citizens, were very important for its southern regional identity.
7. Haipai originally refers to a particular style and commercial practice of
painting originated in the Shanghai region in the late Qing period but its us-
age was gradually extended t<J opera, literature, and lifestyle as a whole.
See Xiong Yuezhi and Zhang Min, Wanqing wenhua, p. 33.
8. Jonathan Hay, "Painting and the Built Environment in Late-Nineteenth-

Century Shanghai." Chinese Art: Modern Expressions, ed. Maxwell K. Heam
and Judith G. Smith (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001),
p. 87.
9. The figures are from Zhen Zu'an, Bainian Shan9hai chen9 (A Century of the
City of Shanghai) (Shanghai: Xuelin, 1999), p. 230.
IO. For a detailed analysis of the changing cartography of the city in late 19th
century, see Ye Kaidi, "Nali shi Shanghai?" (Where was Shanghai?), Ershiyi
shiji, no. 48 (June 1998): 72-88.
11. For a discussion of Shanghai's shi character (as opposed to cheng), see Xu
Daoming, Haipai wenxue fun (On Shanghai/Style Literature) (Shanghai: Fu-
dan daxue, 1999), pp. 31-58. Shi is an integral aspect ofxiaoshimin, or the
petty urbanites. Shi is also linked to "urban• or ·urbane'' in a modern sense
whereas chen9 is not.
12. The first tram was put .in use in 1908, followed by trackless streetcars in the
International Settlement in 1914.
13. See Xiong Yuezhi, "Shanghai zujie yu Shanghai shehui sixiang bianqian"
(Shanghai Concessions and the Changes in Social Thought), Shanghai yan-
jiu luncon9 no.2 (1989). Chan9 was also translated as "ground• in the Shang-
hai cartography of the late nineteenth century. See Ye Kaidi (Kathrine Yeh),
"Nali shi Shanghai?" p. 74.
14. On haipai, see also Li Tiangang, Wenhua Shan9hai (Cultural Shanghai)
364 I (Shanghai jiaoyu, 1998), pp. 3-34. Li defines haipai as essentially a mod-
ern urban mass culture with Chinese characteristics, or "simply, the culture
of city dwellers· (p. 29).
15. Both hai and yang connote vastness, the far away, and open-mindedness.
The city has (or had} a number of other "aquatic" names-such as Hu de-
rived from fishing and Shen after the nearby river-all related to Shanghai's
relation to the ocean and surrounding bodies of water.
16. As quoted in Zhen Zu'an, Bainian Shan9hai cheng, p. 358.
17. Ma Xuexin et aL eds., Shanght1i wenhua yuanliu cidian (A Lexicon on the
Origins of Shanghai Culture) (Shanghai shehui kexue, 1992), p. 525.
18. Other treaty ports, especially Canton under the strong influence of the Brit-
ish colonial culture of Hong Kong also saw the flourishing of a locally
inflected pidgin English. For a study of the history of the sociolinguistic phe-
nomenon, see Zou Zhenhuan, "Shijiu shiji xiabanqi Shanghaide 'Yingyu re'
yu zaoqi Yingyu duben jiqi yingxiang" (Shanghai's "English fever" in the
Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century and the Early English Readers and
Their Effect"), in Ma Changlin ed., Zujie Ii de Shanghai (Shanghai's Foreign
Concessions) (Shanghai shehui kexueyuan, 2003), pp. 93-106.
19. See Cao Juren, Shan9hai chunqiu (Shanghai Chronicles) (Shanghai renmin,
1996), p. 177. Cao also cites one example of Yangjingbang use of Chinese
syntax to speak English: "A boat has two eye. I No eye, how can see. I No
can see, how can go.·
20. Yao Gonghe, Shanghai xianhua (Idle Talk of Shanghai) (Shanghai: Shangwu
yinshuguan, 1926 [19171), pp. 30-31. In the opening of the book, Yao
states that "from a political point of view, Shanghai may be the entry point
for foreign invasion. But from a material point of view, Shanghai is really
the cradle of [modern] civilization for the whole country."
21. A reverse kind of pidgin in Shanghai dialect could be found in many !~r-
eign language newspapers. See Xiong Yuezhi and Xu Min, Wanqin9 wenhua,
p.49.
22. Cai Fengming. Shanghai dushi minsu (Shanghai Urban Folklore) (Shanghai:
Xuelin, 2001 ), pp. 173, 20 l.
23. For a study on the late Qing publishing fever see Leo Ou-fan Lee and An-
drew J. Nathan, "The Beginning of Mass Culture: Journalism and Fiction
in the Late Ch'ing and Beyond.· in David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, Eve-
lyn S. Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1985, pp. 360-95. See also, Xiong Yuezhi and Xu
Min, Wanqin9 wenhua, chapter 2.
24. Marcia Yonemoto, "The Spatial Vernacular in Tokugawa Maps, Journal of
0
Asian Studies, 59, no. 3 (2000): 647-66.

25. See Tess .Johnson and Deke Erh, A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old
Shanghai (Hong Kong: Old China Hand Press, 1993).
26. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, p. 12.
27. See Li Jiang, "Lilong jutaku" (Rowhouses), Sinica 11, no. 7 (2000): 40-42.
Lilong is another name for lon9tan9. Li argues the sound of long (in the
Shanghai dialect) is derived from "row"-this would be a typical example
of Yangjingbang pidgin. I 365
28. Ackbar Abbas, "Cosmopolitan De-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong,"
Public Culture 12, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 774.
29. On such "high-minded" forms of cosmopolitanism, see Joseph J.evcnson's
seminal study, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and Chinese
Stages (Berkeley: University of California, 1971 ).
30. The term unintended city" is coined by the Indian architect and social ac-
0
tivist Jai Sen to designate the space where the disenfranchised and the
0
marginal sections of society live in contradiction [though never separate] to

elite urban utopias. It is the "often unintended result of planning and social
programs and policies, as opposed to direct exploitation." "The Unintended
City," Seminar, no. 200 (April 1976}. (As quoted in Ranjani Mazumdar, "Ur-
ban Allegories: The City in Bombay Cinema, 1970-2000," Ph.D. diss. NYU,
2000, pp. 50-51.)
31. Shanghai tongshe, ed., Shan9haiyanjiu ziliao (Research Materials on Shang-
hai) (1936), p. 324.
32. Xiong Yuezhi and Xu Min, Wanqing wenhi,a, p. 480.
33. Dianshizhai huabao, vol. l, no. l, 1884.
34. Xiong Yuezhi and Xu Min, Wanqing wenhua, p. 482.
35. This sketch of the atmosphere of the Shanghai teahouse culture is based on
a reading of Tuhua ribao (The Illustrated Daily), July 1908-February 1909.
36. Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the
Avant-Garde." Wide Angle 8, nos. 3, 4 (Fall 1986): 63-70.
37. Gunning, ·The Cinema of Attractions," p. 57.
38. Tuhua ribao, vol. L no. 1, 1908.
39. Shen Lixing, "Jiu Shanghaide shijie 're'" (The World Fever in Old Shanghai),
in Shanghai shehui daguan (An Overview of Shanghai Society), ed. Shi Fu-
kang. (Shanghai shudian, 2000), p. 277.
40. Zhou Shixun ed., Shanghai daguan (A Panorama of Shanghai) (Shanghai:
Wenhua meishu tushu gongsi, 1933), section on ·shanghai zhi sige shijie"
(Four Worlds in Shanghai).
41. Tu Shiping. ed .. Shanghaishi daguan (Shanghai Panorama) (Zhongguo za-
zhitushu gongsi, I 948), part 2, chapter 27, section 5. This kind of •tower"
replaces the function of pagodas for obtaining the pleasure of a command-
ing view of the landscape from a vamag'e point, only now the landscape
viewed is the city. Zheng Yimei et al.. Shanghaijiuhua (Old Shanghai Tales)
(Shanghai wenhua, 1986), p. 105.
42. Xin Shanghai (New Shanghai) (Shanghai yinshuguan. i930), pp. 127-28.
43. Walter Benjamin, "Grandville, or the World Exhibition," in The Arcades Pro-
ject, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McJ.aughlin; ed. RolfTiedmann
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1999), p. 7.
44. Jonathan Hay, "Painting and the Built Environment in Late-Nineteenth-
Century Shanghai," p. 75 . .Hay distinguishes "the architecture of spectacle"
from architecture of permanence." referring to monumental civic build-
0
ings. and "architecture of displacement," which consisted of buildings built

by and for migrants and sojourners from other parts of China.
366 I 45. The term is borrowed from Wen-hsin Yeh, "Shanghai Modernity: Com-
merce and Culture in a Republican City," China Quarterly ( 1997), p. 392.
46. It was observed that the French concession where the New World stood was
more liberal than the British controlled international concession. Zheng
Yimei et al, Shanghaijiuhua, p. I 14.
47. See Bao Tianxiao. Chuanyinglou huiyilu xubian (Sequel to the Reminisces of
the Bracelet Shadow Chamber) (Hong Kong: Dahua, 1973), pp. 93-94.
48. Zhang Shichuan, "Zi wo daoyan yilai" (Since I Started Directing), Mingxing
banyuekan vol, 1, no. 5 (1935). Zhang was the nephew of Wang Guozhen,
the proprietress of the establishment.
49. See Yao Gonghe, Shanghai xianhua, p. 48. The term, derived from the words
kitten (mao'er) and hats (mao'er) refers to women impersonating men with
hair covered up, and suggests fashion (as in shimao).
50. Zhou Shixun, ed., Shanghaishi daguan, section on "Shanghai zhi baihuo
gongsi" (Department Stores in Shanghai) (Shanghai: Wenhua meishu tu-
shu gongsi. 1933). The author defines the department store (baihuo gongsi,
literally a company with hundreds of goods) as "a big market that both col-
lects goods from all over the world and also deals in national products."
51. Sincere Co. Ltd., The 25th Anniversary Celebration Album, I 924. The album
also boasts the writings and calligraphy of major literary figures, including
Kang Youwel Zhou Shoujuan, (Shen) Zhengya. and Xu Zhuodai. Zhou con-
tributed a particularly interesting "futuristic" entry on what Sincere would
look like on its fiftieth anniversary.
52. Ann Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993), pp. 29-32.
53. Ellen Thorbecke, Shanghai (Shanghai: North-China Daily News and Herald
Ltd., 1941 ), p. 49.
54. An important precursor of the amusement halls and rooftop gardens in late
nineteenth century is the large private garden-turned public leisure estab-
lishment, such as Zhang Yuan, Dangui Yuan, and Xu Yuan. Xu Yuan was
allegedly the first venue that exhibited an ·occidental shadowplay" in
Shanghai, in 1896.
55. Zhang Shichuan, who was the nephew of Jing Runsan, the founder and
owner of the New World, allegedly came up with the passage idea. See
Cheng Bugao, Yingtan yijiu {Reminiscences of the Film World) {Beijing:
Zhongguo dianying, 1983 ), p. 64. The tunnel collapsed in 1930, which
caused the subsequent shutdown of the north building.
56. For a study that brought the term •petty urbanites" to critical focus in
Western scholarship on Shanghai modern history, see Wen-hsin Yeh, ·Pro-
gressive Journalism and Shanghai's petty urbanites: Zou Taofen and the
Shenghuo Enterprise," in Shanghai Sojourners, ed. Frederic Wakeman and
Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies Monograph Series,
1992), pp. 186-238.
57. I concur with Haochan Lu that the difficulty with defining the petty ur-
banites sociologically is due to the fact that they are not a fixed social cate-
gory. See his Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth I 367
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 167. Its chief
characteristics are diversity, fluidity, and mobility, and as such it demands a
cultural analysis that takes into account, among other things, the Yangjing-
bang character of the metropolis.
58. Shen Yanbing (Mao Dun), ·Fengjiande xiaoshimin wenyi" (The Feudal Art
of the Petty Urban Dwellers), Dongfang zazhi 30, no. 3 (Jan. t 1933), in
Yuanyang hudie pai yanjiu ziliao, ed. Wei Shaochang. pp. 47-52.
59. As quoted in Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk
Literature, 1918-1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985),
p. 14.
60. Lu Hongshi and Shu Xiaoming, Zhongguo dianyingshi (A History of Chinese
Cinema), (Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 1998), p. 6.
61. Synopsia in Zhu Tianwei and Wang Zhenzhen, eds., Zhongguo yingpian da-
dian 1905-1930 (Encyclopedia of Chinese Films} (Beijing: Zhongguo dian-
ying, 1996), pp. 5-6.
62. These experiments are comparable to films such as Rube and Mandy at the
Coney Island (1903), Uncle Josh at the Picture Show {1902), and many of
Griffith's Biograph shorts.
63. For more on the content and making of these shorts, see Qian Huafo,
"Yaxiya yingxi gongside chengli shimo" (The Origins of the Founding of the
Asia Company), WSDY. 1455-58. Qian, an actor of both civilized play and
Peking Opera, was one of the actors in this and several other films.
64. Shanghai tongshe, Shanghaiyanjiu ziliaoxuji, pp. 541-42. While these early
venues have Chinese names transliterating foreign terms, many later ones
carried meaningful Chinese names. This "bilingual" character of the the-
aters' names and its transformation over time is again a testimony to Yang-
jingbang as a "spatial vernacular."
65. Both were built or converted in 1912 in the aftermath of the Republi-
can revolution when many teahouses, which had functioned as theaters,
changed the names to theater houses or stages. Xinxin Wutai originally
opened as Dangui Chayuan by Xia brothers who contributed to many early
films. It was converted from part of the Louwailou Amusement Hall. In
1916, the new management leased khe location from its owner, the
Wing'an Department Store and changed the name to Tianzhan Wutai. Ma
Xuexin et al., Shanghai wenhua yuanliu cidian, p. 670.
66. The actors of the Xinmin troupe actually participated in the war as well as
in the film. This might be an early example of docudrama in China, al-
though the absence of an extant print makes it hard to determine the de-
gree of its docudramatic quality. See the advertisement in Shenbao for
"Shanghai War" used by Jay Leyda in Dianying: An Account of Films and the
Film Audience in China (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972), p. 12. Leyda's
caption erroneously called the film ·war in Wu Han."
67. Guan Haifeng and Zhang Shichuan founded the Huanxian Company in
Xujiahui. one of the ephemeral enterprises.
368 I 68. Yuan Jin, Yuanyang hudie pai (The Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School)
(Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1994), p. 5. For a different account of the
origin of the term see Ping Jinya, '"Yuanyang hudie pai' mingming de
gushi" (The Story behind the Naming of the 'Mandarin Ducks and But·
terflies'), in Wei Shaochang, Yuanyang hudie pai yanju ziliao, vol. I, pp. 179-
81. According to Ping, also a Butterfly author, the term came up at a din-
ner party when Liu Bannong, a May Fourth writer, called the novel Jade
Pear Spirit a Butterfly novel. Liu also observed that many popular writers
adopted pen names that contained Chinese characters for butterfly or other
birds or insects.
69. Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-
Century Chinel·e Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 ), p. 10.
For a discussion on the public reception of traditional vernacular story·
telling, see Patrick Hanna, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1981 ).
70. Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, p. 6. According to the sources
cited by Link, there was a six-fold expansion of printing industry in Shang-
hai from the early twentieth century to the early 1930s. New-style schools
increased from 4,000 in 1905 to more than 120,000 by the late 19l()s in
China (p. 10).
71. Ibid., pp. 11-12.
72. For a sample of early "film stories· written in the semivernacular style,
which was commonly used by Butterfly writers, see Tao Hancui, (Huitu)
Yingxi daguan (An Illustrated Anthology of Shadowplays) (Shanghai shijie
shuju, 1924). Most stories were derived from European and American films
and meant to provide models for Chinese cinema. See also Die Lu, ed.,
Yingxi xiaoshuo sanshizhong (Thirty Film Stories) (Shanghai: Jim:hi tushu-
guan, 1925). The latter includes a dozen of Chinese film stories, such a~ Yan
Ruisheng, a big hit released in 1920.
73. Cheng Shuren, ed., Zhonghua yin9ye nianjian (Yearbook of Chinese Film)
(Shanghai, 1927), section on "Yingye chubanwu· (film publications).
74. Xu Chiheng ed., Zhongguo yingxi daguan (Filmdom in China) (Shanghai:
Hezuo, 1927), section on "Guanyu yingxi chubanwu zhi diaocha" (re-
search on film publications).
75. It is possible that the precedence of film magazine publication in China can
be found in the various youxi (literally, play or entertainment) or New
Drama magazines, and to some extent, the popular Butterfly literary mag-
azines. The latter were run by almost the same group of people who en-
thusiastically crossed from one entertainment form to another in that rap-
idly changing time.
76. Some of the translations of the magazines' titles are mine. The rather literal
renditions are meant to show the prevalent use of the term shadowplay in
the film discourse in that period.
77. Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin, WSDYS, p. 179. For a comprehensive and anno-
tated account of film publications 1921-49, see Zhang Wei, Yinxian and
Chen Jin, Zhongguo xiandai dianying chubanwu zongmu tiyao" (A Con-
0
cise Annotated Bibliography of .Film Publications in Modem China) Shan9- I 369

hai dianying shiliao (1994), vol. 2, pp. 212-88; vol. 3, pp. 289-344.
78. Dianying zhoubao, 1925, no. 1 (April): l.
79. Ibid., 11.
80. In fact, it was a period when a new generation of Chinese film stars with
athletic bodies (such as the legendary couple Jin Yan and Wang Renmei)
began to take over the center stage. It was certainly connected to the Na-
tionalists' modernizing drive, in particular the New Life movement.
81. On the intersection between cinema, social dance, and political culture in
Republican China, see Andrew Field, "Selling Souls in Sin City: Shanghai
Singing and Dancing Hostesses in Print, Film. and Politics, 1920-40," in
Yingjin Zhang, ed., Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, pp. 99-127.
82. Gong Jianong, G.TN, pp. 154-55, 31-32.
83. The idea of the Queen of Sports was obviously inspired by the title the
"Queen of the Cinema" bestowed on Hu Die in 1933.
84. See Qing Ren, "Quanguo yundonghui Ii guanyu dianying fangmian de
zhongzhong" (Diverse Things Surrounding Film During the National Sports
Games), Min9xin9 banyuekan, no. 27 (1933): 7-8. The reporter also men-
tioned that Li Lili, the star who played the Queen of Sports, even hired a
personal coach to improve her athletic skills in Nanjing. Many other stars
who took an active interest in sports also arrived at the stadium to view the
event, creating sensation as well as commotion.
85. Interview with Ms. Cheng Ying, Shanghai, October 1997.
86. At a few theaters earphones were installed for simultaneous interpretation.
The literal translation by a disembodied and technologically mediated voice

was, however, not quite the same as the gesticulating and atmosphere-
generating "interpreter· inside the auditorium. Interviews with Mr. Shu
Yan in Beijing and Ms. Cheng Ying in Shanghai in the fall of l 997.
87. The genealogy goes back even further to the Symbolist poets active in the
1920s. See Harry A. Kaplan, "The Symbolist Movement in Modern Chinese
Poetry,· diss., Harvard University, 1989; Heinrich Fruehauf, "Urban Exoti-
cism in Modern Chinese Literature, 1910-1933," diss., University of Chi-
cago, 1990. For other treatments of the modernist movements in early
twentieth-century China, see Randolph Trumbull, diss., "The Shanghai
Modernists· (Stanford University, 1989(; Yingjin Zhang, T'he City in Modern
Chinese Literature and Film (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1966),
chapter 6, "The Circulation of Temporality and Eroticism in Shanghai." Leo
Ou-fan Lee's Shanghai Modern and Shih Shu-mei's The Lure of the Modern are
two recent studies that covered the subject substantially. l will have more
to say on the controversy surrounding •soft cinema" in chapter 7.
88. This "translation· practice is further complicated by the fact that the Japa-
nese writers were initially influenced by the French writer Paul Morand.
Morand visited Shanghai in l 928. See Yan Jiayan's, introduction, Xin 9an-
jue pai xiaoshuo xuan (An Anthology of the New Sensationalist Fiction) (Bei-
jing: Renmin wenxue, 1985), pp. 1-6. For a more recent and perceptive
study on the New Sensationalist literature in China, see also Wu Zhongjie
370 I and Wu Lichang, eds., Zhongguo xiandaizhuyi xunzong 1900-1949 (Tracing
Chinese Modernism, 1900-1949) (Shanghai: Xuelin, 1995), pp. 381-416.
89. These English and French translations of book or journal titles are original.
90. Yan Jiayan, ed., Xin ganjue pai xiaoshuo xuan; Liu Na'ou, Di1shi fengjingxian
(Shanghai: Shuimo shudian, 1930); Shi Zhecun, One Rainy Evening (Beijing:
Panda I Chinese Literature Press, 1994).
91. Wang Ruiyong, "Shanghai yingyuan bianqian Ju· (A Record of the Changes
in Shanghai Cinema Theatres), in Shanghai dianying shiliao (Historical Ma-
terial on Shanghai Cinema) 5 (1994), p. 86.
92. It is only fleetingly suggested that the film was an UFA production rather
than a Hollywood film. The fact that the story was set in a "Parisian" the-
ater in the French concession and a European film was shown there indi-
cates that there was a certain measure of resistance to the Hollywood cin-
ema among the intellectuals. In the story, the male character tries to
explain to the girl what UFA was: "UFA is a leading German film maker.
They turn out some excellent films. They're my favorites. I think they're
better than anything that comes out of Hollywood" (p. 28).
93. Morodin could be a misspelling for Ivan Mozhukhin.
94. Zhecun Shi, "At the Paris Theatre," in One Rainy Evening (Beijing: Par_1da/
Chinese Literature Press, 1994), p. 38.
95. Shu-Mei Shi, The Lure of the Modem, pp. 342-54.
96. Cheng Shuren, Zhonghua yingye nianjian, "Zhonghua yingyeshi, • p. 17.
97. See my article, "The Shanghai Factor in Hong Kong Cinema: Historical Per-
spectives: Asian Cinema IO, no.I (Fall 1998): 146-59.
98. Jay Leyda, Dianyin9, pp, 24-27.

99. Thomas Bender, HThe Culture of the MetropolisH (review essay), Journal of
Urban History 14 (1988): 492-93.
100. Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Order-
ing (Loodon and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 6-9. ·
101. La.ikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Cinematic Left-wing Cin-
ema Movement, 1932-1937 (Lanham, Md. and London: Rowman & Little-
field, 2002), p. 166. See Chapter 7 "A Shanghai Cinema or a Chinese Cin-
ema?" for an insightful discussion on the relationship between this cinema
movement and national identity.
102. Li Suyuan and Hu Jubin, WSDYS. pp. 95-96.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Lu Xun, "Shanghai wenyi zhi yipie" (A Glance at the Shanghai Arts), in Lu
Xun quanji, vol. 4, p. 293; HChengzha de fanqi" (The Surfacing of Dregs), Lu
Xun quanji, vol. 4, p. 323.
2. Edward Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century
Chinese Prose (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991 ). Gunn's
purpose is to uncover how •a Chinese educated elite [followed] what they
perceived as the example of foreign nations in creating a national language,
and [to] further [debate] the nature and role of that language in writing as
part of a nation-building enterprise.• See especially chapter 5, ·creative
Stylists in Literature: 1918-42," pp. 95-133. I 371
3. These terms were still relatively new to Chinese filmmakers as they had
only been translated recently. According to Cheng Bugao's account, Zhang
and Zheng's early filming experience was largely improvisational and col-
laborative. A detailed shooting script was an unknown concept until much
later. Zheng's scripts, based on the models of Peking opera and modern spo-
ken drama, consisted of rough outlines of scenarios (mubiao), a11owing
much room for actors' improvisation. See Cheng Bugao, Yin9tanyijiu (Rem-
iniscences of the Old Film World) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1983),
pp. 108-10. See also Kou Tianwu, "Zhongguo dianyingshi shangde 'diyi'"
(The "firsts" in Chinese film history), Yin9shi wenhua, no. 2, 1989, p. 267.
Cheng and Kou give different dates for the "first" full-fledged film script.
Cheng recalls Xia Yan's Torrent (Kuangliu) of 1932 as the first instance of a
real film script, whereas Kou attributes the •first" to Hong Shen's Shen tu shi
published in t 925. It should be noted, however, that a "film script" as such
was also quite a recent development in American film production, and
Zhang was made aware of this through his conversations with a film pro-
fessor from Columbia University who visited Zhang's company in the early
1920s. See Wang Suping, "Zhongguo dianying tuohuangzhede zuji-zaoqi
dianying daoyan tanyilu" (Footprints of the pioneers of Chinese cinema-
Early film directors on their art), Yingshi wenhua no. 2 (1989): 308. I will
discuss in more detail the issue of screenwriting in chapter 5.
4. Gongsun Lu, Zhon99uo dianying shihua, vol. 1: 46-48.
5. See FZS. vol. I, p. 59. To date this work ls the most comprehensive survey
of Chinese cinema up until 1949 but with obvious ideological biases. Tan
Chunfa's book on Zheng Zhengqiu, however, revises this picture. Accord-
ing to his findings, Laborer's Love and The King of Comedy were shown at the
Embassy Theater to a full house. Late arrivals had only standing room. Tan
Chunfa, Kai yidai xianhe, p. 248.
6. See, for instance, the Hong Kong Arts Center and the Hong Kong Chinese
Film Association's Programme for Hong Kong Arts Festival. I 984: Tansuode
niandai-Zaoqi Zhongguo dianyin9 zhan (Early Chinese Cinema: The Era of
Exploration).
7. "Chronotope· is a key concept of Bakhtin's historical poetics. Literally
meaning "time space,• it refers to t.~e "intrinsic connectedness of temporal
and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.• See
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dia/09ica/ Imagination, ed., Michael Holquist; trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
198 l ), p. 84. Although Bakhtin's original idea primarily concerns the novel.
the con(."ept has been widely adopted in critical interpretations of other cul-
tural texts and their relationships to dynamic cultural systems.
8. This "laborer,· as I will show later, is not an idealized proletarian as would
have been pictured by the May Fourth discourse. Rather, as a carpenter
turned fruit vendor. his image comes closer to a typical petty urbanite. Be-
cause he is a returnee from the overseas, this petty urbanite possesses a cos-
mopolitan aura as well.
372 I 9. Back cover of Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1979).
10. Ibid., p. 27.
11. Cheng Shuren, Zhonghua yingye nianjian. p. 179.
12. FZS, vol. 1, pp. 53-54.
13. Tom Gunning, "Film History and Film Analysis: The Individual Film in the
Course of Time," Wide Angle 12, no. 3 (July 1990): 5.
14. Ibid., p. 6.
15. Ibid., pp. 13-14.
16. FZS, vol. 1, pp. 8-9.
17. Translation adapted from Jay Leyda, Electric Shadows, p. 2. The original es-
say in Chinese also contains a description of a film about a train arriving at
a station which "shook the entire room." Youxibao, no. 74 (September 5,
1897).
18. See Yong Li, "Woguo diyizuo yingyuan jin hezai?" (Where is China's First
Movie Theater Today?), Shanghai dianying shiliao (Historical Materials on
Shanghai Cinema) (Shanghai dianyingju shizhi bangongshi, n.d.), no. 5,
pp. 99-100. Years later, Ramos rebuilt it into a concrete structure, expand-
ing the space to hold 710 seats.
19. Liao Ben, Zhon99uo 9udai juchang shi (History of China's Ancient Theaters)
(Zhengzhou: Zhongguo guji, 1997), pp. 92-98.
20. Ibid., p. 160.
21. Ibid., p. 162 ..For the social and political impact the ascendance of modern
playhouse in urban China had on the formation of modern subjectivity, see
Joshua Goldstein, "From Teahouse to Playhouse: Theaters As Social Text in

Early Twentieth-Century China," Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 3 (August
2003}: 753-80.
22. Cheng Bugao, Yingtan yijiu, pp. 84-87.
23. "Chaguan yu yinyue chalou" (Teahouse and music tearoom), in Shan,ghai
chunqiu (Vicissitudes of Shanghai), ed. Tu Shiping (Hong Kong: Zhongguo
tushu jicheng gongsi, 1968). The book appears to be a reprint of Shanghai
da9uan (An Overview of Shanghai) published in Shanghai in the 1940s. For
a brief discussion on the "Hale's Tour Car," see Douglas Gomery, Shared Plea-
sures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 10.
24. Qian Huafuo, Sanshi nian Lai zhi Shanghai, pp. 12-13.
25. See his Xiandai Zhon99uo dianyin9 shi /iie, p. 11.
26. For a fairly comprehensive genealogy and stylistic analysis of shadowplay
in China and its export to foreign countries, see Dong Jingxin, "Zhongguo
yingxi kao" (An Examination of Chinese Shadowplay}, Juxue yuekan 3,
no. 11 (1934): 1-19.
27. Cheng Shuren, "Zhonghua yingye shi" (pp. 1-15), in Zhonghua yingye nian-
jian, ed Cheng Shuren. The original account of the story, "Li furen" (Lady
Li), can be found in Hanshu.
28. For visual illustrations of "leather shadow puppets,· see A Wei, ed., Piyingxi
(Shadowplay) (Beijing: Zhaohua meishu, 1955}. Zhang Yimou's film, To
Live ( 1994), contains vivid scenes of shadowplay and its milieu. I 373
29. Dong Jingxin, "Zhongguo yingxi kao: pp. 5-8. Dong's article also included
a list of some major titles of shadowplay programs, p. 18.
30. ·cong yingxi dao dianying" (From Shadowplay to Cinema), in Shanghai
fengwu zhi (Gazetteer of Shanghai Lore), ed. Wu Qiufang (Shanghai: Shang-
hai wenhua, 1982), p. 256.
31. For a concise history of wenmingxi, see Ouyang Yuqian's memoir ·ran wen-
mingxi· (On the Civilized Play), in Zhongguo huaju yundong wushinian shil-
iaoji (Collection of Historical Materials on Fifty Years of Chinese Spoken
Drama Movement) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1958), vol. l, 48-108.
32. See also Wang Zilong, Zhongguo yingjushi (A History of Chinese Cinema and
Drama) (Taipei: Jianguo, 1950), pp. 1-5.
33. Zhong Dafeng, ·Lun yingxi" (On "shadowplay"), Beijing dianying xueyuan
xuebao, no. 2 (1985}: 54-92, and "Zhongguo dianyingde lishi jiqi geng-
yuan: zallun 'yingxi'" (The History of Chinese Cinema and Its Sources:
Once More on "Shadowplay"), Dianyin9 yishu, no. I ( 1994): 29-35; no. 2
( 1994): 9-14.
34. .Lin Niantong, "Zhongguo dianyingde kongjian yishi" (The Sense of Space
in Chinese Cinema}, Zhongguo dianying yanjiu (Dianying: An Interdiscipli-
nary Journal of Chinese Film Studies) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese
Film Association, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 58-78.
35. Zheng Yimei and Xu Zhuodai, Shanghai jiuhua (Old Shanghai Tales)
(Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua, 1986), p. 112.
36. Yingshi wenhua, no. 2 ( 1989): 302.
37. Gongsun Lu, Zhongguodianyingshihua, vol. l, p. 13.

38. I put quotation marks around narrative because it does not carry the same
meaning as ·narrative cinema" as an established institution. In fact, this
short feature, despite its vague line of causality, was filmed mainly as a
"documentary" presentation. The camera setup is a static long shot. The
whole reel constituted a single long take. "If the reel is finished while the
action or expression [of the actor] has not, the next reel will continue with
the same action." Zhang Shichuan, "Zi wo daoyan yilai."
39. Zhong Dafeng, "Lun 'yingxi,"' p. 63.
40. Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions." p. 64.
41. The popular play was derived from ,Wu Yanren's eponymous story pub-
lished in a literary journal in 1907. Wu deployed first-person narration,
combining Western-style fiction and traditional Chinese st0rytelling to cre-
ate a "true record" incorporating real locations and personalities, a style
popular in late Qing narrative fiction. See Zhang Wei, 'Pilu yijian yanmo le
qishi wuni.ande shishi" (Unveil Historical Evidence Lost for 75 Years), in
Zhongguo jindai wenxue zhengming (Debates on Modern Chinese Literature)
(Shanghai shudian, 1987), vol. l, pp. 159-61.
42. Synopsis in Zhu Tianwei and Wang Zhenzhen, eds., Zhongguo yingpian da-
dian, p. 7.
43. The film (nonextant) premiered at the Embassy Theater and made a huge
profit. Xu Chiheng, "Zhongguo yingxi zhi shuyuan" (Tracing the Origin of
374 I Chinese Shadowplay), in Zhongguo yingxi da9u,m, p. 3.
44. A synopsized script was published in the November issue of Yingxi zazhi in
l 921, which is considered the first text that approximates a script. A detail-
rich story version can be found in Die Lu, Yingxi xiaoshuo sansh izhong
(Thirty Film Stories) {Shanghai: Jinzhi tushuguang, 1925), pp. 117-19. The
film was reported a hit in Beijing as well. An advertisement from Zhongtian
Cinema calls the movie a "picture that sends a warning to the world." It also
stresses the attraction of "real locations" and that the film sets an example
of how Chinese cinema has advanced in recent years. The film was report-
edly shown continuously (with no intermissions) for five days. As late as
1940, the linked play-film was performed at the Xinguang Grand Theater
in Shanghai. The advertisement indicates that Shanghai dialect was used.
Both items are found in the "Yan Ruisheng" folder (no. 121-42) at the
China Film Archive.
45. Shenbao, July 19, 1921. The film was premiered on July 1 and was shown
for a week at rhe Olympic Theater. Judging from the date of this advertise-
ment, the film seemed to be on view in Shanghai beyond July 7. "Baihuali"
and "Fuyuli" mentioned in the list of locations are longtang names.
46. Xu Chiheng, Zhongguo yingxi daguan, p. 3.
47. Note, too, that photography in China at the time was called, via Japanese,
xiezhen (true depiction).
48. Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in his What Is Cin-
ema? vol. 1. p. 15.
49. Ibid., p. 14.
50. He Xiujun thought her husband "went too far" with playing xutou (selling
points) in chis film. Due to its gory details. the film was banned by the mu-
nicipal government. See He Xiujun, "Zhang Shichuan he Mingxing ying-
pian gongsi," in WSDY, p. 1520.
5 l. FZS, vol. l. p. 59.
52. The early 1920s in Chinese history is marked by several important events:
the birth of the Chinese Communist party, and, under the mediation of
Comintern, the first collaboration between Sun Yac-sen's Nationalist party
and the Communist party in order to reclaim power from warlords in a
post-imperial, war-torn China.
53. Thomas Elsaesser, introduction to Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative,
pp. 167-68.
54. Laohuzao (literally, tiger stove) is a rudimentary teahouse with an open
storefront, hereafter referred to as teashop. For more on this particular
Shanghai urban spatial feature and public space in general. see Lu Han-
chao, ·Away from Nanking Road: Small Stores and Neighborhood Life in
Modern Shanghai," Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 1 (1995): 93-123. For a
more detailed description of the teashop in the Republican period, see Bao
Jing, ed., Lao Shanghaijianwen (Impressions of Old Shanghai) (Shanghai:
Shanghai guoguang shudian, 1947), vol. 2, 52-53. Bao depicts the teashop
as a public space patronized mainly by people from the lower social strata.
It functioned as a bathroom in summer and cheap· hotel for the homeless in
winter. Hooligans and thieves also constituted a major clientele. I 375
55. A typical example of this genre is Ruby and Mandy at Coney Island (1903).
56. Hong Shi et al.. "Zhongguo zaoqi gushipian chuangzuo tansuo" (Explo-
rations on the Creation of Early Chinese Narrative Cinema), Dianyin9 yishu,
no. l (1990): 39.
57. For lack of a more pertinent term, leisure class used here refers to a particu-
lar urban social group emergl.ng in the Chinese cities around the turn of last
century. They include gangsters, dandies, gamblers, high-class prostitutes,
and those who ran the mass entertainment establishments. Shanghai di·
alect has a particular word for this group: baixian9ren (people who play).
58. For the original use of the concept bricoleur in anthropological theory, see
Claude Levi-Strauss. The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966), pp. 16-33. The term is first used in film history by Alan Williams to
describe the heterogeneity of the origins of cinema as a cultural and tech-
nological medium. See his Republic of Images: A Histo1y of French Filmmaking
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 8-9.
59. Thomas Elsaesser, "Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema" in
Cinema Histories I Cinema Practices, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Los Angeles:
AFI, 1984), pp. 76-78.
60. In addition, Zheng Zhenqiu's role as the doctor is also suggestive of his fam-
ily background in the pharmaceutical (and sometimes opium) business; his
other given name is Yaofeng. which has a reference to medicine (yao). Such
self-referential practice (characters assuming the same last names of the ac-
tors) continued well into the 1930s, as in Big Road (1934), for example.
61. For a historical investigation of the Chinese communities in that region, see
Maurice Freedman, "The Chinese in Southeast Asia: A Longer View,• in The
Study ofChinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman (Palo Alto. Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1979}. For a rich cultural history of the Chinese diaspora
as a whole, see Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: The Story of the Overseas
Chinese (London: Secker and Warburg, 1990).
62. Film magazines often carried news and serious articles on the subject. See,
for example, Huo Wenzhi, "Yingpian gongxiao tan" (On Film's Function),
Dianyin9 zazhi, no. 6, 1924, in which he relates the impact of a documen-
tary film on Shanghai Jingwu Martial Arts Society on the Chinese audience
in Singapore. Gu Jiancheng, "Guozhifingpian yu .Nanyang huaqiao" (Do-
mestic Films and Overseas Chinese in Nanyang), Mingxin9 tekan no. 16: Tade
ton9ku (Mingxing special issue, no. 16, Her Sorrows), 1926 And Wu Xi wen,
"Guochan yingpian yu Nanyang wenhua" (Chinese Film and Nanyang cul-
ture), Zhongnan qingbao 2, no. 2 (Mar. 1935): 20-22.
63. Ma Junxiang, "Zhongguo dianying qingxiede qipao xian" (The Slanting
Starting Line of Chinese Cinema). Dianying yishu, no. l ( 1990): 9.
64. Miriam Hansen, "Adventures of Goldilocks: Spectatorship, Consumerism
and Public Life,• Camera Obscura 22, no. 2 (January 1990): 57.
CHAPTER FOUR
C. J. North, "The Chinese Motion Picture Market,N Trade information Bul-
376 1 letin, no. 467 (United States Deparunent of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign
and Domestic Commerce, May 4, 1927}. Using a tanner's yard as a theater,
and with the projector perched on a pile of books atop a shaky table, the
exhibition situation was certainly more congenial to the teahouse mode
than that of the movie-only theater with its dark and luxury interior. Such
discrepancy shows the unevenness of the moviegoing experience in China
at the time. Despite the penetration of cinema into the rural area, full-
fledged movie theaters were concentrated in major urban centers.
2. Ibid., foreword.
3. Ibid., p. 2.
4. Michael Walsh, "No Place for a White Man: United Artists' Far East De-
partment: 1922-1929," Asian Cinema 7, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 20, 30.
5. North's report cites an embarrassing episode illustrating this problem. At a
theater "catering to the poorer, uneducated Chinese, [t]he picture was a
foreign comedy with the captions, shop-front lettering, etc., all reading
backward, the film evidently having been incorrectly inserted in the pro-
jector. However, no one seemed to notice the difference and the film was
not changed throughout the performance.• "The Chinese Motion Picture
Market: pp. 15-16.
6. Michael Walsh, "No Place for a White Man: p. 3 l.
7. Ibid.
8. Yingxichunqiu, no. 5 (1925): 6, 9, 14.
9. Ibid., p. 2.
10. Ibid., p. 5.
11. The Ramos Amusement Co., being an agent for Famous Players-Lasky, was
also the chief broker of cheap American films and contributed directly to
th.e rampant presence of American films in China. Ramos paid only a flat
rate of 150 silver dollars per print for films that were at least two years old.
"Famous Players were getting something for nothing-picking up cash for
old prints in a territory that thus far they had no interest in exploiting
themselves." See Walsh, "No Place for a White Man," p. 21. One might in-
fer that his retirement also meant a diminished market for the American
products.
12. Bu Jiangjun, "Zhongyang daxiyuan kaimu zhishen.· Dianying zhoubao,
no. l ( 1925): 13. The theater had been an important forum for the civilized
play and modern Peking opera performances.
13. "Shanghai dianying faxing fangyinye yaoshi Ju" (A Record of the Important
Events in Film Distribution and Exhibition in Shanghai), Shanghai dianying
shiliao 5 (1994), pp. 113, 115.
14. Wu Guifang ed., Shanghai fengwuzhi, pp. 258-59.
15. GJN. p. 18.
16. For a sampling of these reports, see Cheng Shuren, Zhonghua yingye nian-
jian, section on "Guochan yingpian xiaolu zhi baogao" (Reports of Chinese
Pictures from Foreign Markets).
17. Wang Ruiyong. "Shanghai yingyuan bianqian Ju" (A Record of the Changes
in Shanghai Cinema Theaters) Shanghai dianying shiliao 5 (1994): 82-98.
Specific addresses of the venues are also given though many of them are no I 377
longer standing. Odeon was among a sizable number of theaters destroyed
by Japanese bombing in 1932.
18. C. J. North. "The Chinese Motion Picture Market," p. 15.
19. Siegfried Kracauer, "Cult of Distraction: On Berlin's Picture Palaces," The
Mass Ornament, pp. 323-24.
20. Xu Chiheng, Zhon99uo yingxi daguan (ads unpaginated).
21. Kracauer, "Cult of Distraction," p. 325.
22. Xu Chiheng, Zhongguo yingxi daguan, section on "Theater Companies-Chi-
nese Management," p. l. Entering the theater was, as described by a jour-
nalist of the time, like entering a "palace." Its facade was built with "man-
made stones" (renzao shi), "strong and elegant"; the interior was decorated
with numerous plaster statues (Shenbao, August 8, 1926).
23. The term is borrowed from Jonathan Crary, "Unbinding Vision: Manet and
the Attentive Observer in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Cinema and the
Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney et al., pp. 46-71. Crary is con-
cerned with a perceptual tension imbued in the discourse on visual atten-
tion against the backdrop of modernity in late nineteenth century Paris. I
find his take on the problem germane to the issue here, namely, the am-
biguous relation between indulgence of visual pleasure and the need to dis-
cipline or "direct" that pleasure. The effect is an attention that constantly
vacillates between ephemeral immobilization and persistent distraction.
24. Jianyun, "Dao yan" (introduction), Chengxing Gu'er jiuzuji tekan (Morning
Star's Special issue on Orphan Rescues Grandfather (Chengshe, 1923), p.3.
25. The film is not extant. See original synopsis and dialogues in the "special is-
sue· mentioned above. The series was edited by Ren Jinping, chair of the
society and director of publicity for Mingxing. A modified script appears in
Ah Ying, ed., Zhon99uo xinwenxue daxi (A Comprehensive Collection of Chi~
nese New Literature) ( l 927-37), vol. 13 (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi.
1987).
26. Gu Jianchen, "Zhongguo dianying fada shi" (A History of the Development
of Chinese Film), in Cheng Shuren, ed. Zhon9hua yin9ye nianjian (Yearbook
of Chinese Film). Shanghai. 1934.
27. Xu Chiheng, Zhongguo yingxi daguan, pp. 6-9.
28. The film was reportedly shown in Sha'nghai, Nantong, and Nanjing and was
brought to New York as well (.FZS. pp. 41-24). See also Ouyang Yuqian,
"Dianying banlu chujia ji" (Entering cinema halfway), Dianying yishu, no. 3
(1959): 70-74, 80.
29. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yanxi yilai (Since I Started Acting) (Beijing: Zhong·
guo xiju, 1959), pp. 91-94.
30. Hu Die, Yin9hou shengya. pp. 16-21. In the same year, a young American
woman, a certain Miss Bailey, briefly ran a film school in Shanghai. Her
major Chinese collaborator was Zhang Shewo, a prominent Butterfly writer
who was also an aficionado of Western drama; see Xu Chiheng. Zhongguo
yingxi daguan, p. 8. Some of the students were later employed to play roles
in some films made by the British-American Tobacco Co. (FZS, p. 124).
378 I 31. Yingxichunqiu, no. 4 (1925): 15.
32. Yingxi chunqiu, no. 5 (1925): 17. In the same "Replies· column in that issue
there is another letter from Chinese students in Berlin who praised theed-
itors' effort to promote new Chinese culture and arts and offered to help to
make Chinese film known to the Europeans. The editors wrote back with
gratitude and a request for reciprocal information about foreign film cul-
ture (18-19).
33. Recruitment advertisement in Dianyin9 zazhi. no. 6 ( 1924).
34. Zhou Jianyun and Wang Xuchang, "Yingxi gailun" (An Introduction to
Shadowplay), LLWX, vol. 1. p. 11.
35. The school address (Gengqin alley on Xinzha Road) appears to have been
the same as the film company. which later moved to a larger location. It
is possible the school was part of the fund-raising campaign to set up the
new company. See Cheng Shuren, "Specialists Trained Abroad (p. 1), in
0
his Zhonghua yingye nianjian. For more on Shengzhou. see the section on
"Hushang ge zhipian gongsi zhi chuangli shi ji jinguo" (The History of the
Founding of Film Companies in Shanghai), in Xu Chiheng. Zhongguo yingxi
daguan, pp. 10-l l.
36. Zhou and Wang, "Yingxi gailun," p. 13. Li Suyuan points out that the con-
fusion of naming at that period should alert us to the fact that "it is not the
naming per se, but rather people's perception of the cinema at that time,
that is the point of departure of our research on Chinese early cinema.· Li
Suyuan, "Guanyu Zhongguo zaoqui Li Lun" (On Early Chinese Film The-
ory), Dangdai dianyin9, no. 4 ( 1994): 23.
37. This probably explains why the so-called expressive drama (biaoqing ju,
which literally means "facial expression drama") is listed in the chart be-
low as an immediate antecedent, a[ter vernacular modern drama, to the
shadowplay.
38. Zhou and Wang, "Yingxi gailun," p. 14.
39. Gu I<engfu, • Yingxi zazhi fakanci." The quotations here are from the full text
collected in LI-WX, pp. 3-10.
40. The primary place given to acting is pertinent to the early experiments that
relied heavily on actors' improvising and formulaic performance at once.
Gu himself was also a teacher at the Mingxing Film School. He joined the
Da Zhonghua Company as director In 1924 and began to edit Dianying zazhi.
41. There is no better example than the docudramatic film Yan Ruisheng (1921)
which Gu participated in making.
42. Gu I<engfu, "Yingxi zazhi fakanci, • p. 9.
43. The attention paid to psychology and neurology is hardly surprising given
the fact that Freudian psychoanalytical theory and other schools of psy-
chology had been widely translated into Chinese in this period. For a study
on the introduction of psychoanalysis in China and its influence on literary
discourse, see Jingyuan Zhang, Psychoanalysis in China: Literary Transforma-
tions 1919-1949 {Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1992). Ber-
trand Russell's visit to China and his lectures on "The Analysis of Mind" de-
livered in Beijing in 1920 triggered widespread interest in psychology and
behaviorism (pp. 10-13). I 379
44. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," pp. 325-26.
45. Zhou and Wang, "Yingxi gailun," p. 17; emphasis added.
46. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, pp. 20-23.
47. Chen Shouying, '"Kan jingtou' yu 'dui jingtou' zuoxi" {Looking at the
Camera or Acting to the Camera), Dianying zazhi, no. 13 ( 1925).
48. Zhou and Wang, "Yingxi gailun: p. 18.
49. Ibid., pp.18-19.
50. Hu Die recalls that in order to learn how to drive a car, she and another
actress-to-be Xu Qinfang. who later became a popular martial-arts film star,
had the ingenious idea of renting a taxi. then asking the cab driver to take
them to the suburbs. There they let the driver ·rest" in the back seat while
they practiced driving. Afterwards they paid the driver double the fare. Hu
Die, Yin9hou shen9ya, p. 21.
51. Zhou and Wang. "Yingxi gailun," p. 19.
52. In his introduction to the special issue for Orphan Rescues Grandfather, Zhou
Jianyun offers a few concrete examples of "national" approaches, more in
terms of screen realism than political doctrine. He contends that, because
not all Chinese wear Western suits, it is not necessary to have actors wear
them regardless of situations. Similal'ly, Chinese gardens deserve to be used
as locations and filmed for their elegant beauty. Gu'er jiuzuji tekan (Special
Issue on Orphan Rescue, Grandfather) {Mingxing Company, 1923}, p. 4.
53. Zhou and Wang, "Yingxi gailun," pp. 21-22.
54. Ibid., p. 23.
55. Ibid.
56. See Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Pos1(e)-Peda9ogy from Jacques
Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), pp. 173, 179. The last chapter, "Film: Sergei Eisenstein," deals more
directly with the implication of film and other visual or electronic media for
"applied grammatology" as a popular pedagogy {pp. 265-315).
57. Tan Xinpai's art, as mentioned earlier, was made into the first Chinese-pro-
duced film at the Fengtai Photo Studio in Beijing in I 905. In 1920, another
famous Peking opera actor Mei Lanfang came to Shanghai to perform and
happily accepted the invitation from the Commercial Press Film Depart-
ment to film some episodes of the pl.iys he was performing. See Mei Lan-
fang, Wode dianying shenghuo (My Film Life) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying,
1962), pp. 3-10. ln 1923 and 1924, Mei was involved in a number of more
"sophisticated" filming projects of his art. In his memoir he recalls the prob-
lems he had with the filming crew as he could not accept at first their
method of "chopping up" his continuous movement and singing. When a
dance episode from Farewell My Concubine was filmed in a theater in Beijing,
he told the cameraman that they should "try to make the film look con-
nected even though it is actually shot in fragments." •Just like a puzzle can
be put together from disparate pieces and look complete (p. 14).
58. Furen ruzi refers to uneducated people as a whole. It is characteristic of the
Confucian doctrine to equate the •uncultivated" men with women and
380 I children who are almost by definition ignorant because of illiteracy and low
social status within the patrilineal system.
59. This echoes the educational aim of the early production policy of the Com-
mercial Press Film Department. In 1926, during the heyday of commercial
cinema, the film department was disassociated from the press and became
the Guoguang Company, which made five narrative films before closing
down in 1927 (FZS. pp. 39-40).
60. Xu Chiheng, Zhongguo yingxi daguan, pp. l 0-11.
61. See, for example, Sun Shiyi, "Yingju zhi yishu jiazhi yu shehui jiazhi" (The
Artistic Value Versus the Social Value of Cinema), "Wang xiacheng de
yingju" (The Cinema that Caters to the Lower Strata), and Jin Cao, "Zhong-
guo dianying yu yiShu" (Chinese Cinema and Art), all collected in LLWX,
pp. 69'--71, 76-80, 90-96. I have encountered countless articles in the
early film magazines that actively participated in this public discourse for
establishing cinema's social and cultural legitimacy.
62. Gu'er jiuzu ji tekan (Mingxing Company, 1923), pp. 6-8. Notably, Zhou
Jianyun, one of the authors of Introduction, co-wrote the intertitles with
Zheng Zhengqiu.
63. Zheng Zhengqiu, "Fenmochang zhongde zahuodian• (The Grocery Store in
the World of Theater), cited in GJN, p. 74.
64. LLWX, pp. 66-68. The article was originally published in Shanghai yi [uren
tekan (Special Catalogue for A Woman of Shanghai) by the Mingxing Com-
pany in July 1925.
65. Several Chinese workers were locked out by a Japanese-owned textile mill
during a strike. One worker was killed in the protest, which quickly ignited
a mass rally on the Nanjing Road. The demonstration was met with violent
suppression by the .B.ritish controlled police force. For an account of the in·
cident, see Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 340.
CHAPTER FIVE
l. Jian Sheyu, ·Guan Mingxing shezhi zhi Guer jiuzuji" (Watching Orphan Res-
cues Grandfather by the Star Company), Ziyoutanfukan (The Free Conversa-
tions Supplement) Shenbao, December 26, 1923.
2. A practice that bears some resemblance to the commedia dell'arte" in Italy
0
of the Renaissance period. For a definition of "commedia dell'arte," see Karl

Beckson and Arthur Ganz, A Reader's Guide to Literary Terms (New York: The
Noonday Press, 1960), pp. 30-31.
3. Some chief polemics against the Butterfly fiction by Lu Xun, Qu Qiubai,
Mao Dun and others, as well as the defenses made by the popular writers
are collected in Wei Shaochang, ed., Yuanyang hudie pai yanjiu ziliao, vol. 1.
4. Bao Tianxiao, "Wo yu dianying" (The Cinema and I). Chuanying/ou huiyi Ju
(Hong Kong: Dahua, 197 l ), pp. 95-96.
5. A Hollywood film would have indicated one as the story creator and the
other as the screenwriter. In the Chinese case, there was actually a third
writer credited-the calligrapher who rendered the intertitles.
6. Zhou Jianyun and Cheng Bugao, Bianjuxue (The Science of Screenwriting),
in LLWX. pp. 35-46. Zhou also coauthored the Introduction to the course lit· I 381
erature discussed in chapter 4. Cheng was one of Mingxing's leading direc-
tors and cinematographers.
7. Ibid., 38; emphasis added. See also Wang Fangzheng, "Zhuanshu zimude
yidian xiao jingyan" (Some Experiences on Composing Intertitles), Dian-
ying zhoubao, 3 ( 1925): 9. Wang proposes that the writing style of intertitles
for each film should be consistent, and attentive to the educational level
and regional specificity of the audiences. On the whole, however, Wang is
inclined toward simpler language, especially for the sake of "women and
children" who detest (or ignore) long and difficult intertitles.
8. This is also true of the mov.iegoing experience of the period. Mr. Shu Yan,
a former critic, told me that while the literate and literary people cmdd get
a concise synopsis (or shuomingshii, pamphlet of explication) written in an
ornate mixed classical and vernacular (buwen bubai) Butterfly style lan-
guage in the theater lobby, most women and illiterate spectators enjoyed
the loud, colorful, and exaggerated commentary of the "explicator." In
other words, the combination of different forms of verbal production par-
alleled the heterogeneity of the audiences with different degrees of access
to language and representation.
9. Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899-1918
(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 5.
l 0. Ibid., p. 12. The term contact zone is developed by Mary Louise Pratt in her
book, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1992).
l l. Lydia Liu, Translingi,al Praclice: Lilerature, National Culture, and Translated

Modernity, China, 1900-1937 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995).
12. Xu's stage name is Xu Banmei. He went to Japan to study physical educa-
tion and founded China's first institute of physical education after return-
ing to China. After several years in the theater, he and Wang Youyou
founded the Kaixin {Fun] Film Company in 1925, which specialized in
physical comedies. For more on his background in the theater see his Huaju
shichuangqi huiyilu (Memoir of the Beginning of Chinese Spoken D.rama)
(Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1957).
13. The book, like most theoretical texts on .film at the time, was based on
translations and compilations of Wesihn and Japanese sources, but was
also heavily inflected by the author's own opinions. Xu Zhuodai, Yingxi xue
(Shanghai: Huax:ian shangyeshe tushubu, 1924). Hou Yao. Yingxi juben
zuofa (Shanghai: Taidong tushuju, 1925).
14. Sannian yihou, Minxin tekan (Minxin special issue on Three Years Later), no. 4,
December 1926.
15. For a definition of the soul and its two components hun (the sentient ani-
mal soul) and po (the after-birth personality), see Wolfram Eberhard, A Dic-
tionary ofChinese Symbols (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 270-71. For a nu-
anced anthropological study of this subject, especially regarding the
·number• of souls and its relationship to personality, see Stevan Harrell,
"The Concept of Soul in Chinese Folk Religion,· Journal of Asian Studies 38,
382 I no. 3 (May 1979): 519-28. The play that best exemplifies the importance
of the soul in traditional Chinese drama is Tang Xianzu's Peony Pavilion of
the late Ming period.
16. See Anders Hansson, Chinese Outcasts: Discrimination and Emancipation in Late
Imperial China (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996 ), especially Chapter 3, • Musicians'
Households."
17. Lu Xun, "Shexi," in Lu Xun quanji (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1981 ), vol. I,
pp. 559-70. Interestingly, Lu Xun preferred the open-air rural theater to
the cramped theater house in the city. In his description of the theater, he
mentioned seeing ghost characters from a famous Buddhist tale. See also
David Johnson's discussion on the pedagogical function of the theater in
David Johnson et al., eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985).
18. Ouyang Yuqian, Zi wo yanxi yilai, p. 59. In this memoir, he also recalls how
his childhood penchant for acting was influenced by the leather-puppet
shadowplay (p. 4).
19. Lu Xun, "Lun Zhaoxiang zhilei· (On Photography, etc.), in Lu Xun quanji,
vol. 1, pp. 181-90.
20. The association of new electronic media with paranormal and spiritual phe-
nomena is not unique to China. For a brilliant study on the subject in the
American context, see Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from
Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). The Chinese
responses indicated, however, a certain anxiety about Western incursions
on both Chinese territories and traditions.
21. FZS, p. IO. However, Cixi was a big fan of photography. As the most pow·
erful imperial sitter who loved huazhuang xiang (makeup portraits, mean·
ing the sitter poses as a dramatic character), her photos circulated widely
among the general populace. See Ma Yunzeng et al., Zhongguo sheyingshi:
1840-1937 (A History of Photography in China) (Beijing: Zhongguo she-
ying, 1987), pp. 63-64. A contemporary poem also recorded Cixi's photo
sessions in the court, in which she appeared as Guan yin (a female Buddha).
See Liu Lu ed., Qinggong cixuan (Selected Ci Poetry from the Qing Court)
(Beijing: Zijincheng, 1985), pp. 101-2
22. Hou Yao, Yingxi juben zuofa, p. I.
23. The script of The Abandoned Wife includes 136 scenes that are not divided
down to shots. They are organized a<.-cording to interior scenes and on lo-
cation exterior scenes.
24. Xu's view is strikingly similar to that of Paul Wegener, also screenwriter and
star of Student of Prague. For a persuasive account of Wegener's view on the
uniqueness of the cinema and the importance of its cinematographic prop-
erties, as opposed to drama and literature, see Kristin Thompson, • Im An-
fang War ... Some Links between German Fantasy Films of the Teens and
the Twenties,· in Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895-1920, ed. Paolo Cher-
chi Usai (Pordenone, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto and Edi:zioni Bib-
lioteca deU'Immagine, 1990), pp. 138-61.
25. This resolution has affinity to Chinese Buddhist notions of the soul, which,
in one interpretation. passes through several purgatories and then reaches I 383
a dark room where it has to look for a skin so that it can be reborn (Eber-
hard, p. 271). In other words, the skin may be seen as a kind of "shadow"
in which the soul seeks appearance and life, illusive as it may again be.
26. I<racauer, "Photography," p. 430.
27. Annette Michelson, "The Art of Moving Shadows," in The Art of Moving
Shadows, catalogue of the exhibition ·on the Art of Fixing a Shadow, 7
May-30 July 1989," ed. Annette Michelson (Washington D.C.: National
Gallery of Art, 1989), p. 16.
28. Xu Zhuodai, The Science of Shadowplay, p. 68.
29. Ibid., pp. 9, 75. In one instance, almost the entire cast and the production
personnel have ying (shadow) in their first name, as would siblings in a
large Chinese family. In fact, yingren (the people of shadows) has always
been a common appellation for people involved in the film world.
30. Lu Xun, "Lun zhaoxiang zhilei," in Lu Xun quanji, vol. 1, pp. 183-85. Lu
Xun further remarked that when the •self-begging picture" disappeared
and the photograph only showed the awe-inspiring face, he could not help
but think that this was only the half of the self-begging-the-self picture, as
the other self was rendered invisible.
31. Homi Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and
Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817," in "Race: Writing, and
Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. 1986), p. 175.
32. Tom Gunning, "Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Pho-
tography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography's Uncanny," in Fugi-

tive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1995), p. 67.
33. On the kinship between photography and cinema, and the play or tension
between stillness and movement, beginning with Lumiere's first screening.·
in 1895, see Patrick Loughney, "Still Images in Motion: The Influence of
Photography in the Early Silent Period," and Annette Michelson, ·The Art
of Moving Shadows," both in The Art of Moving Shadows, ed. Michelson.
34. Eduardo Cadava, "Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History,"
in Fugitive Images, ed. Patrice Petro, p. 226.
35. FZS, p. 91. /
36. Guy de Maupassant, "The Diamond Necklace," in Selected Tales of Guy De
Maupassant. ed. Saxe Commins (Random House, 1950), pp. 137-44.
37. The French catalogue for the 1982 retrospective show of Chinese cinema,
Ombres ilectriques, has this film at the very beginning, calling it "le plus an-
cien film chinois qui ait ete conserve, et par chance ii est absolument im-
peccable." The observation of A String of Pearls as an "impeccable" work of
art, however, is suggestive of its narrative artfulness and skillful cinematic
techniques. The catalogue also describes the "modern style" of the interti-
tles in the cards with text in English, which "ne manquent pas de charme"
(p. 7).
38. Karl Marx, Capital (New York: lnternational, 1977), vol. L pp. 74-75.
384 I 39. W. J. T. Mitchell, lconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1986}, p. 193.
40. As quoted in Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon, p. 188.
41. Miriam Hansen, "Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida,
Kracauer," New German Critique 56 (Spring/Summer 1992): 48-9. Hansen's
reading of the "scriptural" patterning in Griffith's Intolerance provides a good
example here. She argues that the disguising of the script (writing) as a
pure image in the film is connected to the "forgetting" of the historical tran-
sition from image to writing. It is symptomatic of the "reification of mimetic
capacities under the universal law of commodity culture." Paradoxically, it
also constitutes the "very condition" of decipherment. Babel and Babylon,
p. 192.
42. Annette Michelson, "The Art of Moving Shadows," p. 16.
43. Rachel 0. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2000), p. 10.
44. Hou Yao, Yingxijuben zuofa, p. 54.
45. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New American Library,
1953 (1899]), p. 126.
46. Hou Yao, "Yichuan zhenzhu de sixiang" (The ldeas in A String of Pearls),
Yichuan zhenzhu, a special issue of the Great Wall Motion Picture Company
productions, Shanghai, 1926; reprinted in WSDY, pp. 299-300.
47. Li Suyuan, "Zhongguo zaoqi dianyingde xushi moshi" (The Narrative Par-
adigm of Early Chinese Cinema), Dangdai dianying, no. 3 ( 1993): 32-3.
48. For an insightful analysis of European avant-garde and modernist film the-
ory's relation to primitivism. see Rachel Moore. Savage Theo1y, chapter l.

"The Moderns."
49. Yang Liansheng, ·The Concept of 'Pao· as a Basis for Social Relations in
China,• in Chinese Thought and Institutions. ed. John I<. Fairbank (C.hicago:
University of Chicago Press. 1957), pp. 5-8; 49. See also Paul Varo Martin-
son, "Pao Order and Redemption: Perspectives on Chinese Society and Re-
lation Based on a Study of the Chin P'ing Mei," Ph.D. diss., University of
Chicago, 1973.
50. Yang Liansheng, "The Concept of 'Pao,' p. 6.
0
51. Several scholars have pointed to the great impact Buddhist narrative and
arts had on Chinese literature and other arts. See, for example. Victor H.
Mair. Tang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise
of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East
Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1989).
52. See Perry Link, M£indarin Ducks and Butterflies, pp. 196-235.
53. Chow goes on to say, A mode of narration that invites disbelief by inflat-
0
ing a society's addictive ideologies (such as fatalism) to such melodramatic

proportions is fundamentally dangerous for the society." Rey Chow, Woman
and Chinese Modernity, p. 65.
54. A prominent example is Wu Yanren's story Heiji yuanhun (1907), which
was adapted to theater and film as discussed in chapter 3. Despite the "real
record" (shilu) style of the main story, its prelude uses a popular contem-
porary legend of retribution concerning the angry soul of a Buddha, who I 385
allowed his and other statues in a Tibetan temple to be melted for minting
money by the Qing army in dire need. Transmigrating back to India and
waiting in vain for the Chinese to replace the statues, the Buddha reincar-
nated as poppies and then opium to inundate China as a way of retrieving
the overdue debt. See Zhang Wei. Pilu yijian yamno le qishi wuniande
0
shishi."
55. The film had another title, Way Down West, which was meant to be a coun-
terpart to Griffith's Way Down East. For a list of Griffith's films shown in
China in the mid- I 920s, see Zheng Junli, Xiandai zhongguo dianying shi/iie,
pp. 38-9.
56. The prominent Zhang family of Cantonese origin comprised of eleven
brothers with the same father but different mothers. It is thus not mere co-
incidence that the film is about ·brothers feuding over treasure. The fifth
0
brother in the family. Zhang Huichong, had his own company and is known
as the first martial-arts film star. The seventh, Zhang Darning, was the no-
torious ex-husband of the legendary actress Ruan Llnyu who committed
suicide in 1935, largely due to the scandalous unresolved legal battle be-
tween her and Zhang.
57. Yu is played by Wu Suxin, Zhang's girlfriend in real life. She played almost
all the female leading roles in Huaju productions from 1927 to I 931. The
title card introduces her role as "the cohabitant 'wife' of Xin and the two
did not have an official wedding." Tongju (cohabitation) was a vogue among
young people who considered themselves to be moderns. They chose ·ro-
mantic and free love" as a prc>test against the feudal practice of arranged
marriage. See Roxane Witke, "Transformation of Attitudes Towards Women
During the May Fourth Era of Modern China,• PhD. diss., University of
California-Berkeley, 1970, especially chapter 5, "Free love and Marriage.•
58. The mise-en-scene here is very similar to the "theft" scene in A String of
Pearls, except here the sleeping figures are not of a couple, but two young
women. Thus the loss of the pearls is not associated with a family problem
that would need to be solved as in the other film.
59. Ben Singer, "Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama: The Etiology
of an Anomaly,• in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut-
gers University Press, 1996 ), p. 166. For, more extensive study on the sub-
ject, see his book, Melodrama and Modernity.
60. Ben Singer, "Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama, pp. 169-170.
0
61. Tom Gunning, • 'Now You See It, Now You Don't': The Temporality of the
Cinema of Attractions,• in Silent Film, ed Richard Abel, p. 75.
62. V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1968), especially chapter 3, "The Function of Dramatis Per-
sonae: pp. 25-65.
63. See Alan Dundes's introduction to Morphology of the Folktale, Ibid .. xii-xiv.
64. Unlike Lustrous Pearls, this film about treasure hunting begins with a single
hero who bids farewell to his "sister" (girlfriend) and leaves for a mine far
away. The "national treasure," which remained a phantom object in the
386 I film, is only nominally present in a treasure chart, stolen and found after
many tribulations. Before he founded his own company, Zhang .Huichong
was a sailor on a freight ship and then a major actor in the film department
at the Commercial Press from 1922 to 1924, where he received his training
as an actor and a film entrepreneur. In his memoir Gong Jianong describes
Zhang Huichong as the first versatile modern film actor who could ride a
horse, drive a car, and swim, in addition to having a magician's hand. After
gambling all his fortune away he led a small circus and performed in the
Nanyang region. According to Gong, Zhang founded his company with his
share of his father's inheritance (GJN, pp. 83-84).
65. Tianyi's productions as a whole (especially the "classical costume drama•
and the "martial arts genre) enjoyed most popularity among the Nanyang
0
diaspora communities in the 1920s. In 1936, its headquarters moved to

Hong Kong before the Japanese invasion. In 1937, its name was aptly
changed to the Nanyang Film Company. In 1950, it was renamed Shao Fa-
ther and Sons. In 1957, the two younger brothers, Shao Yifu and Shao
Renmei, who had been running a distribution company in Singapore and
Malaysia, returned to Hong Kong to found the Shao Brothers (Hong Kong)
and instituted the Cantonese language production group. Shao Father and
Sons limited its business to theater management and distribution from that
point on. See Du Yunzhi, Shaoshi dianyin9 wangguo mixin (The Secrets of the
Shaos' Film Kingdom) (Taipei: Ni wo ta dianshi zazhishe, 1979). Du's oral
history reveals many details of the competition and In-fights between the
brothers and their sons over the decades, which were exacerbated by the
destruction of film vaults by fire,
66. For a synopsis of the film, see WSDYJB, pp. 1603-4. It was a common prac-
tice for competing companies to make films with same (or similar) _titles,
based on the same (or similar) stories, Many commercial wars were waged
over the so-called twin cases (shuangbao an). In 1932, under the influence
of the left-wing cinema, Tianyi also adapted Maupassant's "Necklace" into
One Night Glamour ( Yiye haohua).
67. Marshall Berman, All That ls Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(New York: Penguin Books, 1982). The original phrase is from Karl Marx's
Communist Manifesto.
68. This pedagogical moment also suggests the persistent influence of some
early cinematic genres such as educational documentaries about plants,
minerals, and bacteria that were also modern attractions.
69, Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller." in Illuminations, p. 87.
70. Tian Han, "Yige weiwanchengde yingsede meng-Dao minjian qu" (An
Unfinished Silver Dream: Going to the People) in his Wangshi zhuihuailu (Bei-
jing: Zhongguo dianying, 1981 ), pp. 2-7. The films discussed here are not
extant. My discussion is based on the written sources.
71. WSDYJB, pp. 934-30 (originally published in Shenbao, Ben9fu zengkan (local
supplement), May 14, 1926.
72. As we shall see in chapter 7, Tian Han becomes a driving force in the left-
wing cinema of the 1930s, which was overwhelmingly devoted to the cause I 387
of mobilizing the people for patriotic causes.
73. Its antecedent may be found in Zhang Huichong's Seizing a National Treasure
mentioned above. In it the girl surprises the spectator by turning herself
into a supple and smart heroine who rescues the hero trapped under a huge
bronze clock.
74. The idea of "types" as opposed to characters is in part inspired by Tom Gun-
ning's paper, "Pathe and Cinematic Conte-Tale: Storytelling in Early Cin-
ema." presented at the fourth DOMITOR Conference, Paris, Dec. 1996.
CHAPTER SIX
I. Shenguai has also been translated literally as "gods and monsters," I choose
"magic spiritH for the visual spectacle it created and the important associa-
tions it had with contemporary discourses on magic.
2. WSDYS, p. 239.
3. In the genre's early stage, Tianyi, enticed by business opportunities in the
diaspora, merged with a Nanyang distribution company (headed by Cheng
Bilin) to form Tianyi-Qingnian. They produced a great number of "classical
costume" films that were both shown domestically and exported to
Nanyang. The collaboration ended in 1928 when Tianyi began to have di-
rect control in the region. Tianyi's expansion into Nanyang was largely trig-
gered by the competition between Tianyi and the Liuhe consortium. The
latter, under the shrewd management of Zhou Jianyun, recruited the
influential Nanyang distributor Wang Yuting and formed a virtual sanction

aga.inst Tianyi. See Du Yunzhi. Shaoshi dianyin9 wan99uo mixin, pp. 26-17;
30-33. See also Tong Gong, ·wuhu huoshao" (Alas, Fire), YXSJ-J L no. 18
( 1931): 2. Tong Gong is critical of the way Nanyang distributors manipu-
lated the price of martial arts films, reinforcing competition and the genre's
mass production.
4. See for instances, Tong Gong, "Wuhu huoshao, • and Li Changjian, "Sheng-
guaipian zhen hairen" (The Magic-Spirit Film Is Really Harmful), YXSH 1,
no. 7 ( 1931 ): 1O. The Emei Mountain in Sichuan province is a famous pil-
grimage site and one of the favorite destinations for these escapades.
5. For instance, some viewers would start bulning incense and bowing to the
image of Ne Zha (a mythic child hero in Fen9shen9 bang) appearing on the
silver screen. Huang Yicuo, "Guochan yingpiande fuxin wenti" (The Prob-
lem of Reviving the Domestic Cinema), Yin9xi zazhi, 1: 7/8 (June 1930): 24.
The specific film referred to here is The Birth of Ne Zha (Ne Zha chushi,
Changcheng, 1928).
6. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations,
pp. 261-62.
7. One fan described Xia Peizhen, who starred in Burning, as a typical modem
woman with a masculine aura. See, Jiang Zhenxin, "Xiandai nii dianxing-
Xia Peizhen" (A Typical Modern Woman-Xia Peizhen) YXSH 1, no. 16
( 1931 ): I 0. Another fan was particularly impressed by Wu Lizhu, the "ori-
388 1 ental Fairbanks," and considered her martial skills "authentic." Han Chao,
"Tan guochan wuxiapian" (On the Domestically Made Martial Arts Film),
YXSH l, no. 29 (1931): 2-3.
8. Rick Altman, An Introduction to the Theory of Genre Analysis,· American
H
Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 9; l-2.

9. Stuart Kaminsky and Jeffrey Mahan, American Television Genres (Chicago:
Nelson-Hall, 1986), p. 17.
1O. Ying Dim, "Shenguai ju :zhi wo jian" (My Opinion on the Magic-Spirit Film)
[1927], in WSDY, pp. 662-63.
11. See Jin Talpu, "Shenguaipian chajin hou-jinhou de dianyingjie xiang nali
zou?" (After the Censoring of the Magic-Spirit Film-Where is the Film
World Heading?), YXSH 1. no. 32 (1931 ): 1-4. The critic traces the film
genre to the storytelling practice in the teahouse. However, stories told in
that fashion remained idealist (weixinde), or invisible. Although the re-
formed theater with "magic devices" could present some of the fantastic
features in the vernacular tales, ordinary people usually could not afford
this type of live show. Most small cinemas in the Shanghai area were near
factories and farms and thus were ideal for attracting this type of audience
to see the wonders of the magic-spirit film.
12. Ma Junxia_ng, "Zhongguo dianying qingxiede qipao xian," p. 11.
13. The lead actor Wang Yuanlong (who also directed one episode) of Four He-
roes of the Wang Family (Wangshi sixia: Dazhonghua beihe, 1927) wrote in his
memoir how he himself was impressed by the grandiose set of the film. All
four films in the series were big hits in Shanghai in 1927-29. "Zi wo ru
yingjie yilai" (Since I Entered the Film World), Linxing 3 (1933): 10. Dis·
satisfied with the exterior footage of landscape, they made a set so big that
it "occupied the entire glass studio.•
14. James Liu, The Chinese Knight-Errant (Chicago: University of Chicago Pr~ss,
1967). pp. 4-6.
15. Sima Qian, Shiji, vol. 86, pp. 2515-2538; vol. 124, pp. 3181-3190.
16. See Chen Mo, Dao9uan9 xiaying men9taiqi-Zhon99uo wuxia dianying lun (A
Sword-and-Shadows Light Montage for the Knight-Errant: On Chinese
Martial Arts Film) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1996), pp. 15-22.
17. Mingxing repc>rtedly had plans to adapt the novel onto the screen. See Qing
Ping, "Cong wuxia dianying shuodao HU<>Shao Hongliansi he Shuihu"
(From Martial Arts Film to Burning and On the Water Margins), YXSH, 1,
no. 3 ( 1931 ): 7-8. The author predicts that if the film were well made, •not
only would the majority of lower class people hurry to see it but the edu-
cated would also be attracted to it."
18. The term wuxia designated the new style martial arts fiction was coined by
Japanese novelists in the nineteenth century and was subsequently bor-
rowed by Chinese writers living in Japan. Ye Hongsheng, The Art ofWuxia
Fiction (Taipei: Lianjing publishing. 1994), p. 11, as quoted in Sam Ho,
"From Page to Screen: A Brief History of Wuxia Fiction," in Heroic Grace; The
Chinese Martial Arts Film, ed. David Chute and Cheng-Sim Lim (Los Ange-
les: UCLA Film and Television Archive, 2003), p. 14.
19. Che Mo, Dao9uan9 xiaying mengtaiqi, p. 32-35. 1 389
20. Jia Lielei, "Zhongguo wuxia dianying yuanliu Jun• (On the Origin of the
Chinese Martial Arts Film), Yingshi wenhua, 5 ( 1992): 213. Xiang I<airan
was inspired by folk tales in the Hunan region where the novel was set. See
Zhang Gansheng, Minguo tongsu xiaoshuo lungao (Chongqing: Chongqing,
1991 ), pp. 111-24. Before becoming a popular writer, Xiang had been in-
volved in the anti-Yuan Shikai revolution and subsequently studied in Ja-
pan. He was said to be the only martial arts fiction writer who mastered the
arts he wrote about. In 1927, after Xiang returned to his native Hunan, an-
other writer by the name Zhao Shaokuang continued to write the remain-
ing episodes.
21. The director Zhang Shichuan was allegedly attracted to the novel when he
tried to find out what had distracted his son from his homework (GJN,
p. 157).
22. Arthur Asa Berger, ·Preface," Popular Culture Genres: Theories and Texts
(Newbury Park, Calif.: SAGE, 1992), xiii.
23. Jia Leilei, "Zhongguo wuxia dianying yuanliu Jun: p. 216. Ren Pengnian,
also the director of Yan Ruisheng, founded his own company, Yueming, in
1927; it was one of the major producers of the martial arts film. His wife
was Wu Lizhu, the "Oriental Female Fairbank."
24. For the Sake of Justice (Dayi mieqin [a.k.a. Xiayi yuan], 1922) and The Patriotic
Umbrella (Aigi,o san, 1923 ).
25. See Guan Haifeng, ·wo paishe Hongfeng kulou zhijingguo" (How I Made Red
Skeleton), in Zhon99uo dianying, 5 (1957), pp. 60-61.
26. Xinya's advertisement, as quoted in Li Su yuan and Hu Ju bin, WSDYS, p. 77.

The director Guan Haifeng later also made two proto-"martial arts" films,
The Chivalric Boy (Xiayi shaonian; 1924} and Revenge of the Filial Daughter
(Xiaonii fuchouji, 1925 ), the latter starring Wu Suxin, who played the hero-
ine in Lustrous Pearls.
27. GJN, 1: 83-84.
28. Both are famous Ming novels of the •magic-spirit" genre. In 1927 alone, Da
Zhonghua released three ten-reel films adapted from Investiture of Gods.
There were about eight films adapted from Journey to the Westby various stu-
dios.
29. Xiycmji Pansi dong tekan (Special Catalogue 6n Journey to the West, The Cave of
the Spider Spirit) (Shanghai yingxi, 1927), quoted in WSDYS, p. 216.
30. Cheng Xiaoqing, "Lishi yingpian de liyongji nandian" (The Uses of the His-
torical Film and its Difficulties) [1927], WSDY, p. 633. The critic observed
that historical subjects were more likely to attract overseas Chinese and
Western audiences.
31. I consider Romance of the West Chamber (mentioned in chapter 5) an exem·
plary text for the clash between wen and wu. The dream sequence in which
Zhang Sheng rides the •enlarged" phallic brush pen in the sky is a metony-
mic display of the scholar's anxiety as a sexually and politically impotent
subject in a time of social disarray. In Red Heroine, to be discussed later in
this chapter, the last name of the scholar figure, a cousin of the heroine, is
390 I incidentally Wen, played by the director Wen Yimin.
32. Yao Gengchen, ·ran wuxia pian· (On the Martial Arts Film) (1927), WSDY,
p. 670.
33. As the film is not extant, the discussion is based on the synopsis and still
photos pubf,ished in Dianyin9 yuebao 7 (Oct. 1928). Despite sharing the same
family name and middle name the two were not relatives. Zhang Huimin is
said to have had a strong interest in aviation as well. The first Chinese en·
counte·r with the flying machine took place in 1911, when the French pilot
Rene Vallon came to Shanghai and entertained the urban crowd with his
flight skills. He was, however, killed in a flying accident the same year.
Betty Peh-T'i Wei, Crucible of Modern China (Hong Kong: Oxford University
Press, 1987), p. 195.
34. Flying as a motif of the modern fairy tale had appeared in The Flying Shoes
(F'eixing xie; Minxin, 1928) one year earlier. The film was allegedly based
on a German folktale. Another contemporary film, The Great Flying Bandit
(Febdn9 dadao, a.k.a. Little Sister, I Love You, 1929), made by Dan Duyu, also
rests its attraction on flight. This action film involves five brothers trying to
court a modern girl. The mise-en-scene includes the bandit's flying house
(which has two hidden wings, a police helicopter, a flying vehicle on which
a musical show is advertised, a motorcycle, and a car. ~t the end, after a
suspenseful fight in the flying house, the girl descends into the ocean with
a parachute. Her lover from the city ·reappears and carries her away in the
car without leaving a trace. Synopsis in WSDYJB 2: 1729-731.
35. Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philos-

ophy (London: Verso, 1989), p. 42.
36. Juanhong, "Hangkong daxia" (The Great Knight-Errant of Aviation), Dian-
ying yuebao. no. 7 (October 1928).
37. Sun Shiyi. "Dianyingjie de guju fengkuangzheng· (The Craze for the Old
Drama in the Film World) [1926], WSDY, pp. 643-45.
38. E. Chang, "Guzhuangpian zhong zhi ying zhuyi zhe" (Things to Consider in
the Classical Costume Drama) [1927], WSDY, p. 654.
39. It is unclear which film the critic was referring to. In 1927, one of the
numerous classical costume films based on Journey to the West is called Zhu
Bajie the Pig Tours Shanghai (Zhu Bajie you Shanghai). The three-reel short
comedy is dearly in the tradition of early Mingxing comedies such as The
King of Comedy and Laborer's Love. Such modern remaking of the classical
novel culminated in Mingxing's New Journey to the West (Xin Xiyouji) of 1929,
sporting a female lead with the name of Miss I<. and urban venues such as
the dance hall.
40. Friedrich G. Ji.inger, as quoted in Hermann Bausinger, Folk Culwre in a
World of Technology, trans. Elke Dettmer {Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), p. IO.
41. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
42. Translation by J. D. Schmidt, in his book, Within the I-Iuman Realm: The Po-
etry of Huang Zunxian, 1848-1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), pp. 270-71. See also the section on "Huang Zunxian and Modern I 391
Science," pp. 181-94. Huang played with and "updated" traditional poetic
allusions in poems by, for instance, Meng Jiao (751-814), the mid-Tang
poet, to describe modern objects and the sensibilities they evoked. Huang
opened the first poem in the set thus: "My thoughts whirl like a wheel,
when it's time to part, I Turning at the rate of I 0,000 RPM [literally, 'ten
thousand times every fifteen minutes (ke)J/ Schmidt points out this is a
"clever transformation of Meng Jiao's lines", "My Thoughts whirl like a
wheel when it's time to part I Ten thousand times each single day"; but
Huang accelerates the speed of the whirling thoughts to correspond with
the increased tempo of modem life· (p. 190).
43. On the "science fantasy" genre in_ late Qing fiction, see David Der-wei
Wang, Fin-de-siecle Splendor. chapter 5, "Confused Horizons: Science Fan-
tasy" (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991) pp. 252-312; see
also Masaya Takeda, Tobe! Dai-Sei teikoku (Fly! Great Qing Empire) (Tokyo:
Riburupoto, 1988).
44. Huang Zunxian, "On Climbing the Eiffel Tower," in Schmidt, Within the Hu-
man Realm, p. 275.
45. Dianshizhai huabao 1 :4 (1898). For a translation of the caption in English,
see David Arkush and Leo 0. Lee eds., Land without Ghosts: Chinese Impres-
sions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1989), pp. 120-21. The book also contains, how-
ever, two political poems written by Huang while serving as the Chinese
consul-general in San Francisco from 1882-85, expressing his disillusion-

ment with social injustice in America, especially racial discrimination
against Chinese immigrants (pp. 61-70).
46. See Liang Qichao, Yingbing shihua (Discourse on Poetry in the Ice Room)
(Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1959), pp. 2, 24, 51. See also his remarks (with
entire quotes of the original) on Jiang Wanli's poems on the submarine and
the airplane (pp. 136-37), which Liang found to be similar examples of the
"poetic revolution."
47. Frank Dikotter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the
Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (Honolulu: Uni-
versity of Hawaii Press, 1995). p. 21. I
48. Gan Yonglong, "Jixie ren" (The machine-man), Dongfang zazhi 8, no. 8 (Au-
gust 1911 ): 22. The magazine switched to the vernacular in 1920 under the
impact of the New Culture movement. See Chow Tse-Tsung, The May Fourth
Movement, p. 181.
49. The chief theoretician for this discourse is Yan Fu, also a major translator of
Western texts (in particular those of British liberalism). On Yan Fu and his
imponant role in the late Qing reform, see Benjamin Schwartz. In Search of
Wealth and Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964). Yan
Fu was also instrumental in introducing the concept of science into mod-
ern Chinese thought. For an excellent discussion on Yan Fu and the ques-
tion of science. see Wang Hui. "The Fate of 'Mr. Science' in China: The Con-
392 I cept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought," Positions 3,
no. 1 (Spring 1995): l-68.
50. See Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Litera-
ture, 1918-1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), espe-
cially chapter I, "The Discovery of Folk Literature" and chapter 7, "Intel-
lectuals and the Folk."
51. As quoted in Chow Tse-Tsung. The May Fo-urth Movement. p. 328.
52. The term is a direct translation of Eucken's concept Lebensanschauung.
Zhang was a student of Bergson and Eucken while studying in Europe.
With the latter he coauthored Das Lebensproblem in China und in Europa
(Leip1Jg. 1922). See Chow Tse-Tsung, The May Fourth Movement, p. 333 (in-
cluding the footnote on the same page).
53. Ibid., pp. 333-35. For a concise review and analysis of Zhang's ideas and the
debate as a whole, see also Fan Dainian, "Dui 'Wusi' Xinwenhua yun-
dongde zhexue fansi-ji ershi niandai elm de kexue yu renshenguan da
lunzhan" (A Philosophical Reflection on the May Fourth New Culture
Movement-On the Great Debate on Science and View of Life in the Early
Twentieth Century), in Kexue shi lunji (An Anthology of Essays on the His-
tory of Science), ed. Fang Lizhi (Hefei: Zhongguo kexue jishu daxue, 1987),
pp. 255-76. Rather than ruling out the importance of science altogether, as
Fan points out, Zhang was proposing a nonpositivist approach, which em-
phasized methodology rather than object of study, contingency rather than
causality or quantification (p. 263).
54. The term "metaphysics• in Chinese translation is xuanxue, which also re-
ferred to philosophy in general as opposed to science. Xuanxue also carries

the connotation of spiritualism and esoterism. Xu,m in particular refers to
strange or paranormal phenomena that are beyond ordinary or rational
comprehension. Xuanji, or strange coincidence/device, is a commonly de-
ployed narrative and mise-en-scene strategy in martial arts-magic spirit
film. lo the latter usage, xuan becomes a materialized and embodied entity
with the aid of cinematic technology.
55. Ding Wenjiang, •xuanxue yu kexue," Nuli zhoubao, April 12, 1923: 48-49.
Collected in Yadong tushuguan, ed., Kexue yu renshengguan (Science and the
View of Life) (Shanghai, l 923 ), pp. 1-30.
56. Chow Tse-Tsung, The May Fourth Movement, p. 334.
57. Such a contradiction attests to Horkheimer and Adorno's thesis that en-
lightenment imernalizes myth and thereby creates a new form of my-
thology and totalitarianism. Conversely, archaic myths are placed on a
seculariz.ing trail. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Dialectic ofEn-
lightenment ( 1944), trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder,
1972), pp. 6-9.
58. These include Luo Zhixi, Kexue yu xuanxue (Shanghai: Commercial Press,
1927; 1930); Peng Kang, "kexue yu renshenguan-jinji nian lai Zhongguo
sixiangjie de zong jiesuan,'' Wenhua pipan, no. 3 (1928); Wang Gangshen,
Kexue fun ABC (Shanghai shuju, 1928). Sources from Fan Dainian, nDui
'Wusi' Xinwenhua yundongde zhexue fansi,'' endnotes. pp. 275-276.
59. The technique is calledjieding, nconnecting the roofs." Dong entered Ming- I 393
xing as an apprentice. After assisting the shooting of Orphan Rescues Grand-
father, he began to operate a camera independently in 1924 and is credited
as the first cinematographer who used double exposure in The Good Brother
(Hao xiongdi), in which one actor played two brothers. He is also the first
cameraman who collaborated with a sound technician in producing China's
first sound film (on wax disk), The Singing Girl Red Peony (Mingxing, 1931).
In his later years, he served as the technical consultant for the Shaw Broth-
ers Co. in Hong Kong.
60. He Xiujun, "Zhang Shichuan he Mingxing yingpian gongsi" (Zhang Shi-
chuan and the Mingxing Film Company), in WSDY. p. 1528. The author is
Zhang's widow who wrote the memoir in 1965. According to He, the article
in the American magazine rnntained no more than a few foreign terms, so
Dong had to resort to his homespun methods to achieve the intended spe-
cial effect.
61. In Chinese folklore and as a literary trope, female warriors were often
called jingguo yinxiong (heroes with headdress). Invariably, the female
knights-errant in the "martial arts" film appear in a headdress covering her
long hair, the marker of her original femininity. Fan Xuepeng, who starred
in Red Heroine, recalls that she had the idea of dying her character with "red
ink" to make her authentically "red." Because of that, the film was more
popular with the Nanyang audience and as a result, the company earned a
large profit. She claims Mingxing partly borrowed this idea in portraying
Honggu (Red Maiden) in Burning. Fan Xuepeng, ·wo de yinmu shenghuo
de huiyi" (Remembering My Life on the Silver Screen)[l 956], in WSDY.

p. 1480.
62. Din9yin9 yuebao and Yingxi shenguo ( YXSH), two leading film magazines dur-
ing the height of the genre craze between 1928 and 1932, carried numer-
ous articles on makeup, tricks, and sets. The critic Jin Taipu sees the •magic-
spirit" film itself is about making secrets "public.· which explains its
attraction because it satisfies the audience's curiosity for revealing what lay
behind the mysterious. Jin Taipu, "Shenguaipian chajin hou," p. 2.
63. The term is derived from Matei Calinescu, Five Faces ofModernity: Modernism,
Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1987). Calinescu identifies these ·rac/s• as distinctive aesthetic cate-
gories of modernity. The martial arts-magic spirit film apparently blends
some of these categories in a way that dissolves the boundary between high
and low.
64. Marcel Mauss. "Techniques of the Body,• Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (Feb-
ruary 1973): 73, 75.
65. Sam Ho, "From Page to Screen.· p. 14.
66. Robert Stam, "Specificities: From Hybridity to the Aesthetics of Garbage,•
Social Identities 3, no. 2 (1997): 279. Stam's argument is derived from his
analysis of Afro-diasporic and Brazilian cinemas and popular culture. In
light of Bakhtin's conception of "chronotopic multiplicity.• Stam argues for
an alternative aesthetic that is not built on binarism and linear temporality
394 I but on a productive ·redemption of detritus.· What I find particularly sug-
gestive is his substitution of the term "premodern" (·that embeds moder-
nity as telos") with •paramodern," a term that allows the nonlinear collage
of the most archaic and the postmodern resources for cultural production.
67. The female knight-errant figure goes back to the Tang period-such as
the legendary Hua Mulan, made internationally famous by Maxine Hong
Kingston's fiction and the Disney animated film Mu/an-and was often as-
sociated with its subordination to filial piety and masquerading as male. For
an account of the niixia image in traditional folklore and history, see Wang
Li, Zhon99uo 9udai haoxia yishi (Ancient Chinese Gallant Knights-Errant and
Chivalrous Subjects) (Hefei: Anhui renmin, 1996), chapter 5, "Niixia ji xia
zhi funii guan· (Female Knights-Errant, Knight-Errantry and Views on
Women), pp. 134-60.
68. The late Qing novel Ernii yin9xion9 zhuan (A Tale of Heroes and Lovers) was
an important precedent for this genre. See David Wang's perceptive analy-
sis of the novel and its influence on subsequent literary production in Fin-
de-siede Splendor, pp. 156-74.
69. More famous productions (such as Burning) are not included as they do not
concentrate on the image of the heroine alone. WSDYJB contains extant
plot summaries (and sometimes complete scripts of intertitles from theater
pamphlets or lilm magazines) of these films.
70. Youlian was founded in 1925 by Chen Kengran, Xu Bibo, and others. One
of its first productions was a documentary shot on the spot about the
May 30 incident on Nanjing Road that year. Its leading actresses Xu Qing-
fang hid the camera in her wide trousers to avoid police confiscation. Xu
Bibo, "Jilupian 'Wusan huchao' paishc jingguon (How the Documentary
The May Thirtieth Shanghai S11r9e Was Made), Zhongguo Dianying 5 ( 1957): 62.
71. The motifs of the martial heroine's apprenticeship w.ith the ape-man and
her unrequited love can be traced to one of the earliest literary works of the
genre about Yuenti and her sword fighting skill from the first century. It has
been passed down and rewritten countless times, including the version by
Jin Yong. See Chen Mo, Dao9uan9 xiaying mengtaiqi, p. 28.
72. Xu joined Youlian in l 925 when it was newly established. Besides her
screen image as a heroine, she was also the screenwriter and star of The
Knight-Errant with a Double Swords (Shuangjian xia, 1928}. She joined Ming-
xing in 1933 after Youlian ceased operation due to the Japanese bombing
of Shanghai in January I 932.
73. In her name, the character for Yun has the •grass" radical on top of "cloud."
.But both characters (with or without the radical) are pronounced the same.
74. Wu's English name is White Rose Woo, so the name of the heroine is actu-
ally that of the actress. Notably, Wu also served as the assistant director of
the film.
75. This scene of her gender transformation was done through a set of shots us-
ing a curtain, a screen, and a mirror. Bai's coswme and makeup were al-
legedly influenced by Three Musketeers, which was widely popular in China.
Zhongguo dianying (Chinese Cinema: A Documentary Film), part 4 (copro-
duced by Center for Research on Chinese Film and Chinese Film Archive, I 395
1996).
76. It was, for instance, used as an incipient narrative dev.ice as seen in Laborer's
Love. The rope also plays an important role in Red Heroine in escape and res-
cue scenes. Of course, the rope is an essential prop in the Westerns widely
seen in China at the time. Also as in Laborer's Love the staircase in the middle
of the set is turned into a slide, like when the carpenter-vendor "produces"
injured bodies for his future father-in-law.
77. This scene, except for the beginning, is missing from the extant print I saw.
It is possible that it was censored. The description is from the synopsis
reprinted in WSDYJB, pp. 1826-828.
78. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs. and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Lon-
don: Free Associations Books, 1991 ), p. 150.
79. Wang Chaoguang, "Sanshi niandai chuqi de Guomingdang dianyingjian-
cha zhidu" (The Film Censorship System of the Nationalist Party in the
Early 1930s), Dianying yishu 3 ( 1997): 63.
80. Sec Prasenjit Duara, "Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Moder-
nity: The Campaign against Popular Religion in Early Twentieth-Century
China: Jo11rnal of Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (February 1991): 67-83.
81. Zhongguo jiaoyu dianying xiehui, ed., Zhongguo dianyin9 nianjian (The Cin-
ematographic Yearbook of China) of 1934. compiled by the official China
Educational Film Association and prefaced by the minister of propaganda
Chen Lifu, is a publication that demonstrates the Nationalists' systematic ef-
fort to control the film industry for the purpose of nation building. The cen-
tral theme of the book .is education through cinema. A whole section is de-
voted to introducing foreign practices of film censorship, which is followed
by a section on "Chinese film administration" offering detailed description
of the NFCC's establishmem and a list of censored domestic and imported
films.
82. See Song Jie's article, "Dianying yu shehui lifa wenti" (Cinema and the
Problem of Social Law-making), Dongfang zazhi (Feb. 1925): 79-94. After
introducing (or translating) a large amount of material on film censorship
in the West, Song proposes the necessity of establishing film censorship in
China but stresses that it should be in the forr of people's film censorship
0 0
rather than officially controlled.

83. For a comprehensive study on the subject, see Xiao Zhiwei's dissertation,
°Film Censorship in China, 1927-1937,° chapter 2, °Film Censorship in
China 1911-1938." As Xiao points out, the earlier attempts at censorship
before the Nationalists came to power in 1927, hence the beginning of the
so-called Nanjing decade, were ·sporadic and hardly institutionalized. The
appendix in Xiao's dissertation includes translations of some of them.
84. Among the foreign films banned because of their representation of religious
and occult material were Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, Alice in Wonder-
land, and Dr. Frankenstein (ibid., p. 231).
85. Wang Chaoguang, ·sanshi niandai chuqi de Guomingdang dianyingjian-
cha zhidu," p. 63. The original source of this information is NFCC, "Dian-
396 ! yingjiancha gongzuo zong baogao• (A General Report on the Work on Film
Censorship), and Luo Gang, "Zhongyang dianjianhui gongzuo gaikuangq
(An Overview of the Work of the NFCC), both in Zhon99uo dianyin9 nianjian
(1934).
86.Lu Xun, "Youwu xiangtong" (Each Supplies What the Other Needs), Xin
qin9nian 6, no. 6 (Nov. 1919), collected in Lu Xun quanji, vol. l, pp. 364-
65. In the essay, Lu Xun attributes the Hknightly" or martial style to North-
ern writers and the sentimental style to the Southern writers.
87. Qu Qiubai, HGuimenguan yiwai de zhanzhen• (The War Outside of the Gate
of Hell), in Wei Shaochang, Yuanyang hudie pai yanjiu ziliao, p. 22.
88. Qu Qiubai, "Puluo dazhong wenyi de xianshi wenti" (The Actual Problem
of Proletarian Popular Literature and Art), in Wei Shaochang, Yuanyan9
hudie pai yanjiu ziliao, p. 28. The original article was written on Oct. 25, 1931
and published in Wenxue (Literature), a League of Left Writers publication,
in March 1932.
89. Shen Yanbing, "Fengjiande xiaoshimin wenyi," pp. 48-49.
90. Benjamin, ·on the Mimetic Faculty," in Reflections, p. 333.
91. Jennifer Bean, "Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary
Body," Camera Obscura 48 (vol. 16, no. 3, 2001): 46-7.
92. See Richard Dyer, "Entertainment and Utopia," in The Cultul'al Studies Reader.
ed. Simon During (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 371-81.
93. Ibid., p. 49.
94. Ibid., p. 48.
95. Shen Yanbing, "Fengjiande xiaoshimin wenyi,• p. 48. Shen used this as an
example to prove the point that the genre was not capable of carrying mod-
ern and serious messages and could only remain a vehicle for feudal ideas.
96. Wu Xiwen, "Guochan yingpian yu Nanyang wenhua." p. 21.
97. Prasenjit Duara, "Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity.''.
p. 75.
98. See Rey Chow, Primitive Passions, pp. 4-11.
99. Ibid., p. 18.
100. Paul G. Pickowicz, "Melodramatic Representation and the 'May Fourth'
Tradition of Chinese Cinema." p. 296.
101. Despite Lu Xun's overall negative view of the popular cinema, he never-
theless enjoyed moviegoing. He reportedly relished Mickey Mouse cartoons
with his son. Gu Yuanqing and Gao Jinxian, "Lu Xun yu dianying• (Lu Xun
and the cinema), Dianyingyishu 4 (1979), pp. 41-48.
102. Romance of the West Chamber is a good example of the temple's function as
such a liminal space. In order to concentrate on study, young scholars often
take residence there to prepare for the imperial exams, as Zhang Sheng did
in the film.
103. Wang Chaoguang, "Sanshi niandai chuqi de Guomingdang dianying jian-
cha zhidu," p.64.
104. Ibid., p. 65.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I. For a book-length study devoted to the left-wing cinema, see Laikwan I 397
Pang's Building a New China in Cinema {Landham, Md.: Rowman and Little-
field, 2002).
2. The second half of the 1940s, after the Japanese lost the war and the Shang-
hai film industry regained independence and flourished again, has been
commonly designated the second golden age.
3. Sun Yu calls 1932 the year when Chinese cinema made a uleft turn." See
his article, "Huiyi Wusi yundong yingxiangx:iade sanshi niandai dianying"
(Remembering the '30s Cinema Under the Influence of the May Fourth
Movement). Dianyingyishu, no. 3 (1979): 8.
4. Chris Berry, "Chinese Left Cinema in the 1930s: Poisonous Weeds or Na-
tional Treasures?" Jump Cut 34 ( 1989): 87-94.
5. A 141 film showcase, including 27 films from 1922 to 1937, screened in
Beijing and Shanghai in 1982, and in Milan and Paris in 1984. The program
toured a number of European cities in various formats. The Film Center at
the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo also held similar exhibitions
in 1984, 1988, and 1991.
6. For a report on the conference, see Jian Yong and Tian Jin, "Tontao Zhong-
guo dianying lishi jingyande yici shenghui" (A Grand Conference for Ex-
ploring the Historical Experience of Chinese Film History), Dianying yishu,
no. 11 (1983): 10-11.
7. l\n example of such publications is Lu Si's Yingping yijiu (Reminiscences of
Film Criticism) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1984).
8. The document was published in Wenxue daobao, no. 6-7, October 1931. See
Li Shaobai, "Jianlun Zhongguo sanshi niandai 'dianying wenhua yundong'

de xingqi" (A Concise Treatise on the Rise of the "Film Culture Movement"
in China in the '30s), Dangdai dianying, no. 3 ( 1994): 79-80. In my inter-
view with the important 1930s film critic Shu Yan, he also stressed that the
term "left-wing" was hardly used at the time. He said that the term "New
Film Culture movement" laid emphasis on film as "culture" as opposed to
commodity (November 16, 1996).
9. In 1932, several American business interests attempted to form U.S.-
registered, Shanghai-based studios to make films for the Chinese market.
As with similar situations in the mid- l 920s, they were met with strong op-
position. For a sample of the polemics/against the American movies at the
time, see Yi Lang's (Lin He) article, "Mei zibenjingong Zhongguo dianying-
jie hou zengyang tupo muqian de weiji" (How to overcome the current cri-
sis caused by the American capital's invasion of the Chinese film industry),
Dianyingyishu, l, no. 3 (1932). See also Wang Suping, "Liangge yingpian
gongsi de 'liuchan' shirno" (On the "Abortion" of Two Film Companies),
Yingshi wenhua, no. l (September 1988): 282-S7.
10. Yi Lang (Lin He), "Mei ziben jingong Zhongguo dianyingjie hou zengyang
tupo muqian de weiji," p. 82.
11. Yang Hansheng, "Zuoyi yundongde ruogan lishi jingyan" (Some Histori-
cal Lessons From the Left-Wing Cinema Movement), Dianying yishu, 11
(1983): 2.
398 I 12. Mingxing spent most of its resources on the implementation of sound at
that time, whereas Lianhua seized the opportunity to make films for a mar-
ket not yet entirely ready for the talkies.
13. See Lu Si, "Zhongguo zuoyi dianying huigu" (Remembering the Chinese
Left Cinema Movement), in Yingping yijiu, p. S5.
14. The English term appears in the original. "Chuncan zuotanhui" (Workshop
on Spring Silkworms), in Chen Bo and Yi Ming, eds., Sanshi niandai Zhongguo
dianying pinglun wenxuan (An Anthology of '30's Chinese Film Criticism).
(Beijing: Zhongguo dianying, 1993), hereafter SSND, pp. 250-51. The ar-
ticle was originally published in the Daily Supplement on film, Chengbao,
Oct. 8, 1933. Interestingly, Cheng also acknowledged the addition of mate-
rials such as statistical tables that enhanced the "documentary" look of the
film. The same issue also carried other news on recent developments in
Russian film and drama.
15. Lu Xun, for instance, translated and introduced Iwasaki Hisashi's work. See
"Xiandai dianying yu youchanjieji" (Modern Cinema and the Bourgeoisie),
Lu Xun quanji, vol. 4, pp. 389-413.
16. "Su'e laihua yingpiande yige xiaotongji" (A Brief Account of Films Im-
ported from Soviet Union), Yingmi zhoubao (Movie Fans Weekly) l, no. 5
(Oct. 24, 1934): 86.
17. Yang Hansheng, "Zuoyi yundongde ruogan lishi jingyan," p. 3.
18. Ibid.
19. Lu Si, Yingpingy1jiu, pp. 4-10.
20. Ibid., pp. 14-5. In general. however, one or more critics were assigned to a
certain theater and .reviewed all the programs there (p. 10).
21. Lin He, "Zuoyi juliande yingping xiaozu ji qita" (Left-wing Dramatists
Group etc.), Dianying yishu, no. 9 ( 1980): 59-60.
22. For a vivid and detailed report on a series of these "tea party" seminars in
1934, see Qi Xin, "Ji disici dianchahui" (A Record of the Fourth Film Tea
Party) and other articles in Yingmi zhoubao vol. 1, no. 4 (Oct. 17, 1934):
70-74.
23. At the time the average salary for a journalist was 50 yuan, and a junior col-
lege professor earned about 60 yuan a month. Interview with Shu Yan (No-
vember 16, 1996).
24. See the section on a dance hall incident involving some fashionable critics
and a college-educated hostess in Qi Xin's article, "Liandaren chi jiangcha, •
Yingmi zhoubao vol. 1, no. 4: 74.
25. The only active woman critic was Hu Ping, also an actress.
26. Zheng Zhengqiu, "Ruhe zoushang qianjin zhi Ju" in SSND, pp. 614-17,
Mingxingyuebao, vol. l, no. I (May 1933).
27. Gu Menghe, "Yi Tian Han tongzhi zai Nanguoshe de dianying chuangzuo"
(Remembering Comrade Tian Han's Film Work at the "Southern-Country
Society"), Dianyingyishu, no. 4 (1980): 56.
28. Tian Han, "Wode ziwo pipan, • (My Self-Critique) ( 1930), quoted in Chen
Daicheng, "Wei zaochengde meng" (The Unrealized Dream}, Dianying yishu,
no. 11 ( 1980): 49. I 399
29. Tian Han, "Yinse de meng." Yingxing, no. 5 (1927).
30. On the "pure film movement" and Tanizaki's role in it, see Joana Bernardi,
Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement (De-
troit: Wayne State University, 2001 ), especially chapters 4-6.
31. Tian Han, "Yinse de meng," Tian Han's (translated) film theory was quickly
accepted and spread by other writers. See, for instance, Wei Nan's elabora-
tion of the "day dream" thesis in his article, "Dianyingde wenyihua" (Trans-
forming Cinema into Art), in Lu Mengshu, ed. Dianying yu wenyi (Cinema
and the Arts-A Special Supplement of Yinxing), (Shanghai: Liangyou
tushu, 1928), pp. 1-15. The author argues for the elevation of the status of
the screenwriter, in "transforming"_shadowplay into an art form.
32. In Japanese film historiography, Tanizaki's view of cinema was influenced
by German expressionist theater and cinema. Tian Han saw The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari in Japan in 1921 and was shocked by its "sharp and strange
beauty/ See his Yin.fe de meng (Silver Dream) (Zhonghua shuju, 1928),
p. 52.
33. Gu Menghe, "Yi Tian Han tongzhi zai Nanguoshe de dianying chuangzuo,"
p. 57.
34. This can be glimpsed even in a fictional text. In Junijiro Tanizaki's novel,
Some Prefer Nettles, translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker
(New York: Knopf, 1955 (1928)), the male protagonist, a fashionable Tokyo
dandy of refined tastes, relates how he acquired a copy of an exquisite edi-
tion of Arabian Nights from Shanghai. Tanizaki may have been referring to
his own frequent trips to the Asian metropolis of the time.
35. I have found several production stills and Tian Han's handwriting in a spe-
cial file at the China Film Archive. Samples of Tian Han's handwriting con-
tain the word "masochism" in English. The stills show, among other scenes,
the encounter on the train, Li's whipping of Sun (with Li dressed in male
attire), and the lakeside shooting.
36. In his memoir, Gong Jianong's description of the film does not mention the
sadomasochist sex scene or the shooting. Instead, he remembered the film
primarily as a ·scenic publicity" film, in which the phantom gives the
young man from Shanghai a tour aro6nd the lake. See GJN, pp. 115-18.
Tian Han's modern tale bears affinity to classical tales about the legendary
lake and the beauties bred by it, in particular late Ming writer Zhang Dai's
Xihu mengxun (In Search of Dreams at the West Lake).
37. Qian Bai. ·Guan Mingxlngde 'Hubian chunmeng' hou'' (After Viewing
Mingxing's Spring Dream at the Lakeside) Min9xin9 tekan, no. 27 (1927), col-
lected in WSDY, 1168.
38. Xu Xiacun, "Modern Girl," in Yan Jiayan, Xinganjuepai xiaoshuo xuan (An
Anthology of New Sensationalist Fiction) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chu-
banshe, 1985), pp. 30-35 [Originally published in Xin wenyi, L no. 3
(1929)]. For a detailed historical study on the cafe waitress and her "labors
and desires· in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, see Miriam Silverberg, "The
400 I Cafe Waitre~'S Serving Modern Japan," in Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of
Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1998), pp. 208-28.
39. Besides this film, Cai Chusheng also wrote two other scripts in the same
vein in this period, Spring in the South (Nan9uo zhichun, Linhua, 1932},
wh.ich he directed, and Spring Tides (Chunchao; Hemintong, 1933) directed
by Zheng Yinshi.
40. Paul Pickowicz, "The Theme of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the
1930s," Modern China 17 ( 1991 ): 47.
41. A female writer assuming a male name to publish her autobiographical
novel is a motif picked up again in Cai's New Woman two years later. See the
synopsis by Cai in WSDYJB, pp. 2242-44.
42. See Li Lili, "Huiyi he Cai Chusheng tongzhi zai yiqi gongzuo de nianyue•
(Recollections of the Years Working Together with Comrade Cai Chu-
sheng), Dianyingyishu, no. 6 (1979): 31.
43. Xi Naifang, "Ping "Fenghongse de meng"-Meiguopian de yingxiang" (On
Pink Dream-The Influence of American Film), SSND, pp. 325-27 (origi-
nally published in Chengbao's daily film supplement, Sept. 6, 1933).
44. Su Feng, "Zhishi yige meng· (Only a Dream), Chengbao's daily film supple-
ment, September 6, 1932.
45. Lu Si, Yingpin yijiu.
46. Tian Han, "Cong yingse zhi meng Ii xingzhuanlai" (Awaking from the Sil-
ver Dream), in WSDY, pp. 472-75 [Dianying, no. l, 1930).
47. Another example was the famous Welcome Dan9er incident that took
Shanghai by storm in 1930. Hong Shen. a drama professor at Fudan Uni-
versity and a well-known screenwriter, stood up in the middle of the
screening at the Grand Theater and called for a collective protest to the hu-
miliating depiction of Chinese in Harold Lloyd's slapstick comedy. In the ar-
ticle Tian Han refers specifically to the scene in which Lloyd passes a stick
to two Chinese men who beat each other with it (ibid., p. 474).
48. The film is not extant. A complete script can be found in WSDYJB,
pp. 2250-81. Prior to this film, Bu had also been chastised by the left crit-
ics for his compounded "humanist," "feudal." and "petty-bourgeois" senti-
ments and aesthetics in his earlier films including Hubian chunmeng, Taohua
qixueji, (1931), Lian'aiyuyiwu (1930), Rendao (1932) andXuguduchunmeng
(1932).
49. For an insightful analysis of the multiple types of women, see Yingjin
Zhang, "Engendering Chinese Filmic Discourse of the 1930s: Configura-
tions of Modern Women in Shanghai in Three Silent Films," Positions 2, no.
3 (1994): 603-28, especially, 612-16.
50. Such screenplays may be seen as a new variant of the •revolution plus love"
literature prevalent in early twentieth century. See Liu Jianmei's detailed
study of this literary phenomenon, Revolution Plus Love: Literary flistory,
Women'.$ Bodies, and Thematic Repetition in Twentieth-Centu1y Chinese Fiction
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003 ), especially chapters 2-4.
51. Tian Han's political turn and new conviction in the ideological function of I 401
cinema is obviously a result of Soviet influence. See Lu Wei, Tian Han
juzuo/un (On Tian Han's Playwriting) (Nanjing daxue, 1995), p. 120.
52. These three were among the five scripts written for Yihua, which produced
some of the most radical films in 1933-35. Due to the precarious political
situation, Tian Han's name did not appear in some of the films' credits.
53. Su Feng and Lu Si, "Women de pipan• (Our Criticism), SSND, pp. 113-16
(Chengbao's film supplement, Dec. 31, 1932).
54. Cai's other preconversion film Sprin9 in the South revolves around a modern
man's entanglement with three (types of) women, and also was denounced
by the left critics.
55. Chen Wu, "Guanyu Xinnilxin9 de yingpian, pipingji qita" (Criticism of New
Woman, and more), SSND, pp. 345 (Zhonghua ribao, March 2, 1935).
56. See, for instance, Kristine Harris, ·The New Woman Incident: Cinema,
Scandal. Spectacle in 1935 Shanghai," in Transnational Chinese Cinemas:
Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon H. Lu (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1997), pp. 277-302.
57. Ai Xia also wrote a few scripts, including A Modern Girl (Xiandai yi nuxin9,
1933), starring herself. The story is about Putao, a modern girl who has a
relationship with a married journalist and goes to any length to maintain
this love. In the end she was put into the prison where she meets her old
friend, a revolutionary woman. Upon release, Putao decides to embark on
a "progressive road." Although there is at this point not much more mate-
rial available for analysis, it is interesting to observe that Ai Xia's script gives
her a bright open possibility. For a synopsis, see WSDYJB, pp. 2449-51
(Mingxingyuebao l, no. 2, 1935).
58. See Cai Hongsheng, Cai Chusheng de chuangzuo daolu (Cai Chusheng's Cre-
ative Path) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu, 1982), p. 13.
59. Ibid., p. 21.
60. Film Art was, however, forced to cease publication by the Nationalist cen-
sors after only four issues.
61. The aforementioned Movie Weekly cost 50 cents per copy, so 20 cents was a
real bargain for such a "quality" magazine. "Bianzheshi" (Editorial Room),
Xiandai dianying, no. 2 (April l, 1933): 1.
62. For examples, Ai Xia, "Ai de zimei" (Love's Sister), in Xiandai dianying, no.
l, p. 12; Li Lili's poem, "Zai Xihu she 'Tianming' waijing guituzhong" (On
the Way Back from Filming Daybreak), in Xiandai dumying, no. 2, p. 1.
63. Huang Jiamo, "'Yiandai dianying' and Zhongguo dianyingjie" ('Modern
film' and the Chinese Film Industry) Xiandai dianying, no. 1 (1933): I.
64. See Lu Jiefu, "Cong dazhonghua shuoqi" (Beginning with the Issue of Pop-
ularization), Xiandai dianying, no. 2 (1933): p. 12; and Tian Wa, "Dazhong-
hua zhuanmaidian" (The Specialty Store on Popularii.ation), Xiandai dian-
ying no. 3 (1933): 27.
65. Jiamo, "Xiandai de guanzhong ganjue" (The Feeling of Modern Audiences),
Xiandai dianying, no. 3 (1933): 9.
402 I 66. Xia Yan, "Baineizhang de 'shengyiyan'-shui shahai le Zhongguo xinsheng
dianying· ("The Commercial Eye• of Glaucoma-infected Vision"-Who
Killed the Newborn Chinese Cinema), Chengbao's film supplement, July 3,
1934.
67. In that sense, the "soft film" was hardly a new category but rather took on
a more salient modernist form. See Kwok & M. C. Quiqueme!le, "Chinese
Cinema and Realism" in Film and Politics in the Third World, ed. John D. H.
Downing (New York: Praeger, I 987), p. 182.
68. Xiandai dianying, no. 6 (1933): 3.
69. Liu Na'ou, "Zhongguo dianying de shendu wenti" (The Problem of Depth
Description in Chinese Film), Xiandai dianying, no. 3 (1933).
70. Lu Si, "Lun dianying piping de jizhun wen ti" (On the Question of Basic Cri-
teria of Film Criticism), SSND. pp. 791-819 [serialized in Minbao's film sup-
plement Yin9tan, March 1-9, 1935).
71. The Metropol, for example, had a striking presence with its blue, lustrous
facade accentuated by red neon lights. It is only a stone's throw away from
Grand and Calton. There was a female nude statue in the foyer, and the au-
ditorium had deep green upholstered seats, red silk ribbon on the ceiling,
and four pretty female ushers. See Yi Feng, "Shehui bujingqi zhong Da
Shangahai yingxi kaimu" (The Metropol Opens Despite the Recession)
Min9xin9, no. 28 (1933): 50.
72. Michael Sullivan, Art and Artists in Twentieth Century China (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1996), pp. 44-46.
73. Ibid., pp. 58-59.
74. Under pressures from both society and her family (she was the second wife
of the man who redeemed her from the brothel), Pan eventually returned
to Paris in 1935 and continued her art career there until her death in 1983.
Pan Yuliang's life is the subject of Huang Shuqin's film Soul of Painting (Hua
hun, 1996), adapted from Ye Nan's eponymous biography and starring
Gong Li.
75. Zhang Jinsheng, Meide renshen99uan (The Beautiful View of life) (Shanghai:
Beixin shuju, 1925), p. 62. Several pictures featuring nude practitioners in
Europe were used to illustrate his argument in the book.
76. Xu Meiyun, "Yige modeng yanyuan" (A Modern Actor), Xiandai dianyin.f.J,
no. 5 ( 1933): 12.
77. Xiandai dianying, no. 6 (1933).
78. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1986), p. 40.
79. As quoted in "Tiaowu de zimei" (The Dance Sisters), Diansheng 3, no. 6
(1934): 117.
80. Liu was killed by an unidentified assassin in Shangha.i in 1939. For more on
Liu's life and career, see Shih Shu-mei, "Gender, Race, and Semicolonial-
ism: Llu Na'ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape," Journal of Asian Studies 55,
no. 4 (Nov. 1996): 934-56.
81. Liu Na'ou, Dushifengjingxian (The Horizon of the Metropolitan Landscape)
(Shanghai: Shuimo shudian, 1930). Scene is the original French title. The
book is written in Chinese. I 403
82. Translation adopted from Shih Shu-mei, "Gender, Race, and Semicolonial-
ism," p. 934.
83. For instance, the modern girl in Xu Xiacun's story "Modern Girl" is Japa-
nese. The dandy in Liu Na'ou's "Bones of Passion" is a French man.
84. Liu Na'Ou's story "Reqing zhigu" (Bones of Passion} is a good example
(Scene, pp. 67-87). The French term appears at the end of the story, in a let-
ter supposedly "written" in French by the modern girl who turns out to be
a married woman. She has sought money from the French man to save her
husband's small flower-vending business.
85. Liu Na'ou, "Liangge shijiande buganzheng zhe." in Scene, pp. 89-106
86. Ibid., p. 104.
87. Annette Michelson, introduction, to Kina-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Wi'rtov,
ed. Michelson, trans., Kevin O'Brien. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), xix, xxv.
88. Liu Na'ou, "Lun Qucai" (On [Film's] Subject Matter), Xiandi dicmying, no. 4
(1933): 2.
89. Yuri Tsivian, "Between the Old and the New."
90. Mu Weifang, "'Huashen guniang"' (Girl in Disguise), SSND, pp. 832-33
(Minbao's supplement, Yingtan, 7 June 1936).
91. Gao Feng, "'Huashen guniang' ji qita" (Girl in Disguise etc.), SSND,
pp. 834-36 (Dawangbao, June 20, 1936) .
. 92. Bai Zi, "Huashen9 9unian9 gongzuo riji" (Work log of Girl in Disguise);
Huasheng 9unian9 tekan ( 1936 ), microfilm, China Film Archive. Apparently,
Yuan Meiyun was very keen on her male garbs. She took walks "incognito·
in her male suits. She also went to the Datong Photo Studio to have pictures
taken in her suits.
93. Ibid. The cartoonist's name is Jiang Dongliang.
94. For a discussion on the proliferation of, and debates over, translated West-
ern discourses on homoeroticism in Republican China, see Tze-lan Debo-
rah Sang's article, "Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of Tongxing'ai
in Republican China (1912-1949)," in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of
Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia H. Liu (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1999), pp. 276-304. Sang observes that the profusion of public dis-
cussions on female same-sex love wfnt hand in hand with an increased
male scrutiny of a female experience previously largely confined to the pri-
vate sphere. This was accompanied by a concerted action to stigmatize and
prohibit female same-sex love in the name of science.
95. Sun Yu's film career began in 1927 when he joined the Great Wall Com-
pany as an assistant director. In 1928-29 he wrote and directed his first
two films, Xiaoxiang Tears (Xiaoxiang lei) and Playboy Swordsman (Fengliu
jianke), both martial arts subjects though with a poetic touch. He then
joined Lianhua while making Spring Dream in the Old Capital (Gudu chun-
meng; Minxin, 1930).
96. Peter Rist, "Visual Style in the Shanghai Films Made by the Lianhua Film
Company (United Photoplay Service): 1931-37," The Moving Image: The
404 1 Journal of the Association ofMoving Image Archivists (2001), pp. 210-16.
97. Zasui is a cheap northern dish made of chopped and stewed entrails of lamb
and oxen. The English pidgin term "chop-suey," which I choose as a trans-
lation, both refers to stir-fry dishes with similar or other cheap ingredients
common in American Chinatowns.
98. Sun Yu, "Dianying zaisuiguan: Kaizhang daji" (Cinematic Chop-Suey
House: An Auspicious Opening), Xiandai dianying. no. l ( 1933): 22-23.
99. Sun Yu, Dalu zhi ge, p. 119.
100. Ibid., p. 123.
101. As with Roadside Flower, this film was also apparently inspired by and re-
worked the story of l.a dame aux camellia, which enjoyed enormous popu-
larity in China. Dong Xinyu offers a pen.-eptive analysis of the imprint of
this "Camellia" prototype on Chinese film melodrama about aborted free
love in her Kan yu beikan zhijian (Between Seeing and Being Seen) (Beijing
shifan daxue. 2000), pp. 86-90.
102. Wang Renmei, Wode chengming yu buxing (Shanghai wenyi, 1985), p. 108.
l 03. A similar setting is found in the first half of Daybreak made a year later. In-
deed. while other films of the period often feature middle-class homes with
city views as a given. Sun Yu insistently give the working class also a share
of that view and thus a sense of city ownership.
104. According to Wang Renmei's recollections, Sun Yu deleted another sen-
tence ("The life's path is uneven with obstacles, but they ignore them") and
instead had the camera tracking the four pairs of youthful, strong legs
marching in synchrony, stepping over boulders. Wang, Wode chen9min9 yu

buxin9, pp. 107-8.
105. The script was originally titled Revenge on the Volcano (Huoshan fuchouji).
"Blood of Pass.ion· (qingxue) has an obvious erotic meaning, althOU!Jh Sun
Yu insisted that the change of title was motivated by the desire to get away
from a mere •personal revenge• theme. Sun Yu, "Daoyan 'Huoshan qing-
xue ji'" (Notes on Directing Blood of Passion on the Volcano), SSND, p. 132
[Shibao, September 15, 1932].
106. Xi Naifang and Huang Zibu, "Huoshan qingxue," SSND, p. 135 [Chengbao's
daily film supplement, September 16, 1932].
107. Ibid., 133-35.
108. Sun Yu, Dalu zhige, p. 123.
109. Paul Pickowicz, "The Themes of Spiritual Pollution in Chinese Films of the
1930s,• p. 51.
110. Ding Yaping, "Lishi de jiulu-Zhongguo dianying and Sun Yu" (The Old
Path of History-Chinese Cinema and Sun Yu), Beijing dianying xuebao,
no. 4 (November 2000): 3-4.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Xinhua had come into existence in the mid-l 930s sound boom. Its founder
Zhang Shankun was a key figure in the film scene in the mid- to late 1930s
and in Occupied Shanghai after the war broke out. As had Zhang Shichun
before him, Zhang Shankun came from the teahouse background. After a I 405
brief career in a tobacco company, and through his involvement in a pow-
erful triad (The Green Gang), he climbed to a managerial position in the
Great World, the famous amusement center, and the adjacent Gongwutai
Theater.
2. The Chinese rendering of the title, "The Ghostly Shadow in the Field of
Singing• (Gechang meiying), aptly translates a Western •phantom" into a
Chinese idiom for the supernatural figure.
3. His original surname was Xu. Because he is married into his wife's family,
presumably as an adopted male heir, he took on his wife's last name as well,
hence the rather unusual double surname.
4. Lyrical Theater (Jincheng) was located at the intersection of today's Beijing
Road and Guizhou Road. The theater was built in 1934, the same year Xin-
hua was founded.
5. GJN, p. 407.
6. Linda Badley. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1995), pp. 8, 11. On horror as a "body genre: see Carol J.
Clover. "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film," in Fantasy and the
Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989), pp. 91-
133. See also Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess: in
Film Genre Reader II, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1995), pp. 140-58.
7. According to a U.S. Department of Commerce Report from 1930: ·The ex-
hibition of the first sound and talking pictures in the Shanghai theaters .in
February 1929 took the motion-picture public of Shanghai by storm. Since
then no less than 12 theaters in Shanghai have installed or are about to in-
stall sound equipment, and most first-class theaters show nothing but
sound pictures. Outside of Shanghai, sound equipment has been installed
in Hong Kong, Canton, Tientsin, Hankow, Peiping and Nanking" (E. L. Way,
ed., "Motion Pictures in China," Trade Information Bulletin, no. 722 [U.S. De-
partment of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce,
1930): 5}.
8. Roman Jakobson, ·The Dominant,· .in Language in Literature, eds. Krystyna
Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (CamMridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987),
p. 41.
9. C. J. North, "The Chinese Motion Picture Market," pp. 8, 16-17.
10. Lianhua, the left-leaning company established in 1930, was slow in em-
bracing sound. This procrastination was due to a number of reasons; one
central concern was that the crude quality of early sound film was not ap-
propriate for its campaign of "reviving the national film.· Making silent
films, with sound only as occasional embellishment, quickly became Lian-
hua's production philosophy. See "Lianhua jinhou zhipian jihua" (The Fu-
ture Plan for Film Production at Lianhua), Yingxi zazhi 2, no. 2 (Oct. 31,
1931): 22-23.
11. Xu Bibo, "Zhongguo yousheng dianying de kaiduan• (The Beginnings of
406 I Chinese Sound Cinema), Zhongguo Dianyin9, no. 4 ( 1957): 58-62. Xu wrote
the script for the film. To promote the film, YXSH ( l, no. 9 [March 1931 J)
devoted a special issue to it, with a synopsis, song lyrics, and other items of
interest.
12. Hu Die, Yinghou shengya, pp. 91-94. It happened frequently that one heard
a male voice while there was a woman speaking on the screen. See also
GJN, pp. 209-10.
13. Singing Beauty was sold to a distributor in Canton. After overcoming some
technical problems, such as the matching of "sound" and "mouth,· the film
premiered there on September 19, 1931. The theater was located in the
heart of the city near the bus terminal. which greatly boosted box-office re-
turns. Ji Cheng, "Yu Meiren zai Guangzhou• (Singing Beauty in Canton),
YXSH l, no. 38 (Oct. 3, 1931).
14. Yun Qin, "Cong Genii Hongmudan shuodao Yuguo tianqin9• (From The Sing-
ing Girl Red Peony to Peace after Storm), YXSH. 1, no. 21 (June 6, 1931 ): 8-9.
15. The caption reads; "Dear readers, you often go enjoy sound films, and per-
haps you are aware that some of them have sound. But because of your [ig-
norant] situation, you may not know how it was done. We hereby show
you two strips of film from Peace after Storm. Please pay attention to the side
bar with uneven coloring-that is precisely the source of sound waves,"
Yingxi zazhi, no. 9 (April 1931 ): 3.
16. YXSH, 1, no. 24 (June 27, 1931). ln the same issue, a picture of the "Movi-
etone" strip was shown, along with a picture of the star Huang Naishuang
dancing.
17. See for instance, Tanjingdeng (Carbon Light), "Zhen mei lianchi ya!" (How
Shameless!), YXSH I, no. 26 (July 11, 1931): 3.
18. Kamola (Camera), "Tianyi gongsi shezhi shengpian zhi jinguo" (How
Tianyi Came to Make Sound Film), YXSH l, no. 20 (June 6, 1931): 4-7.
19. Xiaoyuan, "Qingwen Tianyi gongsi" (Some Questions for the Tianyi com-
pany), YXSH 1.35 (12 Sept. 1931 ): 27-28; and Chen Guoxin, "Guan guo-
chan shengpian Gechang chunse hou" (After Seeing the Domestically Made
Sound Film Spring Arrives in the Singing World), YXSH 1, no. 47 (1931 ): 2-3.
20. Sha, "Guan Gechang chunse hou" (After Seeing Spring Arrives to the Singing
World), YXSH L no. 50 (Dec. 26, 1931): 15-17.
21. Hence the wordplay on fang (square), a homophone of the fang in Mei Lan-
fang, and yuan (round), which refers to the shape of a record album. Hu
Die, Yinghou shengya, p. 96.
22. Mary Ann Doane, "The Voice in the Cinema: Articulation of Body and
Space," in Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, eds., Film Sound (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press), 1985, pp. 163-64.
23. Mary Farquhar and Chris Berry, "Shadow Opera: Toward a New Archaeol-
ogy of the Chinese Cinema," Post Script 20, no; 2-3 (Winter/Spring & Sum-
mer 2001): 25-42.
24. The shorts were shown with other films in a variety of manners. The song
lyrics appeared as intertitles. Those made by Minxin were later incorpo-
rated into Lianhua's (into which Minxin merged) first feature Spring Dream
in the Old Capital ( 1930), accompanied by a phonograph. Mei Lanfang, Wode I 407
dianying shenghuo, pp. 3-10, 13-20.
25. For an informative and insightful essay on the "modernization" of the
Peking opera star (including Mei Lanfang), see Isabelle Duchesne, "The
Chinese Opera Star: Roles and Identity," in Boundaries in China, ed. John
Hay (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), pp. 217-330.
26. The sound track is not extant. The film also contains dancing episodes per·
formed by (but shot separately) the Mingyue singing and dancing troupe.
Wang Renmei, Wo de chengming yu buxing, pp. 112-23. According to Wang,
these episodes were among several experimental "singing and dancing"
sound films using wax disk technology. They were supposed to be shown
before a feature. But in this case, they were incorporated into the film de-
spite lack of narrative connection.
27. FZS, p, 163.
28. This may have been partly influenced by Hollywood musicals that were
shown at first-run sound theaters in Shanghai. The June 1930 issue of the
magazine, Xin yinxing yu tiyu, for instance, carries a big advertisement for
Warner Brother's release Show of Shows. Its Chinese title is "Xi zhong xi"
(Play within a play) (p. 14).
29. Wang Wenhe, Zhongguo dianying yinyue xunzong {Beijing: Zhongguo
guangbo dianying, 1995), p. 9.
30. The film is not extant. For a complete original script, see Sun Yu dianying
juben xuanji (Selected Film Scripts by Sun Yu) (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying,
1981). Sun Yu reportedly admitted the influence of Frank Borzage's Seventh
Heaven ( 1927)-one of Fox's first Movietone films-on this film. See Yi

Zhong, "Cong Gudu chunmeng shuodao Yecao xianhua ji Lian'ai yu yiwu·
(From Spring Dream in the Old Capital to Wild Flowers and Love and Duty),
Yingxizazhi 2, no. 2. (Oct. I, 1931): 30.
31. See Yingjin Zhang, "Engendering Chinese Filmic Discourse of the 1930s. •
32. Quoted in Wang Wenhe, Zhongguo dianying yingyue xunzong, p. 8.
33. Ibid., pp. 6-7.
34. Huo Shan (Volcano}, "Duiyu yousheng dianyingde quexian• (The Short-
comings of Sound Film), YXSH, vol. 1. no. 51 (2 Jan. 1932): 4-5. The re-
port from the American consulates in Shanghai obviously overestimated
the size of the English-speaking populition there at the time (E. L. Way, ed.,
"Motion Pictures in China,· p. 5).
35. On the whole Sun Yu's language is very modem and shows the influence
of the May Fourth vernacular literature. His song lyrics retain traces of clas-
sical poetry and folk song, however. "Looking for My Brother," for in-
stance, has an eight-line stanza that alternates between lines with three and
five characters. In all there are four verses, with the "brother" and "sister·
singing two verses each. Both in form and content, it resembles a folksong.
36. Wang Wenhe, Zhongguo dianying yinyue xunzong, p. 90. Besides the theme
song, another important diegetic piece of music, the humoresque by the
Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, played by the male protagonist in the
film when expressing his love, was also •synchronized" by a record.
408 1 37. Lianhua had offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tianjin. In fact, Wild
Flowers was produced by Minxin, but •published" or distributed by the
newly founded Lianhua.
38. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, .Dialectic ofEnlightenment, p. 120.
39. Ibid., pp. 44-45.
40. GJN, pp. 295-96.
41. Roman Jakobson, "On the Relation between Virnal and Auditory Signs," in
Language in Literature, p. 469.
42. The most famous •song and dance· troupe at the time, the "Mingyue gewu-
tuan, • headed by Li Jinghui and featuring would-be movie stars Li Lili and
Wang Renmei, was an important supplier of musical material and talent to
the emerging sound film industry. Li Minghui promoted the numbered mu-
sical notation, standard Chinese, and children's literature and education. All
the troupe members learned guoyu, partly for singing the songs he wrote.
The troupe was officially incorporated into Lianhua in 1931, and partici-
pated in the production of several films. See Wang Renmei, Wo de chen9min9
yu buxin, chapters 2 and 3. Nie Er, the young musician who composed the
theme song in Children of Troubled Times (the future national anthem of the
PRC) for the film, was also a Mingyue member.
43. For a discussion on the significance of Stimmung in the Weimar cinema, see
Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and
the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973), pp. 199-206. According to Eisner's definition, Stim-
mung, an effect of lighting, suggests the "vibrations of the soul,• which
"hovers around objects as well as people.• She continues. nThis Stimmung is

most often diffused by a 'veiled: melancholy landscape. or by an interior in
which the etiolated glow of a hanging lamp, an oil lamp. a chandelier, or
even a sunbeam shining through a window. creates penumbra.• Although
Eisner's view is at times impaired by her obsessive critique of the Geiman
npsyche, • her highlighting of the key stylistic elements in the Weimar cin-
ema is helpful. This description applies to Song at Midnight to some extent
as well.
44. Qingchang guairen (Shanghai: Langhua yingpian gongsi), April 1924.
45. The "bamboo clock,• consisting of a hallowed bamboo stem and a stick, is a
device traditionally used to indicate the time at night according to the posi-
tion of the moon.
46. Another hunchback in the film is the night watchman in the theater. In-
terestingly, the two old characters serve the dual function of both the ser-
vants and the parents to the male and female protagonists. Together they
seem to form a deformed family, marked by physical or mental handicap
and divided by historical trauma. The hunchback is one of the typical char-
acters in horror films. See Drake Douglas, Horrors! (New York: Overlook
Press, 1989), the section on "The Hunchback," pp. 299-332. The other
types Douglas examines include the Vampire, the Werewolf. the Monster,
the Mummy. the Walking Dead, the Schizophrenic, and the Phantom. The
main character in Song at Midnight clearly belongs in the international fam-
ily of phantoms. I 409
4 7. The lyrical mood here is also evocative of the figure of the esoteric, strange
and dissent in classical Chinese literary tradition, for examples, Qu Yuan's
Chu Ci, and Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi. Fo.r a perceptive study of the latter,
see Judith Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1993). The association with Qu Yuan is not entirely arbitrary,
since Tian Han was heavily influenced by a combination of Chinese esoteric
poetry, Japanese modernism, and Western romantic poets such as Goethe
and Whitman.
48. A ghost, according to the traditional belief. does not possess a shadow, and
that is how one can tell a ghost from a living person. In the case of Song
Danping, because he is not really dead, the shadow-body may stand as a
liminal form between a ghost and aliving person.
49. Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday L1Ye, trans., Steven Rendall
50. Yomi Braester, Witness Against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in
Twentieth-Century China (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003),
p. 99.
51. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, translated by Ulrich
Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983 ), p. 185.
52. YXSH, vol. l, no. 4 (1931): 2.
53. Hu Zhongbiao, "Shenguai muogui huazhuang zhi yanjiu" (Studies on the
Makeup of Demons and Spirits), Dianying yuebao, no. 7 (Oct. 10, 1928).
54. Ying also directed Plunder of Peach and Plum ( 1934), the first "total" sound
film made with sound equipment devised by Chinese technicians. Prior to

his entry into the film world. like other prominent directors of the period,
Yin had been active in the spoken drama scene.
55. In one interesting instance of the uncanny use of sound in relation to the
face, a portrait of her fiance on the wall suddenly "talks" to the woman, en-
couraging her to work harder for the revolutionary cause.
56. Carol Clover, "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film," in Fantasy
and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: British Film Institute, I 989),
p. 94.
57. James Donald, "The Fantastic, the Sublime and the Popular: Or, What's At
Stake in Vampire Films?" in Fantasy dnd the Cinema, p. 240.
58. The corpus of this project as a whole is known as Shiji, or Records of the His-
torian. It was written ca. 104-91 and consists of 130 books. It covers the pe-
riod from the mythical Yellow Emperor to the contemporary events during
the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty; the contents range from bi-
ographies of famous figures to peasant uprisings, from portrayals of ethnic
minorities to descriptions of commercial life. The genres and methods used
by Sima Qian were adopted by later historians and historiographers. The
work as a whole has also been considered an exemplary literary landmark.
Sima Qian is credited as the first historian who adopted the genre of biog-
raphy in the writing of history.
59. The reference to nitric acid has, however, a more direct connection to mod-
410 I ern science and military technology. My thanks to James St. Andre who
alerted me to the prevalent motif of vitriol-throwing in late Victorian En-
glish detective fiction, which was translated into Chinese. The practice of
using nitric acid in incidents involving thwarted love has been a persistent
part of urban lore in Shanghai.
60. Incidentally, the name of one of the Chunliu playwrights was Song Chip-
ing; only the middle character differs from Song Danping. Whereas chi
means obsession, dan has connotations of loyalty and devotion. Ouyang
Yuqian describes playwrights like Song and others as being primarily in-
fluenced by their literati background, and hence reluctant to embrace more
radical ideas and values. Their protagonists tend to be romantic and gallant
yet tragic, and they often renounce the world through suicide or escape in
the end; see his "Tan wenmingxi.» pp. 206-7.
61. For a first-hand account of the Chunliu troupe, see Ouyang Yuqian, uHuiyi
Chunliu" (Remembering Chunliu), collected in his Zi wo yanxi yilai (Since I
Started Acting) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1959), pp.155-89.
62. A full-length version of the play in Chinese, translated and modified by Xu
Banmei, is included in Zhongguo zaoqi huaji, xuan (Selected Early Chinese
Spoken Drama Plays), ed. Wang Weimin (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, 1989),
pp. 307-44.
63. See Zhong Dafeng et al., "From Wenrningxi (Civilized Play) to Yingid
(Shadowplay)," p. 49.
64. Nie Er died just one day after Zheng. on July 17, 1935.
65. Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists, as quoted in Mark Jancovich,
Horror. p. 53.
66. Notably, Universal Pictures' The Phantom of the Opera has none of these
features.
67. FZS, pp. 490-91.
68. Here it is possible to connect Benjamin's conception of photography's ca-
pacity to reveal the •optical unconscious• and Frederic Jameson's propo-
sition that narrative interpretation has to be informed by an underlining
"political unconscious.• For both, the "unconscious" stands for a particular
historically formed experience that cannot be simply reduced to the level of
content alone. Benjamin is more attentive to the technological singular-
ity and representational challenge posed by the photographic medium,
whereas Jameson is primarily concerned with the form of the novel. See
Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography" and Fredric Jameson,
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1981 ).
69. A contemporary critic, writing shortly after the premiere of the film, com-
mented on the problem of sound recording in the film, that the volume of
the sound effects tended to drown out the dialogue. What he found most
attractive about the film was these poetic staging of the nocturnal scene,
with a cold moon and the misty lighting. He also argues that the form of
horror is very appropriate for the subject matter, which presents the ghost
as a human being and an embodiment of the ·conflict between emotion I 411
and reason." Ye Di, "Yeban gesheng" (Song at Midnight), in SSND, pp. 471-
73 [Da wanbao, Feb. 22, 1937).
70. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, p. 257.
71. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Islowsky (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 304-67.
72. Yomi Braester, Witness Against History, p. 81.
73. The·Hong Kong catalogue for the retrospective of Early Chinese Cinema: The
Era of Exploration (Hong Kong Arts Center and Hong Kong Chinese Film As-
sociation, 1984) describes this film as "reminiscent of Song at Midnight in its
treatment of images and heralds the style of 'Film Noir' in the forties.•
74. The persistent return of the grotesque face and the proliferation of the
horror and other "body genres· in Hong Kong in ensuing decades further
underscores the significance of Song at Midnight in Chinese film and cul-
tural history. The film's latest incarnation was The Phantom Lover (with same
Chinese title, Yeban gesheng) made in 1995, on the eve of the "turn-over·
of Hong Kong to China, and featured the mega-pop star Leslie Cheung
(Zhang Guorong), who composed and sang film's songs. The film was again
a huge hit. The nocturnal singing of this early sound film echoes until this'
day, not least because Leslie Cheung killed himself by jumping off a high-
rise hotel in central Hong Kong on April l, 2003. His death prompted a
mass mourning both in the city and around the world, on the street, and in
cyberspace.
ENVOI
l. Harry Harootunian, History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the
Question ofEveryday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 17.
2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thou9ht and Historical
Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 17-8.
3. Paul Veyne, Writin9 History, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown,
Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984 (1971), pp. 15-30.
4. Ibid., p. 5.
I
GLOSSARY
aimeiju :t~J)]
Aipulu (Apollo) ~-ts.
Aodi'an (Odeon) #1:ii!*
babu zhuyi A;r-.i..l
baguwen AJl!t:;i:.
baihua att
baihua yundong a n-:ilt11
baixiangren a~11.A..
Baiyuan laoren a~~A.
Bali daxiyuan e.$:k.AVt
bao :fi{,
Bao Tianxiao e!,k~
baolupian
baoying ,l .~
~~>t
beifa :11;1:li, I 413
bianhuan ~t1
bianju
biaoyan ,ti.;;.
bishi pian *~>t
bizhen i@.~
bolaiping Mi4t~
buwen bubai :r-::.t;:r,: a
Cai Chusheng .i-1! i.
Changcheng /<.JA
Changjiang /<-5:t.
Changming hanshou yingxi iPJJ ifi,IUJ Ia ~,1l 1IU1.
xuexiao Jiangyi
changpian zhengju l<.>t .iE.JII
changshi 'f~
chayuan -*"lffl
Chen Duxiu rAUli!f
Chen Kaige l!iltJIX~
ChengBugao ,tt ffe
chi i\l!.
chifei ~I!
chuan it:
chuancha jfil;
chuanqi #Ht
Glossary
chuchu wei xingqu shishang,yiji .!!t.1.t·fii.~~kit ~J~J!,fA.-~

boren yican
chujian chubao, jiuliang jipin F.tdtf l\t.~-it fl~ Yi'
Da Shanghai jihua kJ:.~iH•J
Dashijie :k.-t!!-,l}.
datuanyuan :k. mrm
dazhong :k. :$.
deli.lfeng {lj-fftJR
Demokelaxi xiansheng t.t* .>iAi cf!~ 1.
dianchahui *-t"
dianying 't!.3 I
dianying mingxing 't;ll} 'lll .!i
dianying shi yanjing de bingqilin, 't§}kO/l.llff/8,Jf.l>\-41-,•~:llt:!ig;iJff-.t,.'j-
xinling de shafayi
dianying xiaoshuo 'ilt*J +it
dianying zasuiguan ~-§J~lf~
diaobangzi ;~-=J-
dingmin tun '.-t.-$--il6-
Dong Keyi JUt.
dongya bingfu ~saffe, Jt
dongzuo 'i//11
dushi guanzhong ,/ij1 ,t;" .fiJ/..lf<
414 I dushisanwen :KJ11r-Xt.:t
er wo tu ..::...jJt fro
erchong zhi yi ..::.. :it .:zAlt
fan ouxiang zhuyi li~dt:L~
Fan Xuepeng i'l /lJJ
fangjiao ~l-%¥
fa yang guoguang ft.ti JOO it,
feilii feima ;Jj,Jl!t ~f .IK,
feixia ~,fl
fen shen xiang ~~1f.
fen shuoming n'-lJ!..nJ1
fenchang fenmu ~:l!~.f.
fengsuhua Ji.\.%- :t
fengxing quanqiu JRH1:-1jt
fugu ~j(_-;;-
fuguo qiangbin 1,$\i!*
fuxing Jlit ;lflj
fuxing guopian 4l$HU-t
gailiang jingxi ?.t il:t-JA
ge
geju ~fl
gewu ju lil:Jl~l
gewu pian $:Jt~
Glossary
gewu zhizhi ~4h.Ut

Gong Jianong ~~Al
Gu Kenfu .!lli1i:k
gu'ai [!J :t
guairen ,tfJ,,.
Guaixia {Hl
Guan Haifeng f; itij:J,t
guanzhong xinli ~$,,:;Jj_
Gu'er jiuzu ji 5{,;f{:ill. "Jc.
guju xinbian -t- ,:,J #~ ffli
guochan ~A.
guofang dianying iml%1UJ
guopian zhi gong hWJ }'\ z 's"
guoyu !ffl;rf
gushipian tt::P:J.l
guzhuangju -t"~J.f,J
haipai iai:iffi.
haishang ii!i.-J:.
Han Wudi ;Jt~·tr
heiqi bandeng .1Ri*~a4'E
Hong Shen
Hongkou da xiyuan **
:J!.r.O kJiVll
Hou Yao ~llj1 I 415
Hu i@.
Hu Die t}l1$_
Hu Shi l}l .i&
huabao :t~ll
huahua shijie 1Ue.1!t--l'I-
huaji xiju ~fi$/J•J
Huaju
huaju
*~J
iU•l
Huang Zunxian *ilt:t
huangjin shidai j\-1;-etf\
Huanxian ~'.11.Ii
huayang zaju '!FH-!t.fl;
huazhuang xiang 1t.#ldt
huodong xiezhen it1ti~i l
huowenxue it:t-$
huohai :#1!1,
huoshao :k.lh,
jianghu i.r.J\!J]
jianguang doufa ,,JJ\:.4-ik
jiaohua ~ft.
jiaojihua ?tffll-1t.
jiating gongsi ~Jil/,!-$)
Glossary
jiating wenti ju 'Jf_Jk.WI,1UJ

jiayin zhongxing ip~,j>~
jiazhuangpin ffl!'jt J:,
jieshuo Mit
jiguan .JU/I
jiguan bujing .JU~ ;/f :'--
jingji itii!t
jingkuangshi 11:l! i:..
jingli f,ifft
jingpai -Jr.~
jingyan t<i!lk J
jingyanzhuyi !'$$:.i.~
jixie ren .J~t~A.
jixie wenming .Jli,#.j:_ O}j
juben huang /§ 1-t. iit
1
jun'eiga tMJct
juzhi J.f,}'6'
kai yanjie f,t1 H!trf,.
kaibu ri1P.t
kan xiyangjing ~&ii(-i!
kangbadu bit El~
kanke $~
416 I Ke Ling tnt
kexue shen #~#
kexue yu renshengguan #*~Ai.,1/J/.-z·}
zhizheng
kexue yu xuanxue #~~j:"~
kongbu pian !&•)Ip >t
kuaigan -t:k:$
kunqu :t. db
Lang Que-nai ii~iipJi
laohuzao ~tt,J'l
laogong jf .L
leidesi i4f Jt
Li Lili ~»ti.t
Li Zeyuan 4',if~
Liang Qichao *.r.t>i!
Lian he .I/IP~
Lianhua f f,-if
Lianhuan tuhua i!J,f Wil :t:
lianhuanxi itJJJil
liantai benxi it,&;;$.~
lilong :R.-n-
linghun :ti~
lingong xuexiao {Jil..:r.~tt
Glossary
lishi xiangzhao jJ ±-t- g,

Liu Na'ou JJ•/1')~~
Ii yuan ~lffl
longtang -Ji-i'
Lu Xun ·i· ii!,
Luo Mingyou m_!l}j,{t;
lutian tongshi :;t~:ifil.~
Mao Dun (Shen Yanbing) f Jli ( »tJ/li.;,J<.)
mao'er xi iitil~
Ma-Xu Weibang .!!,~:Hft.J/l
Mei Lanfang ;f$:f,;;j;if
mini ting iti1fi:£
mingshi fengliu .t±.!il.if.t
Mingxing n}) j'._
Mingxing yingpian gufen you- llJl ?1. *J Jt JW;,(~ ~I'll~,;}
xian gongsi
Minxin ~,f)'f
minzhonghua ~%1t
modeng }!J:1'!:
modeng nillang J!J:1'!:-kt11
mubiao
muwei
"~
,i•,t.
namowen ,t}f/;iil,. I 417
Nan yang ~'4-
neixin biaoyan fll·~~;)li
Nie Er 4.lf-
niucha 4'-;f
niupeng .!f-;/NJ
ni.ixia -k-1*.
Ouhua ~1t
Ouyang Yuqian ~J'fi-t1t
piaoyouhui #-A. -fr
pingmin jiaoyu +~~lf
piyingxi Jt§JJA
puluo -tbll.
qianmianlang -too t11
qianyi mohua !iH}?.Jdt.
qimeng },ff,
Qinglian ge ~t!M
qipao jj:ie!,
qiu ji tu ,j:. e..&4
Qu Qiubai -l!t'tk.a
quanbu yousheng duibai 1:--ll~ .t i't a
quanguo yundonghui 1:- W,l ilE lbJ -fr
Quanye julebu 1:-&1Jt.~{I~
Glossary
raoliang sanri t.HiLE-El

Ren Pengnian 1:£: Jj.,.
rentimei A3!ik
renxia haoyi 1Hlir$.:
Renxin zai jishi, miaoshou ke
huichun
{;:.,.,;.ff *' i¥:' tJ-t 'if @1 *
rongzhu xin lixiang yi ru jiu
fengge
rougan
Ruan Lingyu Y,Vt.I,.
ruanpian #:: J1 I
ruanxing dianying JW:•11:. 'l't!;ij
Saiyinsi xiansheng ~rtl.Jlli'Jti.
shan you shan bao, e you e bao ~;tr +:Ill, .t;tr J.Ht
Shanghai .1:.#ij:
Shanghai da xiyuan .!:.#ii: .:k.Ji\l'.it.
Shanghai meishu zhuanke .l:.#ii:k.W.$-#~,f,t
xuexiao
Shanghai qi .!:.#ii:$\.
shangwu jingshen ,';\J;l\'.;l'ir.f-t
shangwu yinshuguan illf ~tr'fi-n
Shao shi xiongdi ii~ .I;\ Ji.if,
418 1 Shao Yifu
Shao Zuiweng (;~~tit
shehui lunli pian ~d:.1{11l,J£)1
shehui pian fd:.1, ft
shehui xinwen :id:.'\tflli~fl
Shen 'f'
shengjiangji frf\},j~
shengse lianyin 11t ~JliHl!l
Shenjiang yi da wutai 'fl ;.I.#}d/1:4:
shenlin qi Jing :¤l-lmJP.it
shenmi ke :ff'£' st
shenqi/shenguai :itJ.J-t#·tf.
Shenzhou pai :i-t :l+I i.$.
shexi :ill!~
shi de jingyanzhuyi it bi] f<! .:t ..i\
Shibao nt:lll
shidai Dt1\
shijie ·~,l\l
shijie datong i¥:_ff. ;k_ Ii)
shijie geming 't,t.!}$-$-
shijiere i¥: ,j\LAA,
shi!i yangchang + ]!.if~
ShiZhecun
Glossary
shimpai geki ..li~fl

shishen !I<.. .Jr
shisu i!t'-f?i..
shizhuang yanqingpian u,t ~:t ·M" }\
shouying +~
shuangbao an
shuoming ~e}I
shuomingshu -j;f,ll}j 't'
Sima Qian a) ,!Jiit
simiao +JiiJ
Sll fti--
Sulian jingtou ~~;,tiiJi
Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) 1t 'f J.i
Sun Yu 1f,Jilr
Tan Xinpei tf~Sil-
tanci ~lj]
Tang San Zang Ji ;.ii,
tekan #f1l
Tian Han 111il
tianqiao .,it;f4
tianren heyi :1.:.A.f;--
Tianyi .,it-
ticai ge (tige) (:119~) I 419
tichang guohuo {tfi m!Jt
tishen ~.Jr
tixian ll.V..t
tiyan l!lllk
tongju Jij,%
Tongqing JiJ&
tongshi :im.lf
tongsu iff!-f?i..
tu'an shi lil~A.
Tuhua Ian &1)1[~
tuolike ,k.11.Ji.
Wanguo bolanhui ;i& IH!/f 'Jt -t
wangguonu -t &mk
Wang Hanlun .:£.il1t
Wang Xuchang i.f.J!U
WangZilong £"fit
Wang Yuanlong £it.fl
wei rensheng de yishu ~A.1.6/J~./,f<t
wen :t
Wen Yimin i:~.I'(.
Wenming yaji j:_B}l.fft~
wenming jiehun j:_BM;HI}
Glossary
wenmingjiao ::tll}J.3W
wenmingxi ,tn})}A
wenxue geming ::t~$-$-
wenxue yanjiuhui :i(~~Jtt"
wenyan 3\:.~
wenyanwen ::t -t .::t
woyou W-.ift
Wu Lizhu !\~M.4
Wu Suxin
wusi yundong Ji. t!9 i!E.1/J
wutaiju ~tlf,J J
wuxia j(, 1:l
wuxia kuang ~11d£
wuxia shenguai pian :i(~:itH:Fl
wuzhi wenming
xi
Xi yuan
,~ mi
~h1t :ta}]
iE,
xi zhong xi IA 1' J1li.
Xia Peizhen l:1/11.~
Xia Yan .l#
Xiahun ft~
xiake 1~:$.
420 I XianXinha.i i:ll:.!Vij:
xiangzuozhuan f.J.H.i
xiao shimin +,tr~
xiao zichan jieji ,J,JfA.l'i'rM.
Xie Jin ~t%
xiesheng shi :%1.~
xin ,¥If
xin ganjue pai ii'i$~~
Xin Qingnian itH·.+
xinchao .i!fwJI
xingfengji ~-t*J
xingyu shichen 11•)~~1!.
xinju f/f~J
Xinmin #If~
xinqi -$Jr~
xinshi xuerang §fr t(.~i:
Xinshijie it.rtil!:--l'i-
xinxing lishi geju §fr 1:! )ft :t. ~1.f,J
xiren dianying J~.f... '4;§.}
xiushen 1,}:f.r
xiyang yingxi ~if§J~
xiyuan mtmJ
xizi JJ\>.-f-
Glossary
Xu Banmei .ft..+~
Xu Qinfang ft'-f-~
Xu Yuan .ft.Iii
Xu Zhuodai .ft..!¥-~
Xuan Jinglin '.ti:$
xuanji ~~Jl..
xuanxue gui
xueben .m.*-
xunxiongci ..(f Jt;Jij
YangNaimei
Yang Xiaozhong .ffi,Ht
yangchang if~
yangpai ifih-
yanjiang illi~
Yanqing pian "t·lk Jt
yanshi ~31!.
Yaxiya Sl.$&1 Sl.
ye huayuan .fl1tml
yeshou Jfik.
yi wu chuanqing ~:.l*11*1*
yiban furen ruzi -Rt#A.-1.t-'r
yichang
YinMingzhu AR:ll}]J.f. I 421
ying :V
*J.lf-
yingjie
yingpianju §.j Jt ,1
yingpingren ~if-A.
yingxi ~Ht
yingxi xiaoshuo fJ/Jl.+it
yingxing dianying .tM!'t§J
yingye jia liangxin f-'lmi jl,~
yinse shijie ~~i!!-.lf-
yipian gongsi -}t.(t}i)
yiren
yishi
*A.
$~
youlechang i.tt~~
Youlian
you xi :i!!ia
Yuan MU2'.hi .j:4*.~
yuanding lfflT
yuanquan shi 0000..'I.
yuamciao ;it.'j!f
yuanxing J.4i~
yuanyang hudie 11:!l+'I~
yuanyang zuo ~:t&
Glossary
yuan yin f,f,-$-

yuanzhi &~
Yueming }] U})
yugong
yule pian *~Jt
yumang ;fi.l]
Yun Gu ;{:~
zaofei i!fil.
zaomeng it~
zaoqi dianying -fJlJJ'iUJ
Zhang Huichong i'Ut-i1P I
Zhang Huimin i'&.t,b\
Zhang Shankun ~~J,'t,
Zhang Shichuan ~x;J1l
zhanghui :t-ro
zhen Ji-
Zheng Yimei 111~"4-
Zheng Zhenqiu Jp.iJ:.;f:k.
zhengdang .iJ:.'$
zhengli guogu ~.1£11/lHl
zhenshixing !11-f"·ti
zhenzhu J}J)!:.
422 I Zhongguo yingpian zhizao you- 'i' ffil JJ Jt JtliHi J~/~ GJ
xian gongsi
Zhongguo yingxi yanjiushe 'f 00:fhi\-)f-:I\'.;/-±.
Zhonghua yingye xuexiao 'i'$NJ~*,K
zhongxue weiyong, xixue weiti <t'~$ifil, c!7~$il/i
Zhongyang daxiyuan '~~k,ABt
Zhongyang yingxi gongsi 'f*;fjJA~.ij
Zhou Jianyun fol i,1J 1;'
zhuangyuan J!k.JC.
ziqiang ~Hi
zong shuoming tiiJf.U})
zoumadeng :*_.lf,;tf
zujie i.n.,J'/-
zuoyi dianying ,.t~iUJ
zuoyou :t~
FILMOGRAPHY
Note: Many translations are original. some are my own.

BAIYAN NOXIA (The Female Knight-Errant White Swallow) El ~-:ft:1l
Fudan, 1928
Ser/Dir: Yu Boyan
Cast: Zhang Lingqun, Qian Siying, Zhao Yongni, Yu Hanmin, Hua Wanfang
CHEZHONG DAO (Robbery on ti Train) .;)i. 'P j;

Commercial Press Motion Picture Section, 1920, 6000 feet
Sn: Chen Chunsheng (adapted from a translated novel)
Dir: Ren Pengnian
Ph: Liao Enshou
Cast: Ding Yuanyi, Bao Guirong, Zhang Shengwu
CHUANJIABAO (A Family Treasure) 1l'.f J

Shanghai yingxi, 1926. 9 r
I 423
Di.r: Dan Duyu
Ph: Dan Ganting
Cast: Yin Minzhu, He Rongzhu, Chen Baoqi, Gu Yunjie, Zhou Hongquan,
Wang Qiefu
CHUN CAN (Spring Silkworms) . j t

Mingxing, I 933, 10 r
Ser: Xia Yan
Dir: Chen Bugao
Ph: Wang Shi1.hen
Cast: Xiao Ying, Yan Xuexian, Gong Jianong, Ai Xia, Gao Jingping, Zheng
Xiaoqiu
DA LU (Big Road) k.Yi-

Lianhua (second studio), 1935, sound effects and music, 10 r
Ser/Dir: Sun Yu
Ph: Hong Weilie
Music: Nie Er
Cast: Jin Yan, Chen Yanyan, Li Lili, Zhang Yi, Zheng Junli, Luo Peng, Han
Langen, Zhang Zhizhe, Shang Guanwu, Liu Qian, Liu Jiqun, Hong Jingling
DA NAO GUAI JUCHANG (Stran9eHappenin9sattheTheater) kl!ilHi-Jl'JJ#i

Mingxing, 1922, 3 r
Filmography
Ser: Zheng Zhengqiu

Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Carl Gregory
Cast: Yan Zhongying, Zheng Zhegu
DAO MINJIAN QU (Goins to the People) j,J ~fl,,*

Nanguo dianying she, 1926, unfinished
Ser/Dir: Tian Han
Cast: Tang Huaiqiu, Tang Lin, Yi Su, Ye Dingluo, Jiang Guangchi, Li Jinfa,
Zhong Zitong, Boris, Piniek, Mme Weifudin~awa (?)
J
DING.JUN SHAN (Mount Dinsjun) ;t.1'-J.i
Fengtai Photographic Studio, extracts, 1905, 3 r, opera film.
Ph: Liu Zhonglun
Cast: Tan Xinpei
DUANDI YUYIN (Linserins Sound of a Broken Flute) liVrfir~-t

a.k.a. PENTOU ZHI WU (Dance in Front of the Tomb) J~;Jl~-
Shanghai College of Arts, 1927, unfinished
Ser/Dir: Tian Han
Ph: Ou Xiafeng, Zhang Huiling
424 1
DUHUI DE ZAOCHEN (Mornin9inaMetropolis),ll)l"!rfl/J~fl,.
Lianhua, 1933, 12 r
Ser: Cai Chusheng
Dir: Cai Chusheng
Ph: Zhou Ke
Cast: Wang Renmei, Gao Zhanfei, Yuan Congmei, Wang Guilin, Tang Huaiqiu
DUO GUO BAO (Seizins a National Treasure) f:' ffiJ

Lianhe, 1926, 9 r
Dir: Zhang Huichong
Cast: Zhang Huiehong, Xu Su'e, Fei Baiqing
D USHI FENGG UANG (Metropolitan Scenes) ,11)1 ip li!.;'c.

Diantong, 1935, 10 r. sound
Ser/Dir: Yuan Muzhi
Ph: Wu Xinxian
Cast: Zhang Xinzhu, Tang Na, Zhou Boxun, Bai Lu, Wu Yin, Cai Ruohong
ERBAIWU BAIXIANG CHENG HUANG MIAO (The Silly in Town God's Temple)
-==- a Ji. a ~11 Jm..i:Jii
Asia, 19i3
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Filmography
Ph: Essler
Cast: Ding Chuhe
FEIXING DADAO (The Great Flying Bandit) 1Mtkl:

a.k.a. Little Sister, I Love You
Shanghai Film Company, 1929
Dir/ Ph: Dan Duyu
Cast: Yin Mingzhu, Dan Erchun, Han Langen
FE NGYUN ERNO (Children of Troubled Times) ».\,;t .!l*

Diantong, 1935, sound
Ser: Tian Han.
Scenario: Xia Yan
Dir: Xu Xingzhi
Ph: Wu Xinxian
Cast: Yuan Muzhi, Wang Renmei, Tan Ying, Gu Menghe, Lu Luming, Wang
Guilin
FENHONGSE DE MENG (Pink Dream) f,H,.r.@.~"'

Lianhua, 1932, 10 r
Ser/Dir: Cai Chusheng
Cast: Gao Zhanfei, Xue Linxian, Liu Jiqun, Han Langeng, Tan Yin, Zheng I 425
Junli
FEIJIAN NU XIA (Heroine with a Flying Sword) ~~·1*1:k.

Xinren, 1928
Dir: Cheng Bugao
Cast: Li Manli, Ren Chaojun
GE CHANG CHUN SE (Spring Arrives atthe Singing World) ~J#Jfr.@.

Tianyi, 19 31, 8 r, sound
Ser: Yao Sufeng.
Adaptation: Qiu Qixiang.
Dialogue: Chen Dabei.
Dir: Li Pingqian
Ph: Bert Cann, Yan Bingheng, Zhou Shilu
Cast: Xuan Jinglin, Zhang YongguL Chen Yitang, Wu Suxin, Xu Qinfang,
Yang Naimei, Zi Luolan, Pu Jinghong
GEND HONG MUDAN (The Singing Girl Red Peony) ,lJ/:.*,b:4:t.:f']-

Mingxing, 1930, 9 r, film with sound on wax disks
Ser/Titles: Hong Shen
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Dong Keyi
Filmography
Cast: Hu Die, Wang Xianzhai. Xia Peizhen, Gong Jianong, Wang Jiting, Tang
Jie, Tan Zhiyuan, Zhu Xiuying, Xiao Ying
GONG FU GU ONAN (Share the Burden of the National Crisis) ~,ij;~Jlt

Lianhua, I 932, 7 r
Ser: Cai Chusheng, with Sun Yu, Wang Cilong, Shidong Shan
Dir: Cai Chusheng, with Sun Yu, Wang Cilong, Shidong Shan
Ph: Zhou Ke
Cast: Wang Cilong, Gao Zhanfei, Zong Weigeng, Zheng Junli, Jiang Junchao,
Chen Yanyan
J
GUDU CHUN MENG (Sprin9 Dream in the Old Capital) #.:~:f;.,f
Lianhua, 1930, 10 r
Ser: Zhu Shilin, Luo Mingyou
Dir: Sun Yu
Ph: Huang Shaofen
Cast: Wang Ruilin, Lin Chuchu, Ruan Lingyu, Liu Jiqun, Luo Huizhu
G U'ER JIU ZU JI (Orphan Rescues Grandfather) :J1$.jl~;/.11.1e.

Mingxing, 1923, 10 .r
Ser: Zheng Zhengqiu
426 I Dir: Zheng Zhengqiu
Ph: Zhang Weitao
Cast: Wang Hanlun, Zheng Xiaoqiu, Zheng Zhegu, Wang Xianzhai, Zhou
Wenzhu, Ren Chaojun, Shao Zhuanglin
HAISHI (Sea Oath) itJI-

Shanghai yingxi gongsi, 1921, 6 r
Dir/Ph: Dan Duyu
Cast: Yin Mingzhu, Zhou Guoji, Dan Erchun, Chen Baoqi, He Rongzhu
HANG KONG DAXIA (The Great Kni9ht-Errant of Aviation)£'.&'. .:k.-(l

Huaju, 1928
Dir: Chen Tian
Ph: Tang Jianting
Cast: Zhang Huimin, Wu Suxin, Chen Fei, Liang Saizhen
HEIJI YUANHUN (Victims of Opium) .~Si~i:t

Huanxian Film Company, 1916, 4 r
Dir: Guan Haifeng
Ph: A. Lauro
Cast: Zha Tianying, Xu Banmei, Zhang Shichuan, Huang Xiaoya, Huang
Youya, Hong Jingling
Filmography
HEIYE GUAIREN (The Stranger of Dark Night) .W,.(!d!l:A

Jinlong, 1928
Dir: Hong Ji, Ma-Xu Weibang,
HONGFEN KU LOU (Red Beauty and Skeleton) t,:.;J;))-ti;~

a.k.a. SHI ZIMEI (Ten Sisters) -tit>#.
New Asia Film Company, l 92L 14 r
Ser: Guan Haifeng
Dir: Guan Haifeng
Ph: Liao Enshou
Cast: Yin Xianfu, Shen Fengying, Chai Shaoyong, Lu Manshu, Hong Jingling,
Wang Guilin
HONG LEI YING (Shadow of Red Tears) tr.iik.-§J

Mingxing, 1931, 20 r
Ser/Dir/Titles: Zheng Zhengqiu
Asst. Dir: Cai Chusheng
Ph: Dong Keyl
Cast: Hu Die, Zheng Xiaoqiu, Xia Peizhen, Gong Jianong, Gao Qianpin
HONG XIA (The Red Heroine) t.,r:.tk_

Youlian, 1929, l O r I 427
Dir: Lincoln Yao (Yao Shiquan) (on print), Wen Yimin (in official sources)
Ph: Yao Shiquan
Cast: Fan Xuepeng (Van Shi Bong), Zhu Shaoquan, Wen Yimin, Shang
Guanwu, Xu Guohui
HONG YANG HAOXIA ZHUAN (The Legendofthe Great Knight-Errant Hong Yang)
;Jt..ff:tll. fl{.
Xinhua, I 935, sound
Ser: Wang Zhongxian (adpated from the eponymous Peking opera)
Dir: Yang Xiaozhong
Ph: Shen Yongshi
Cast: Wang Huchen, Xu Qinfang, Tong Yuejuan, Tian Fang
HONG LOU MENG (Dream of the Red Chamber) f-.r.4J~

Fudan, 1927, 20 r
Dir: Ren Pengshou, Yu Boyan
Ph: Wang Shizhen
Cast: Lu Jianfen, Wen Yimin, Zhou I<ongkong, Fan Xuepeng, Wang Xieyan,
Huang Yueru, Xing Banmei, Wang Yiming, Wang Yiman
Filmography
HUA JI DAWANG YOU HUA JI (The King of Comedy's Journey to China) ~:ff k
.:£.~*le.
Mingxing, 1922, 3 r
Ser: Zheng Zhengqiu
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Goodyear (?) (British resident)
Cast: Ricard Bell (British resident), Zheng Zhengqiu, Wang Xianzhai
HUA MULAN CONGJUN (Hua Mu/an Joins the Army) 1f.*-ilii.flt.-'

Tianyi, 1927, IO r
Ser: Liu Huogong I
Dir: Li Pingqian
Ph: Wu Weiyun
Cast: Hu Shan, Zhu Gang, Zhang Zhenduo, Zhang Zhizhi
HUANGJIANG NUXIA (Swordswomanfrom the Huangjiang River) lU.L*-1:lt

Episode 6 (of 13), DA NAO LUJIAOGOU (Big Trouble at Deer Horn Gulch)
:k.fJtll At Pi iilt-
Youlian, 1930, 10 r
Ser: Gu Mingdao (adapted from his serialized novel)
Dir: Chen Kengran, Zheng Yisheng, Shang Guanwu
Ph: Yao Shiquan
428 I Cast: Xu Qinfang, He Zhizhang, Zheng Yisheng, Shang Guanwu
HUANG TA QI XIA (The Strange Knight-Errant in the Deserted Pagoda) i.t:.~~fk.

Jinlong, 1929
Ser: Ni Gulian
Dir: Hong Ji
Ph: Zhou Tingxi
Cast: Hua Wanfang, Ma-Xu Weibang, Chen Kai, Xiao Sheng
HUASHEN GUNIANG (Girlin Disguise) 11:.,k-H;~

Yihua, 1936, 10 r, sound
Ser: Huang Jiamo
Dir: Fang Peiling
Ph: Yao Shiquan
Cast: Yuan Meiyun, Wang Yin, Han Langen, Zhou Xuan, Wang Guilin, Jiang
Xiu
HUBAIN CHUN MENG (Spring Dream on the Lakeside) i:AJl:i!+.11

Mingxing, 1927, 9 r
Ser: Tian Han
Dir: Bu Wancang
Ph: Dong Keyi, Shi Shipan
Filmography
Cast: Gong Jianong, Yang Nairnei, Xiao Ying, Tang Jie, Mao Jianpei, Lin
Zhusan.
HUO WU CHANG (A Living Wuchang) ftJi.i· .

a.k.a. XINNIANG HUAJIA YU BAI WU CHANG (The Bridal Sedan Meets Pale
~Ji'*'
Wuchan9) -sfr-ltil:ir. tf~'it
Asia, 1913, 2 r
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Essler
Cast: Qian Huofo, Ma Qingfeng, Guo Yongfu, Wang Xihua
HUODONG YINGXIANG (The Mobile Safe) )tfJJ~M.i

Kaixin, 1925, 3 r
Ser: Xu Zhuodai
Dir: Wang Youyou, Xu Zhuodai
Ph: Kawatani Shodaira
Cast: Xu Zhuodai, Wang Youyou, Zhou Fengwen, Zhou Kongkong
HUO SHAN QI NG XUE (The Blood of Passion on the Volcano) kJ!'l{i- Ja.
Lianhua, l 932, 10 r
Ser: Sun Yu
Dir: Sun Yu I 429
Ph: Zhou Kc
Cast: Li Lili, Zheng Junli, Tan Ying, Liu Jiqun.
HUOSHAO HONGLIAN SI (TheBurningoftheRedlotusTemple) k.:lkic<-fi,t

( 14 episodes, 1928-3 l)
Mingxing, part l, 1928, l I r
Ser: Zheng Zhengqiu
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Dong Kcyi
Cast: Zheng Xiaoqiu, Xia Peizhen, Tan Zhiyuan, Xiao Ying, Zheng Shaofan,
Zhao Jingxia, Gao Lihen
KONG GU LAN (Orchid in the Empty Valley) '.'.titij

Mingxing, 1925, 11 r
Ser: Bao Tianxiao (adapted from the eponymous novel)
Titles: Zheng Zhengqiu
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Dong Keyi
Cast: Zhang Zhiyun, Yang Naimei, Zhu Fei, Zheng Xiaoqiu, Song Chanhong,
Zhao Zhen, Wang Jiting, Ma-Xu Weibang, Ren Chaojun, Wang Xianzhai
Filmography
KONGGU YUAN SHENG (The Cry of Apes in a Deserted Valley)'!£~~~

Tianma, 1930
Dir: Ma-Xu Weibang
Cast: Wang Mengfei, You Guangzhao, Tan Yuesun, Fu Meina, Yuan Yijun,
Jing Fansan, Zhao Songjiao
KUANG LIU (Wild Torrent)~!. ii

Mingxing, 1933, 8 r
Ser/Titles: Xia Yan
Dir: Cheng Bugao /
Ph: Dong Keyi
Cast: Hu Die, Gong Jianong, Xia Peizhen, Tan Zhiyuan, Zhu Guyan
LAO GONG ZHI AIQING (Labcrer's Love) -M-.:r:.~fl:'1-it

a.k.a. ZHIGUOYUAN
Mingxing, 1922, 3 r
Ser/Dir: Zhang Shichuan, Zheng Zhengqiu
Cast: Zheng Zhegu, Yu Yin, Zheng Zhengqiu
LIANHUA JIAOXIANGQU (Lianhua Symphony) 1,lff !c.fldll

(an omnibus film of eight shorts)
430 1 Lianhua, 1937
Ser: Cai Chusheng, Fei Mu, Tan You!iu, He Mengfu, Zhu Shilin, Shen Fu,
Sun Yu
Dir: Situ Huimin, Fei Mu, Tan Youliu, He Mengfu, Zhu Shilin, Shen Fu, Sun
Yu, Cai Chusheng
Cast: Lan Ping, Mei Xi, Shen Fu, Li Zhuozhuo. Chen Yanyan, Zheng Junli, Ba
Lu, Liu Qiong, Li Qing, Zong You, Luo Peng, Heng Li, Shang I<ouwu, Ge
Zuozbi; Wang Cilong, Yin Xiucen
MALU TI ANS HI (Street Angel) ,{{,.$-~.ft.

Lianhua, 1937, IO r, sound
Ser/Dir: Yuan Muzhi
Ph: Wu Xinxian
Cast: Zhao Dan, Zhou Xuan, Wei Heling, Zhao Huichen, Wang Jiting, Qian
Qianli, Yuan Shaomei, Lin Jinyu
MITU DE GAOYANG (Lost Lambs) it:it~,M-A-

Lianhua, 1936, 5 r (?)
Ph: Zhou Darning
Cast: ge Zuozhi, Chen Juanjuan, Li Zhuozhuo, Zheng Junli
Fihnography
M UXING ZHI G UANG (Materna/ Light) -~•tiz;lc.

Lianhua, 1933, !Or
Ser: Tian Han
Dir: Bu Wangcang
Ph: Huang Shaofen
Cast: Jin Yan, Chen Yanyan, Li Zhuozhuo
NAN FU NAN QI (The Difficult Couple) ~jl.;!;;_,Jjl.-:fi:.

a.k.a. DONGFANG HUAZHU (Wedding Festivities) i1<1&:it31!
Asia Film and Theater Company, 1913, 2 r
Ser: Zheng Zhengqiu
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Essler
NEZHA CHUSHI (Nezha is Born) 1i~"C.~1:t

Changcheng, 1927, 1O r
Ser: Sun Shiyi
Dir: Li Zeyuan
Ph: Li Wenguang
Cast: Lei Xiadian, Zhang Zhede, Liu Jiqun, Liu Hanjun
NULING FUCHOU JI (RevengeofanActressJ-k#--Ui.1tl.ie. 1 431

a.k.a. MANGMUDE AIQING (Blind Love) 1i ITT ~t:,tt
Hanlun, 1929
Ser: Bao Tianxiao
Dir: Bu Wangcang
Ph: Liang Lingguang
Cast: Wang Hanlun, Gao Zhanfei, Fei Baiqing, Cai Chusheng
NU XIA BAIMEIGUI (The Valiant Girl White Rose)*~ a Ji:.J,lt

Huaju, 1929
Ser: Gu Jianehen
Dir: Zhang Huimin
Ph: Tang Jianting
Cast: Wu Suxin, Ruan Shengduo, Sheng Xiaotian
NO XIA HEI MU DAN (The Female Knight-Errant Black Peony) -k1~.~~J:.-Jt

Yueming, 1931
Ser: Wen Bojiu
Dir: Ren Pengnian
Ph: Ren Pengshou
Cast: Wu Lizhu, Cha Ruilong, Wang Hancheng
Filmography
NOXIA LI FEIFEI (The Female Kni9ht-Errant Li Feifei) -k#.\.4'>~~

Tianyi, 1925, 10 r
Ser: Shao Cunren, Gao Lihen
Titles: Zhao Tieqiao
Dir: Shao Zuiweng
Ph: Xu Shaoyu
Cast: Feng Jilhua, Wei Pengfei, Zhang Yi'er, Zhou Tianbei, Feng Keeheng
PANS I DONG (The Cave of the Spider Spirit) .tif.ifi't

Shanghai Film Company, 1927, 10 r
Ser: Guan Ji'an I
Dir: Dan Duyu
Ph: Dan Gaming
Cast: Yin Mingzhu, Wu Wenchao, Jiang Meikang, Zhou Hongquan, Wang
Qiefu
QI NUZI YU MEIYAN (The Amazing Woman YuMeiyan) 4J--k-"f~~~

Naimei, 1928, 9 r
Ser: Zheng Yingshi
Dir: Shi Dongshan. Asst. Dir: Cai Chusheng
Ph: Shi Shipan
Cast: Yang Naimei, Zhu Fei, Gao Zhanfei, Zhou Kongkong, Gao Qianpin, Yan
432 1
Gongshang, Yuan Yijun
QIFU (The Abandoned Wife)*'*

Changcheng, 1924, 11 r
Ser: Hou Yao
Dir: Li Zeyuan, Hou Yao
Ph: Cheng J:>eishuang
Cast: Wang Hanlun, Gan Yushi, Pu Jun, Hu Caixia, Chen Yimeng
QINGCHANG GUAIREN (The Stran9er on the Love Scene) ffi"JJH!.,1.,,

Langhua. 1926
Ser/Dir: Ma-Xu Weibang
Titles: He Xiaochen
Ph: Luo Hongyi
Cast: Yu Shuxiong, Shen Qiuying, Wu Xiaying, He Xiaochen, Zhang Wuzhi,
Wei Bang, You Guangzhao
SANGE MO DENG NUXING (Three Modern Women) ;.{l!J'***•lt

Lianhua, 1933
Ser: Tian Han
Dir: Bu Wancang
Ph: Huang Shaofen
Cast: Ruan Lingyu, Jin Yan, Li Zhuozhuo, Chen Yanyan
Filmography
SHENGSI TONGXIN (Hearts United in Life and Death) :i.ft%J,,:;

Mingxing, 1936, 9 r, sound
Ser: Yang Hansheng
Dir: Yin Yunwei
Ph: Wu Xinxian
Cast: Yuan Muzhi, Chen Bo'er, Li Qing, Liu Liying, Ying Yin
SHENNU (Goddess) #-k

Lianhua, 1934, l O r
Ser/Dir: Wu Yonggang.
Ph: Hong Weilie
Cast: Ruan Lingyu, Li Qian, Zhang Zhizhe, Li Junpan
SHENXIAN BANG (The Magic Club) #1Ji#-

Kaixin, 1926, 8 r
Dir: Wang Youyou
Cast: Wang Youyou, Ouyang Yuqian, Fang Hongye, Xia Yuerun, Zhou Feng-
wen, Zhang Zhi'er, Qin Haha
SI JIE CUN (Four Heroes Village) tm1!/!H

Zhongguo yingpian zhizao youxian gongsi, 1919, opera film, shot in Nan- 1 433
tong.
Dir. Lu Shoulian
Ph. Galkin(?) (American resident)
SI ZIMEI (Four Sisters) tm-kp#,

Lianhua, 1935
Ser/Dir: Yang Xiaozhong
Ph: Zhuang Guojun
Cast: Liang Saizhen, Liang Saizhu, Liang Saishan, Liang Saihu, Jiang
Junchao, Liu Jiqun
TAO LI JIE (Plunder of Peach and Plum) .f!l4'~

Diantong, 1934, sound
Ser: Yuan Muzhi
Dir: Ying Yunwei
Ph: Wu Weiyun
Cast: Yuan Muzhi, Chen Bo'er, Tang Huaiqiu, Zhou Boxun
TIANMING (Daybreak) :,i;.n}J

Lianhua, 1933, 11 r
Ser/Dir: Sun Yu
Ph: Zhou Ke
Cast: Gao Zhanfei, Li Lili, Ye Juanjuan, Yuan Congmei
Filmography
TIEBAN HONGLEILU ~ti~~*

Mingxing 1933, 10.r
Ser: Yang Hansheng
Dir: Hong Shen
Ph: Dong Keyi
Cast: Wang Ying, Chen Ningqiu, Wang Zhengxin
TIXIAO YINYUAN (Fate in Tears and Lau9hter) 1-~,jfi)~

Mingxing, 1932, 6 episodes, part sound
Ser: Yan Duhe (adapted from the eponymous novel by Zhang Henshui)
Dir: Zheng Zhengqiu I
Ph: Dong Keyi, Wang Shizhen, James Williamson
Cast: Hu Die, Zheng Xiaoqiu, Xiao Ying, Wang Xianzhai, Yan Xuexian,
Gong Jianong
TIYU HAUNGHOU (Sports Queen)~ 1f :i.k

Lianhua, 1934. IO r
Ser/Dir: Sun Yu
Ph: Qiu Yizhang
Cast: Li Lili, Zhang Yi, Yin Xu, Bai Lu, Wang Moqiu, Gao Weilian, He Fei-
guang, Shang Guanwu, Li Junpan, Han Langen, Liu Jiqun, Yin Xiulin
434 1
WANGSHI SIXIA (Pour Heroes of the Wan9 Family) ..!.~l!!l#i.
Dazhonghua beihe, 1927, 10 r
Ser/Dir: Shi Dongshan
Ph: Zhou Shimu
Cast: Wang Yuanlong, Wang Xueehang, Wang Yingzhi, Wang Zhengxin,
Wang Naidong, Zhou Wenzhu, Xie Yunqing
WU FU LIN MEN (Mascot Is Coming Here) .Ji.#,6f1

a.k.a. FENG LIU HESHANG (The Playboy Monk) »l.iitif,, o\J
Asia, 1913, 3 r
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Essler
Cast: Qian Huofo, Ding Chuhe, Ma Qingfeng, Wang Bingseng, Liu Ziqing,
Zhang Cuieui
XI XIANG JI (RDmance of the Western Chamber) i!1J.tii ll

Minxin, 1927, 4035 feet
Ser: Hou Yao
Titles: Pu Shunqing
Dir: Hou Yao, Li Minwei
Ph: Liang Linguang
Cast: Li Dandan, Lin Chuchu, Ge Cijiang, Li Minwei
Filmography
XIAO WANYI (Little Toy) ,J-JJt;t

Lianhua, 1933, 11 r
Ser: Sun Yu
Dir: Sun Yu
Ph: Zhou Ke
Cast: Ruan Lingyu, Li Lili
XIN NUXING (New Woman) ,1.li-Jdi

Lianhua (second studio), 1934, part sound
Ser: Sun Shiyi
Dir: Cai Chusheng
Ph: Zhou Darning
Music: Nie Er
Cast: Ruan Lingyu, Wang Moqiu, Zheng Junli, Yin Xu
XIN TAO HUA SHAN (The New Peach Blossom Fan) .i0t:/t.J/ri
Xinhua, 1935, sound
Ser/Dir: Ouyang Yuqian
Ph: Yu Sheng.5an
Cast: Jin Yan, Hu Ping, Tong Yuejuan, Zhang Shiyun, Wang Cilong, Gu
Menghe, Dai Yanfang
I 435
XIN XI YOU JI (New Journey to the ~st) ,1.liil§J~il
Mingxing, part 2, 1929, 10 r (in all 3 episodes 1929-30)
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Dong Keyi
Cast: Zheng Xiaoqiu, Xia Peizhen, Wang Jiting, Huang .Junfu, Tan Zhiyuan
YAN RUISHENG m!J.fi:t

Zhingguo yingxi, China Film Research Society, 1921, 14 r
Ser: Chen Chunsheng
Dir: Ren Pengnian
Ph: Liao Enshou
Cast: Chen Shouzhi, Shao Peng, Wang Caiyun
YE MEI GUI (Wild Rose) !ff.Jj:)_t

Lianhua, 1931, 9 r
Ser/Dir: Sun Yu
Ph: Yu Xingsan
Cast: Wang Renmei, Jin Yan, Ye Juanjuan, Zheng Junli, Han Lan'gen.
Filmography
YE MING ZHU (Lustrous Pearls) Fi. 11Jh$.

Huaju, 1927, 9 r
Ser: Zhang Huimin
Dir: Chen Tian
Ph: Tang Jianting
Cast: Zhang Huimin, Wu Suxin, Liang Saizhen, Ruan Shengduo, Wu Susu,
Zhang Yuepeng, Tang Jiaming
YEBAN GESHENG (Song at Midnight)

Xinhua, 1937, sound
Ser/Dir: Ma-Xu Weibang
I
Ph: Yu Xingshan, Xue Boqing
Music: Xian Xinhai
Cast: Hu Ping, Jin Shan, Zhou Wenzhu, Shi Chao, Xu Manli, Gu Menghe,
WangWeiyi
YE CAO XIAN HUA (Wild Flowers) ft$rJJ'J;/E.

Minxin/Lianhua, I 930, I l r, part sound (songs)
Ser/Dir: Sun Yu
Ph: Huang Shaofen
Cast: Ruan Lingyu, Jin Yan, Liu Jiqun
436 1
YICHUAN ZHENZHU (A String of Pearls) - !JI~*
Changeheng, 1925, IO r
Ser: Hou Yao
Dir: Li Zeyuan
Ph: Cheng Peishuang
Cast: Lei Xiadian, Liu Hanjun, Liu Jiqun, Zhai Qiqi, Huang Zhihuai, Xing
Shaomei
YINGSHEN YI (The Invisible Coat) f.t:fl' ;ti.

Kaixin, 1925, 3 r
Ser: Xu Zhuodai
Dir: Xu Zhuodai, Wang Youyou
Cast: Wang Youyou, Xu Zhuodai
YINHAN SHUANGXING (Two Ste1rs) ~i!i,~.!i

Lianhua, 1931, 12 r, part sound
Original story: Zhang Henshui
Ser: Zhu Shilin
Dir: Tomsie Sze (Shi Dongshan)
Ph: Zhou Ke
Cast: Raymond King (Jin Yan), Violet Wong (Zi Luolan), Wang Cilong, Gao
Chien Fei (Gao Zhanfei)
Filmography
YINMU YAN SHI (An Amorous History of the Silver Screen) ~J.11--'lt!l
Mingxing, 2 parts. 1931, 18 r
Dir: Cheng Bugao
Ph: Dong Keyi
Cast: Xuan Jinglin. Tan Zhiyuan, Wang Zhengxin. Xiao Ying, Gao Qianpin,
Liang Saizhen
YIYE HAO HUA (One Night of Glamour) -./t~:f

Tianyi, 1932, 9 r, sound
Ser: Su Yi
Dir: Shao Zuiweng
Ph: Wu Weiyun, Zhou Shilu
Cast: Xhen Yumei, Hu Shan, Sun Min
YU GUANG QU (The Fishermen's Ballad) iffi..;'t. lib

Lianhua, 1932, part sound
Ph: Zhou Ke
Cast: Wang Renmei, Luo Peng, Yuan Congmei, Han Langen, Tang Tianxiu,
Shang Guanwu, Qiu Yiwei
YU LI HUN (Jade Pear Spirit) .I..~i,t.

Mingxing, l 924, l O r
Ser: Zheng Zhengqiu (adapted from the eponymous novel by Xu Zhenya)
Dir: Zhang Shichuan. Xu Hu
Ph: Wang Xuchang
Cast: Wang Hanlun, Wang Xianzhai, Yang Naimei, Zheng Zhegu. Huang
Jungu, Ren Chaojun
YU MEIREN (The Singing Beauty) IP, ~A

Youlian, 1931 (film with sound on wax disks, produced under the name of
the Yiming Film Company)
Ser: Xu Bibo
Dir: Chen Ke.ngran
Ph: Liu Liangchan, He Zhigang
Cast: Xu Qinfang, Zhu Fei, Shang Guanwu
YUGUO TIANQING (PeaceAfterStorm) iifl~Jt-t

Huaguang. 1931, 12 r. sound
Ser: Xie Shihua.ng
Dir: Xia Chifeng
Ph: K. Henry
Cast: Chen Qiufeng, Huang Naishuang, Lin Ruxin, Zhang Zhizhi, Liu Yixin
Filmography
ZH!FEN SHI CHANG (Rouge Market) ~~{))--if~

Mingxing, 1933, 6r
Ser: Xia Yan
Dir: Zhang Shichuan
Ph: Dong Keyi
Cast: Hu Die, Gong Jianong
ZIMEI HUA (Twin Sisters) ##.1t

Mingxing. 1933, llr
Dir: Zheng Zhengqiu
Ph: Dong Keyi J
Cast: Hu Die, Zheng Xiaoqiu, Xuan Jinglin, Tan Zhiyuan, Gu Meijun
438 I
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Newspapers and Journals before 1949

(Note: some translations are original while others are .mine.)
Baihuabao [Vernacular Newspaper] if:flt

Chenbao [Morning Daily] ~ill
Chenxin9 [Morning Star] Al.
Dianshen9 [Cinema Voice] 't~
Dianshizhai huabao [Dianshizhai Illustrated] r.u; ~till
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Dianyin9 manhua [Cinema CartoonsJ 't1')1i:t
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Dianying xiju [Film and Drama] 't:IJJ~l1
Dianyin9 xinwen (Movie News] ,t;lJJIJr JIii I 449
Dianyin9 yishu [Movie Art] 1UJ *-W
Dianyin9 yuebao [Cinema Monthly] t'.~ JI :flt
Dianyin9 zazhi [Movie Monthly] 't~a/lit
Dianying zhoubao [Saturday Screen News] 't§)ffl:fll
Dianying zhoubao/Tiaowu shijie [Movie Weekly/The Dancing World] 1:~Jil#.tllit
~i!t--l}
Dongfang zazhi [Eastern Miscellany) ~~$/tit
Huabao [Pictorial Weekly] i:fll
Juxue yuekan [Monthly Journal of Theater Studies] .fl* JI f•I
Liangyou huabao [The Young Companion] JL~:t:fll
Lianhua huabao [Lianhua Pictorial] J!lff:t:fll
Lianhua zhoubao [Lianhua Weekly] lllMf- r.J :flt
Lingxing [Theater-Screen Stars] ft£
Minbao {People's Daily] ~:fll.
Mingxin9 banyuekan [Mingxing Bimonthly] R}J !l. .f JI f•I
Mingxing yuebao [Mingxing Monthly] '!IJ !l.JI :flt
Qingqing dianyin9 [Qingqing Film] -itit"o!~
Shenbao [Shanghai Daily] 'P ffi.
Shibao [Times] Bt:fll.
Shidai dianying [Cinema of the Epoch] Bt+t it§;
Tuhua ribao {Illustrated Daily) llll 1t El :flt
Xiandai dianying [Modern Screen] .JJU-\ 'iU)
Xiju yu dianyin9 [Theater and Cinema]
Xin Shanghai [New Shanghai] .ifr ../:.iii:
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Xin yinxing yu tiyu shijie [Silverland/Sports World] ~ft 1f ~.fl--
Yingmi zhoubao [Movie Fan's Weekly] §,HiliJIJ ~.Ii.
Yingmu zhoubao [Screen Weekly] ~~Jij:f.li.
Yingwu xinwen [Movie-dance News} §J~,ilrl!I)
Yingxi chunqiu [Movie Weekly] ;fj~,fi.,f.,I:.
Yingxi shenghuo [Movie Life] fJ~.i.it
Yingxi shijie [Motion Picture World] §JJ.Sl!.ilt-.fl--
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Yisheng (dianying yu yinyue) [Art Sound (film ana music)] ( 'it~ l!-1'·*)
Youxibao [Leisure and Entertainment] ~~::fl!.
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Zhong Dafeng, Zhang Zhen and Zhang Yingjin. "From 'Civilized Play'
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Zumthor, Paul. "Body and Performance.u In Materialities of Communication, edited
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INDEX
The Abandoned Wife (Qifu), 92, 181, Asia Company, 13, 66, JOO, 337
383n23; discussion of, 160,161 Association of Chinese Film Culture
Abbas, Ackbar, 52 (Zhong9uo dianyin9 wenhua xiehui),
acoustic dominant, ascendance of. 248
302, 303, 317 The Autumn Crabapple (Qiu Haitan9),
acting schools, l30, 131 344
Adorno, Theodor, 9, 175, 393n57
aesthetics. 245; and history, 10 Babel and Babylon: The Emergence of
Ah Ying (Qian Xingcun}, 247-50, 252 Spectatorship in American Silent Film
Ai Xia, 266, 269, 401-2n57 (Hansen), 9
Alice in Wonderland (film}, 396n84 Bachelard, Gaston, 215
All about Shanghai, 42 Ba Jin, 355n22
Altman, Rick, 204 Bai Suyin, 231. 232, 233, 234; The
American movies: as global vernacu- Three Musketeers, influence on,
lar, 2, 17; and horror, 323; mediat- 395n75 1 465
ing role of, 18 baixiangren (man of leisure), 54
An Amorous History of the Silver Screen Bakhtin, Mikhail, 343; chronotope,
( Yinmu yanshi), xiv, xv, xxii, xxvi, concept of. 372n7, 394n66
xxvii, xxviii, xxix, 35, 36, 61, 88, bamboo clock, 409n45
262, 345; overview of, xix, xxi, xxv bao: as historical construct, 184; as
amusement gardens, 61, 96; architec- storytelling device, 184
ture of, 62, 63; and cinema, 64 Bao Tianxiao, 60, 61, 122, 153-54,
amusement halls (youlechang), xxx, 208
54, 60, 108, 225; architecture of, Baudelaire, Charles, 7, 26
62, 63; and Butterfly writers, 60; Bausinger, Hermann, 217
and early film culture, 12, 52, 63, Bazin, Andre, 13, 107, 143
64; popularity of, 58, 61; and Bean, Jennifer, 238
women, 60 The Beautiful Dancing Girl (Wunu
An E, 312 mei9unian9), 307
Angel troupe, financial crisis of, 339, The Beautiful View of Life (Zhang Jing-
342 sheng), 279
antiquity, study of, 221 Before Hollywood: Turn of the Century
antireligious campaigns, 241; and Films from American Archives
martial ans-magic spirit films, 242 (Leyda), 92
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 20 Beijing (China), 120, 122, 246, 308,
Apollo (Aipuluo) Theater, 68, 127 345; film companies in, 88; films
Arcades Project (Benjamin), 43 in, 66, 86; leather puppet shadow-
Around the Globe Press, 55 play in, 98; student demonstrations
art cinema, rise of, 147 in, 23
Index
Bell, Richard, 13 Burch, Noel. 91, 92

Ben-Hur (film), 396n84 Burke, Edmund: aesthetic theory of,
Benjamin, Walter, xiii, 6, 9, 12, 15, 333
16, 17, 18, 25, 26, 32, 43, 54,169, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple
175, 196, 200, 238; on cinema, (Huoshao Hongliansi), xxii, xxiii,
13, 362n94; and cosmopolitan life, 203, 208-11, 233, 235, 236, 240,
359n63; andjlii.nerie, 7; and inner- 242, 393n61; cartoon books of,
vation, 10; optical unconscious, 238; experimentation in, 223-24;
notion of, 138; and photography, outlawing of, 239; petty urbanites,
411 n68; on storytelling, l 92, 193 popularity with, 237
Bergson, Henri, 26, 222, 392n52 Butterfly literature, 91, 102, 154, 169,
Berlin (Germany), 43 182, 194,196,207,239,249; ap-
Berry, Chris, 246, 308 peal of, 70-71; attack on, 184-85,
Bicycle Accident (Jiaotache chuanghuo, 236; as multimedia business, 72;
a.k.a. Hengchong zhizhu,mg), 67 name, origin of, 368n68; readers
Big Road (Da lu), 290, 291, 303, 313, of, 72
339, 375n60 Butterfly writers, 5, 49, 61; and
The Birth of Ne Zha (Ne Zha chushi), amusement halls, 60, 64; and
388n5 cinema, 153, 158, 208, 250; rise
Black Diamond Express, 14 of. 70
The Blood of Passion on the Volcano Bu Wangcang, 248, 249, 256, 261,
(Huoshan qingxue), 290; criticism 401n48
466 I of, 295; plot of, 292, 293; style of,
294; Sun Yu, defense of, 295-96 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (film), 323,
The Blue Angel (film), 294 399n32
body, 31; and nation building, 7 8; Cadava, Eduardo, 169
and vernacular modernism, 5; and Cai Chusheng, 244, 248, 250, 258,
women, 277 259,260,261,264,266,267,303,
Bombay (India), 36 349,400n39, 400n41,40ln54
Book of Poetry, 27 Calinescu, Matei, 394n63
Bordwell, David, 9 Canton (China), 364nl8
Borzage, Frank, 296, 407-8n30 Cao Jianqiu, 38
bound feet, 31, 360n74 Cao Xueqin, 359n64
Boxer rebellion, 205 Carlton Dance Hall, 78
Braester, Yomi, 343 Carlton Theater (Changjiang), 123
Bride Meets Ghost (Xinniang huajiao yu Carlton Theater Orchestra, 314
Bai Wuchang, a.k.a. Huo Wuchang), Cathy Theater (Guotai), 275
67 The Cave of the Spider Spirit (Pansi dong),
Britisl1-American Tobacco Company, 210, 240, 277; as prototype, of
121, 122, 147 niixia (martial heroines), 212
Bruno, Giuliana, 8 Central Studio, 236
Buck-Morss, Susan, 8, 32 Central Theater, 148, 317
Buddhism, 349 Certeau, Michel de, 328, 345
Building a New China in Cinema: The Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 347
Cinematic Left-wing Cinema Movement Chane~ Lon,298, 328,329
1932-1937 (Pang), xvii Changcheng Company, 152
Bund, 50 Changming Correspondence Film
Index
School, textbooks of, 133, 136. (Zhon99uo yin9pian 9ufen9 youxian
138, 144, 146, 151, 155 9ongsi), 131
Chaplin, Charlie, 13, 67, 108 China Film School (Zhonghua yingye
Chen Binghong (Benjamin Chan), 269 xuexiao), 131, 132
Chen Duxiu, 24 China Film Yearbook (Cheng Shuren),
Chen Kengran, 394-95n70 72,236
Chen Ruoyin, 262, 263 Chinese calligraphy, 219
Chen Shouying, 138 Chinese cinema, 296; ascendancy of
Chen Wu, 272 acoustic dominant in, 302, 303;
Chen Yanyan, 77 audience for, 103; as commodity
Chenbao (newspaper), 294 vs. pedagogical tool, 127, 130; as
Cheng Bilin, 387n3 cross-fertilized product, 134; dis-
Cheng Bugao, 132,249, 269, 281, tribution of, 120, 122; exhibition
37ln3, 381116 venues in, 120, 121. 123; gigan-
Cheng Shuren, 72, 236 tisrn, obsession with, 129; golden
Cheng Ying, 80 age of, 246; and horror films, 332;
Chenxin9 (Morning Stars), 72 independent, beginnings of, 255;
Cheung, Leslie (Zhang Guorong), and intertitles, 38ln7; language is-
41 ln74 sue in, 120; market for, 116, 118;
Chicago (Illinois), 7 and martial arts literature, 207;
Children of Troubled Times (Fengyun modernization, as threat to, 239;
ernu), 262, 303, 339, 408n42 as patriotic, xiv; and Peking opera,
China, xvii, xix, xxix, 28, 92, 159, 308; production companies, mush- 1 467
243, 345, 346, 347; cinema in, 22, rooming of, 108; and proselytizing,
44, 94, 102, 119; classical Chinese 250; and second golden age.
(wenyanwen) in, 22; experience, as 397n2; shadow (ying) in, l 57;
concept, 26; film culture in, l, 25, shadow opera tradition in, 308;
35; gender bias in, 285, 286, 287; and silent narrative film, 81: and
intellectuals of. 2; Japanese inva- social change, 297; social impact
sion of. xxxiii, 3; jazz age in. 280; of, 239; staple of, 105; themes of,
leisure class in, 375n57; martial 91; and vernacular culture, link to,
arts in, 206; and modernism, xxviii, 132; vernacular movement, am-
3; and modernity, 44, 221; movie bivalence toward, 155; world liter-
theaters in, 122, 137, 376nl; New ature, adaptation of in, 156; xi
Woman in, 198; nude, as subject (play), notion of in, 99, 157. See
of art, 277; photography in, 164; also early Chinese cinema
play, notion of in, 12; presence of Chinese Enlightenment, 22, 24, 26,
American narrative cinema in, 11 9; 221, 239, 264, 266; antireligious
psychology, interest in, 379n43; campaign of, 241; and vernacular
science, role of in, xxxii; social movement, 350
fragmentation in, 119; Soviet Chinese Film Archive, xvii
Union, relationship between, 249; Chinese film culture, and impact of
technology and modernity. dis- sound on, xxxiii, 308
course about in, 218,221; urban Chinese film history, xiii, xv, xviii; en-
culture in, 22 tertainment and enlightenment,
China Film Archive, 246 tension between in, 90; laborers,
China Film Production Company image of in, (lao9on9), 91
Index
Chinese film industry, xiii, xxxi, 200; ular culture, 64; as vernacular
commercialization of, xxxii, 246; modernism, 19, 32; and vernacular
competition in, 190, 191; cosmo- movement, 2; women, relationship
politanism and nationalism, ten- to, xiv, xvi, 5, 37. See also Chinese
sion between, 21; destruction of, cinema; early Chinese cinema
xiv; feature-length films, produc- cinema of attractions, 11, 12, 20, 179,
tion of, 119; horror genre in, 330, 180; appeal of, 57; and cinema of
343; institutionalization, move to- attractive narration, 143; cinema
ward, 151; and politics, xxxii; star of narrative integration, transition
system of, 38; structural reconfigu- to, 94, 102, 118; and martial arts-
ration of, 242; United States, com- rhagic spirit genre, 203-4; and
petition from, 121; as vibrant, 92 sound film, 305
Chinese folklore, female warriors in, cinema brico/eur, 115; coining of,
393n61 375n58
Chinese nationalism, and student Cinema and the Invention of Modem
demonstrations, 23, 24 Life, 6
Chinese novels, zhan9hui structure of, cinema of narrative integration, 94,
208 102, 118; exhibition space, de-
Chinese theater: as collective experi- mand for, 123
ence, 158; and souls, 158 cinema studies, 5, 7, 25, 57
The Chivalric Boy (Xiayi shaonian), cinema of theater people (xiren dian-
390n26 yin9), 100
468 I Chongqing {China), 122 cinematography, 157, 196
chop-suey (zasui), description of, City God Temple {film), 67
404n97 civilized play (wenmin9xi), xxxi, 56,
Chu Ci {Qu Yuan), 409n47 64, 99, 100, 151, 153, 249, 337
cinema, 32; actresses, demand for, 38; Clover, Carol, 331, 332
as alternative public space, 9; and Collections of Experiments {Hu), vernacu-
amusement halls, xxx; audience of, lar movement, as model text for, 28
xxxi, 64, 65; of business and con- colonialism, 22
science (yin9yejia liangxin), 90; Color {Se) {film), 262
Chinese civilization, propagation of Commercial Press, 159, 193, 209, 210,
through (/ayan9 zhon9hua wen- 220,308, 380n57, 380n59
ming), 210; classical narrative in, Communist army (chifei), 243
xv; double identity of, 171; and Communist Manifesto (Marx), 387n67
history, 4; and illustrated newspa- Communist Party: in China, 375n52;
per, xxx, 57; and metropolitan cul- and left-wing cinema, 247
ture, xxx; mobile nature of. 139- Confucianism, 26, 223, 349, 380n58
40; and modernism, 18, 44; as A Corrupt Official Returned (Tanquan
modernity, xv, xvi, xviii, 1, 5, 6, 8- ron99ui), 67
9, 11, 16, 224; moviegoing, history cosmopolitanism, and cross-dressing
of, 15; political use of, 261; poten- women, 288
tial of, 35; social function of, xxxi; costume drama (9uzhuan9ju), 210;
social transformation, potential for, appeal of, 211; popularity of, 212
148; and speed, 280; sports, cross- Crary, Jonathan, 377n23
fertilization of, 77; and trains, 7; as Creation Society, 193; and vernacular
universal language, 2; and vernac- literary movement, 194
Index
The Crowd (film), 291 Die for Marriage (a.k.a. The Difficult Cou-
Crows and Sparrows (film), 291 ple; Nanfu nanqi), 67
The Cry of the Apes in a Deserted Valley diegesis, 350
(Kon99uyuansheng), 324 Dietrich, Marlene, 19, 294
Csordas, Thomas, 31 The Difficult Couple (film), 66, 102,'337;
Cultural Revolution, 246, 251 Chinese narrative cinema, as be-
ginning of. 100-101. See also Die
Dada, 238 for Marriage (Nanfu nanqi)
Dadong,235 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 26
Oahu Dance Hall, 78 Ding Wenjiang, 222, 223
Dalian (China), 120 Ding Yaping, 296
La dame aux camellias, 156, 404n101 Dingying yuebao (magazine), 394n62
dance, and movies, analogy between, Dishonored (film), 19, 294
280 Doane, Mary Ann, 308
dance halls, and moviegoing, 78, 281 Donald, James, 333
dancing, and socialization, xiii Don Juan (film), 313
dancing and singing genre (gewu pian), Dong Keyi, 224, 393n59, 393n60
xiv drama (xinju), 99, 133, 142
Dan Duyu, 39,191,211,277,279, Dream of the Red Chamber, 211
390n34 Dr. Frankenstein (film), 396n84
Dan Erchin, 191 Drucker, Johanna, 20
Dangui Yuan gardens, 3671154 dushi sanwen (urban jottings), 82
Daoism, 349 Dutch East Indies, 123 1 469
Daqian Shijie (The World of Myriad Dvorak, Antonin, 408n36
Spectacles), 59
datuanyuan (reunion), 182, 186; qing- early cinema, 20; child figure in, 14,
jieju (melodrama), contribution to, 15; as exhibitionist, 102; qualities
184; as storytelling device, 184-85 of, 57; spectatorship of, 116
Davis, Michael, 357n20 early Chinese cinema (zaoqi dianying),
Dawanbao (newspaper), 252 xvii, 3, 143, 156; aesthetics of, xv,
Daybreak (Tianming), 19, 272, 290, xvi; amusement halls, importance
293, 313, 404nl03 of, 63, 64; aspects of, 92-93; body,
Da Zhonghua Company, 379n40, presentation of in, 213; character-
390n28 istics of, 182-83; comical inter-
A Deal (Laoshao yiqi), 67 ludes (chuancha), as prevalent in,
Deleuze, Gilles, 36 ln90 179; as critical category, xv, xxiv;
Dewey, John, 26, 221 cultural milieu of. 115; and early
Dianshizhai huabao (Dianshizhai Illus- film culture, xviii; features of, xxii;
trated, newspaper), 54, 159, 218, and gender, xvi; Hollywood cin-
220 ema, ambivalence toward, 21; as
Dianying (magazine), 261 hybrid, 92; and male actors, 37;
Dianying zazhi (Movie Monthly), 72, and May Fourth culture, 24; mid-
77,379n40 dlebrow literature, influence on. 5;
Dianying zhoubao (Saturday Screen modernity, as emblem of, xviii, 44;
News), 74 and moviegoing experience, 70;
Dianyin9 zhoubao/Tiaowu shijie (Movie personal and collective transforma-
Weekly/The Dancing World), 72 tion (jiaohua), as medium for, 103;
Index
early Chinese cinema (continued) Eucken, Rudolf, 222, 392n52

and public body, 103; and public Europe, 147
sphere, 103; round table in, 183; experience, 31; Chinese equivalent of,
and Shanghai, 51; social reform, 26; meaning of, 25; transformation
disseminating ideas about, 1OI; of, 28
soul, preoccupation with in, 196; Experiments (Hu Shi), 220
and teahouses, 95; themes of. 67; The Exploitation of Pleasure (Davis),
and vernacular modernism, 1, 5; 357n20
and vernacular movement, 24; and
Yangjingbang, 68. See also Chinese The Family (Jia), 355n22
cinema; Shanghai Family'slB!ood (Sha zi bao, a.k.a. Jiating
Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), 220 xue), 67
Eastern Publishing House, 267 A Family Treasure (Chuanjiabao), 191
Egypt, 92 Famous Players-Lasky, 377nl I
Einstein's theory of relativity, 136 Fan Xuepeng, 200, 393n61
Eisenstein, Sergei, 11, 20, 250, 283 Fang Yuquin, 230, 231, 232, 234
Eisner, Lotte H., 408-9n43 Farewell My Concubine (film), 380n57
Ekk, Nikolai, 249 Farquhar, Mary, 308
Electric Shadowplay, 16 fascism, 10, 36; rise of, 284
electric shadowplay: commercial suc- The Fate in Tears and Laughter (Tixiao
cess of, 159; function of, 134; and yinyuan), xxii, xxiv
modern theater, 134 Feixia Lu Sanniang (The Flying-Knight
470 1 electric shadows (dianying), 98 Errant Lu Sanniang), 227
Elsaesser, Thomas, 109, 115 Feiyingge huabao (newspaper), 54
Embassy Theater, 68, 371-72n5, female actors, and Chinese women as
374n43. See also Olympic Theater models for, 5
(Xialingpike) Feng Menglong, 177
embodiment (tixian), 31, 41; and mo- fengsuhua paintings, 54
dernity, 32 Fengtai Photo Studio, 66, 308, 380n57
Ernei Mountain, as pilgrimage site, Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao), 159,
388n4 193
Emperor Wu, 98,158,335, 410n58 Fifth National Games, 80
Empire Theater (Songshan), 123 film: as cultural object, 8 l; history,
Empress Cixi, 159; and photography, preserving of, 143, 144; knowl-
383n21 edge, as object of, 143; and pho-
enlightenment (qimeng), 23. See also tography, 33; and theater, 307
Chinese enlightenment Film Art (magazine), 267, 402n60
Enthusiasm (film), 283 film censorship, xiv, 251, 396n82,
Epicureans, 176 396n83; banning of, 3961184; of
Erfahrung, 25 martial arts films, 200, 213, 236,
Erlebnis, 25 239, 242; and tax collection, 236;
Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Experience and theater morality, 236
and Poetry) (Dilthey), 26 film criticism, 253-54; as cultural
Ernii yinxion9 (Hero and Heroine), 227 institution, 244; and left-wing cin-
Ernii yinxiong zhuan (A Tale of Heroes ema, 251; and national cinema,
and Lovers), 394n68 xxxii
Index
film critics (yingpingren): power of. folklore, 197,217; study of, 190,221
244; social status of. 252 folklore movement, 194
film culmre, xxv, xxx; and moder- folktales, 190, 192
nity, 21 foot binding. 29. See also bound feet
Filmdom in China (Xu Chiheng), 72, For the Love of Pleasure (Rabinovitz); 7
124, 125 Foucault, Michel. 87, 356nl
film drama (yingpianju), 161 Four Heroes of the Wang Family (Wangshi
film history, 10; and modernity, 43; sixia), 388n 13
and theory. 93 Four Sisters (Si zimei), 78
film industry, 11. 74 France, 119, 132
Film Magazine (Yingxin zazhi), 252, .Frankenstein (film), 343
315 Frankfurter Zeitung, 3 3
film publications, 72, 88, 369n75; French Revolution, 336, 342
and advertising, 75, 77; education, Freud, Sigmund, 10, 379n43; notion
as medium for, 131; expansion of, of uncanny, 333
252; film techniques, articles on, Friedberg. Anne, 7, 8, 62
224; flourishing of, 267; and movie Friedman, Jonathan, 2
studios, 73; and screen makeup, Fudan Company, 211
330, 331; song-sheets in, 82; A Funny Love Affair (Huaji aiqing). 67
sports, cross-fertilization of, 77; furen n1zi (uneducated people), 144,
star system, contribution to, 77 380n58
film schools, 132,133,137 Fu Wenhao, 38, 362nl06
film scripts: art of, 152; emergence I 471
of, xxxi, 151; institutionalization A Gambler Plays Possum (Dutu zhuansi),
of, 158; incertitles, writer of 67
(shuoming), 154; retribution (baoy- Gao Zhanfei, 244, 269
ing), notion of. I 52; shadowplay, The Gay Shoe Clerk (film), 179-80
soul (linghun) of, 157; as soul of gender relations, and vernacular mod-
film, I 58. See also screen writing ernism, 5
film story (dianyin9 xiaoshuo), 72 Genette, Gerard, 350
film technology, xxiv, xxvi; body, re- Gengsu Theater, 131
definition of. xxxii; and tuo/ike genre, 204, 208
(trick), 161, 163 German expressionism, 161, 298, 339,
film theory, 3 399n23
Fisherman's Ballad (Yu guang qu), 317 Germany, 36, 119, 136, 239
Fisherman's Song (film), 250, 258, 267 The Ghostly Shadow on a Strange Island
flanerie, 7, 8, 16; andflaneur, 15, 84, (film). 235
85; andf/aneuse, 85 ghosts, 409n48
flying: as dialectic trope, 200; as motif Giornate del Cinema Muto {Festival of
in fairy tales, 390n34 Silent Film), xv
The Flyin9 Female Knight-Errant Lu Girl in Disguise (Huashen guniang), au-
Siniang (film), 235 dience of. 287; and gender bias,
flying knight-errant, 224, 225. See also 287; plot of, 284, 285, 286
martial arts films; martial arts- Gish, Lillian, xix, 354nl3
magic spirit films global capitalism, 43
The Flying Shoes (Jleixing xie), 390n34 globalization, 2, 347
Index
Going to the People (Dao minjian qu), Hangzhou (China), 88

194, 255, 256 Hankou (China), 122
Golden Age (Huangjin shidai), 264 Hanlun Beauty Salon, 41
Golden Mountains (Jinshan), 249 Hansen, Miriam, 2, 9, IO, 15, 16, 18,
GongJianong, 78,256,300,317, 19, 33, 116, 175, 356n2, 384n41
386n64 hard film (yingxing dianying): criticism
Gongwutai Theater, 68, 405nl of. 274; political content of, 275;
The Good Brother (Hao xiongdi), 393n59 vs. soft film, xxxii, 244, 297
Grand theater (Da Guangming), 275 The Haunted House (Guwu xingshiji),
Great China Recording Company, 314 343
The Great Flying Bandit (Feixing dadao, Hay, Jonatihan, 45, 60
a.k.a. Little Sister, I Love You), Hearts United in Life and Death '(Shengsi
390n34 tongxin), 331, 339
The Great Knight-Errant of Aviation Helen Theater (Ailun), 68
(Hangkong daxia), 214, 227; flight heterotopia, 87
in,215,216 He Tingran, 125
Great Shanghai Project (Da Shanghai He Xiujun, 375n50, 393n60
jihua), 80 history, xiii, 350
The Great Train Robbery (film), 209 History of Chinese Silent Film (Li and
Great Wall Company (Changcheng), Hu), xiv, xviii
129,159,160,177, 193, 404n95; Hollywood cinema, 16, 18,283,297,
independent script, emphasis on, 348-49; Asian market, inroads in,
472 I 169 120; encroachment of, 248; as
Great World theater, 60, 61, 63,117, global vernacular, 17, 18, 21; hege-
405nl mony of, 11; onslaught of, 303
Griffith, D. W., 2, 384n41, 385n55 Homi Bhabha, 164
grotesque face, 328, 41 ln74; defini- Hongkew Theater, 68, 95
tion of, 329; double, figure of, 330, Hong Kong, xxxiii, 120, 225, 3641118,
331; fascination with, 330; and 41 ln74; and cinema, xxxii, 203,
mirror, 330; political meaning of, 344; and Shanghai, 86, 344
331; and sublime, 333 Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Cham-
Guangzhou (China), 88 ber), 359n64
Guan Haifeng, 209, 368n67, 390n26 Hong Shen, 132,158,251, 355nl7,
Guattari, Felix, 36ln90 371n3, 40ln47
Gu Kengfu, 144, 379n40; film theory Hong xia (Red Heroine), 227
of, 134, 135, 136 Horkheimer, Max, 393n57
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, xxix horror films (kongbu pian), 298, 330;
Gu Mingdao, 208 characters in, 409n46; international
Gunning, Tom, xxvii, 14, 15, 16, 20, appeal of, 331; and parodies, 332
57, 93, 102, 168, 189 Ho, Sam, 225
Guoguang Company, 380n59 Hot Blood (a.k.a. Hot Tears), 336
Guo Morou, 193 Hot Blood (Rexue), 336
Hou Yao, 92,152,153,158,161.169,
haipai (Shanghai style), 45, 65, 363n7 171. 172, 177, 179, 181, 182, 195,
Hale's Tours, 57, 96 196, 198; background of, 159, 160;
Han Dynasty, 98 cinema and possibility of change,
Index
184; datuanyuan (reunion), use of, 55, 57; coverage of, 55; and petty
186; drama, cinema's relationship urbanites, 58; popularity of, 54-55
to, 157; influences on, 160; May illustrated serial fiction, 238
Fourth ideology, ambivalence to· Impressions of a European Journey (Liang
ward, 185; modernity, cinematic Qichao), 221
vision of, 197; philosophy of, 159; India, 92
theater, conception of, 160 industrial capitalism, 22
huabao. See illustrated newspapers innervation, 10, l 5
huaji, 68 interiorization, 109
huaju (spoken drama), 99 International Federation of Film Ar·
Huaju Company, 187,190,191,193, chives (FIAF), xv
·198, 214,227,228 International Settlement, 120, 132,
Hua Mulan legend, 229, 394n67 364nl2
Huang Chujiu, 60 intersubjectivity, 31
Huang Jiamo, 82, 269, 270, 271, 272, intertextuality, 31
273,277 Intolerance (film), 384n4 l
Huangjiang nuxia (Swordswomanfrom An Introduction to Shadowplay, 132, 133,
the Huan9jian9 River), 227 143
Huang Naishuang, 406nl6 Investiture of Gods (film), 210, 390n28
Huang Shuqin, 403n74 The Invisible Coat (Yinshenyi), 163
Huang Zunxian, 218-19, 220, Isis theater (Shanghai), 68
39ln42, 391-92n45 Italy, 239
Huanxian Company, 368n67 Iutkevich, Sergei, 249 I 473
Huanxian (Dream Fairy), 101 Iwasaki Hisashi, 398nl5
Huanxian Theater, 96, 98
huayang zaju (Chinese-foreign mixed Jade Pear Spirit ( Yu Li hun), 39, 128,
residences), 49 156, 183, 368n68
Hubian chunmeng, Taohua qixue ji Jakobson, Roman, 302, 317
(film), 40 l n48 Jameson, Frederic, 41 ln68
Hu Die, xxv, 13L 200, 238, 250, 277, Japan, 92, 99, 120, 132, 147, 239,
304,307, 379n50 283, 303; Northern China, inva·
Huichong, 191 sion of, 242; Shanghai, bombard-
Hujiang Photo Studio, 269 ment of, 242
Hu Jubin, xvii, xviii Japanese cinema, 9 l
Hu Ping, 300, 399n25 Japanese radical film writing, 249
Hu Shan, 277 The Jazz Singer (film), 313
Hu Shi, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 36, 41, Jia Leilei, 209
101, 154,155,210,220, 360n66, Jiang Dongliang, 404n93
360n74 jianghu, 225,231,232,242
Hu Ying, 156, 157 Jianghua qingxia (He and She), 227
Huyssen, Andreas, xxiii Jiang Qing, 246
Hu Zhongbiao, 330, 331 Jiangwan Stadium, 80
Jiangxi, 24 7
Ibsen, Henrik, 160, 161 Jiayin Restoration (Jiayin zhongxin),
illustrated newspapers {huabao), xxx, 337
23, 70, 159; and cinema, linked to, jing/i, 31
Index
jin9pai school, 6 5 Lacanian-Althusserian, theory of sub-
Jing Runsan, 58, 367n55 ject positioning, 93
jingyan, 26, 31 Lang, Fritz, xxiii
jin9yan zhuyi, 26 Lan9man nu yinxiong (A Romantic Hero-
Jinlong Company, 324 ine), 227
Jin Shan, 300, 318 Lan9unian9 (A Girl Bandit), 227
Jin Taipu, 394n62 The Last Conscience (Zuihou de liangxin),
Jin Yan, 244,262, 291. 308, 312, 314, 183, 354-55nl6
369n80 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 44
Jin Yong, 395n71 leftist film criticism, legacy of, 254
Jin Zhanxiang, 54 leftist in{el!ectuals: and cinema, xxxii;
Jin Zhijian, 335, 336 and modernists, xxxii
The Journey to the West (film), 27, 210, left-wing cinema, xiv, xvii, 81, 87,
217,240, 390n28, 39ln39 245, 296, 297, 387n72; and Com,
Julian, Rupert, 298 munist Party, 247; emergence of,
246; Hollywood, as enemy, 283; as
Kaixin [Fun] Film Company, 382nl2 latter-day construction, 247; na-
Kang Youwei, 366n5 I tionalism, embrace of. 283; as
Kataoka Teppei, 281 screenwriting and film criticism
Kayser, Wolfgang, definition of gro- movement, 248
tesque, 329 left-wing writers: and cinema, 23,
Ke Lin, 23 243, 251; goal of, 251; and martial
474 1 The Kin9 of Comedy (film), 371-72n5, arts fiction, 239; and martial arts-
39ln39 magic spirit films, 243
Kingston, Maxine Hong, 394n67 The Leper Girl (Mafeng nu), 343
Kirby, Lynne, 7 Leroux, Gaston, 298
The Knight-Errant with Double Swords Levi-Strauss, Claude, 190
(Shuangjian xia), 235, 395n72 Leyda, Jay, 92
knight-errantry, 207, 215; as female, Lian'aiyuyiwu (film), 401n48
227, 394n67; and folk heroes, 240; Liang Qichao, 220, 22 L 222
theme of, 209 Liang Saizhen, 77-78
Kracauer, Siegfried, 6, 9, 16, 32, 33, Liangyou huabao (The Young Compan-
43, 124; and mass ornament, 35, ion), 55, 252. See also Film Maga-
36, 36ln90, 36ln91; on photogra- tine ( Yinoxin zazhi)
phy, 36In89; Tiller girls, fascina- Lianhua Company, xiv, 73, 78, 80,
tion with, 34 81, 191, 235, 242, 248, 249, 251,
Kunming (China), 122 252,292, 308, 313, 314, 398nl2,
kunqu opera, 141 404n95,407n24,408n37;sound
film, ambivalence toward, 406nl0
Laborer's Love (Lao9on9 zhi aiqing, a.k.a Lianhua huabao (newspaper), 77
Zhiguo yuan), xxix, xxxi, 93, 100, lianhuanxi (film-dramatic plays), 68
108, 127, 153, 205, 302, 371- Lianhua Symphony (Liahhua jia-
72n5, 39ln39, 395n76; discussion xian9qu), 81
of, 90-91, 109, 110, 111, 112, Li Boyuan, 23
114, 115, 116, 117, 145; social mo- A Lifetime Affair (Zhon9shen dashi),
bility, as celebration of, 113; as 101
transitional text, 94 Li Jinghui, 408n42
Index
Li Lili, 19, 78, 80, 244, 269, 290, 293, 192,200,228,231,235, 386n58;
369n84,408n42 folktale structure of. 190, 197, 198;
Li Liying, 61 look of, 187; and martial arts films,
Li Minghui, 38, 408n42 199; modernity of, 195; plot of.
Li Minwei, 38 187, 189; portrayal of women in,·
Linder, Max, 67 195, 198; theme of retribution in,
Lindsay, Vachel, 2 152, 189
Lingering Sound ofa Broken Flute (Duandi Lu Xun, 89, 153, 158, 159,164,236,
yuyin), 194, 255 237, 255, 360n66, 382nl 7,
Link, Perry, 71 383n30, 396n86, 397nl01.
Lin Qinnan (Lin Shu), 207, 209 398nl5; cinema, suspicion of. 241
Lin Shu, 156 Lyrical Theater, 300, 317, 405n4
Lin Yin, 78, 80
Li Pingqian, 249 machine aesthetic, and speed, 280
Li Shaobai, 247 Madam Butterfly, 303
lishi (history), 31 The Magic Club (Shenxian bang), 163
Li Suyuan, 182 Ma Junxiang, 205
Literary Association (*i1nxue yanjiu- Manchuria, 284; Japanese invasion of.
hui), 159, 160, 193; and vernacular xiv, 246, 248, 262, 283, 290
literary movement, 194 Mandarin Ducks writers. 5, 49, 91;
Little Toys (Xiaowanyi), 290 and cinema, 153; rise of, 70
Liu Bannong, 368n68 Mao Dun, 193, 236, 249. See also Shen
Liu Haisu, 277 Yanbing 1 47s
Liu, James, 206 Mao Jianpei, 256
Liu, Lydia, 359n64 Marionettes (Kui/ei), 249
Liu Na'ou, 82, 83, 269, 271, 289, martial arts (wuxia): roots of. 206; xia
403n83, 4031184; and cinema, (knight-erranty), idea of, 206
views on, 274, 275, 280, 283; death martial arts films, 4, 65, 191, 199,
of. 403n80; fiction writing of, 281, 210, 237, 296, 304. 387-88n3;
282; hard film, criticism of. 274 ambiguity of, 214; censorship to-
Lloyd, Harold, 13, 40ln47 ward, 200, 213; as cinematic folk-
longtang housing, 50, 53-54; and cin- tale, 204; as overtly commercial,
ema, 65, 68; and urban life, 51; 200; criticism of, 200; flying as
Yangjingbang, as incarnation of, staple ingredient of. 200; oral sto-
51-52 rytelling, roots in, 229; prototype
Looking for My Brother (recording), 314 of. 209; as stimulant, 214; wu as
Lost Lambs (Mitu de 9aoyan9), 267 embodying spirit of. 213. See also
Louwailou (The Tower beyond Tow- martial arts-magic spirit films
ers), 58, 59 martial arts literature, 237, 239; and
Love After Robbery (Jiehou yuan), 75 cinema. 207; fiction, censorship of,
Lu Mengshu. 261 236; popularity of. 237; serializa-
Lumiere brothers. 94 tion of, 207; and vernacular move-
Lu Si, 252, 260, 275 ment, 207
The Lust of the White Serpent (Jasei no martial ans-magic spirit films (wuxia
yin), 256 shenguai pian), xiv, xxxii, I 99, 208,
A Lustrous Pearl (Ye guangzhu), 191 210, 212, 223; and antireligious
Lustrous Pearls ( Ye mingzhu), xxxi, 191, campaigns, 242; appeal of, 394n62;
Index
martial arts-magic spirit films Ma-Xu Weibang, xxxiii, 298, 300,

(continued) 319,329,332.339, 340,343,344;
attacks on, 237; as avant-pop, 205; background of, 322; origin of
banning of, 235, 236; censorship of, name, 405n3
236, 242; characteristics of, 204-5; May Fourth enlightenment, 159; and
as dangerous, 235; as democratic, cultural iconoclasm, 241
205; development of, 233; as em- May Fourth intellectuals, 241, 242,
powering, 205; as experimental, 248; and cinema, 250; denuncia-
2l2; flying as motif of, 203; flying tion of martial ans-magic spirit
knight-errant as trademark of, 224; films , 239; resentment toward
as genre cinema, 205, 206; gro- Buttirfly literature. 237
tesque face in, 330; and horror May Fourth literature, 27, 250
films. 332; impact of, 239; left- May Fourth movement, 3, 5, 25, 28,
wing cinema, taking over by, 243; 70, 136, 185,193,196,198,221,
market for, 240; modern experi- 239, 348, 349; and film culture,
ence, celebration of, 241; nuxia (fe- 89, 91; Japanese radical film, influ-
male knight-errant), as subgenre of. ence on, 249; and literary revolu-
200, 203; and petty urbanites, 237, tion, 24; and petty urbanites, 65;
238, 239; as politically regressive, retribution, attack on, 184; and sci-
239; popularity in diaspora Chi- ence, 214, 223; Soviet cinema.
nese communities, 240; popularity influence on, 249; and vernacular
of, 226; presentation of the body movement, 23; and women, 264
476 1 in, 213, 225; significance of, 203; May Fourth writers, 15 3, 160, 242;
supernatural elements in, 205; tea- attacks against Butterfly literature,
house milieu, origins in, 205; as 236
turning point in Chinese cinema, May Thirtieth incident, 147
213; vernacular modernism of. Ma Ziming, 5.4
239; and vernacular social space, Meiji Restoration, 99
203; women, as powerful figures Mei Lanfang, 100, 250, 307, 308,
in. 202, 203; xia, cultivation of in, 313-1~ 31& 380n57
213. See also martial arts films Melies, Georges, 228
Marx, Karl, 387n67; commodity the- melodrama, 9, 188, 357n20
ory of, 175 Melodrama and Modernity (Singer), 9
Mascot Is Coming Here (Wufu lingmeng. Meng Jiao, 391 n42
a.k.a. The Playboy Monk, Fengliu Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 32
heshang), 67 metaphysics, 392-93n54
mass culture, 175 Metropol theater (Da Shanghai), 275,
masses (dazhong), 271, 272, 275 402n71
mass media, and serialization, 208 Metropolis (film). xxUi
mass ornament, 34, 35; global appeal Metropolitan Scenes (Dushi feng-
of. 36; and modernity, 36 guang), 81
Maternal Light (Muxing zhiguang), 262 Metz, Christian. 30
Matii!re et memoire (Marter and Memory) Meyerhold, Vsevold, 11
(Bergson), 26 Mianmian, 82
Maupassant, Guy de, 152, 160, 161, mimesis, 238, 350
171,172, 195 Minbao (newspaper), 22, 252, 337
Mauss, Marcel, 225 Ming period: and eight-legged essay
Index
(baguwen), 28; and literary ar- graphic design of, 276; as high-
chaism (fugu), 28 brow, 268; illustrations in, 276,
Min9xin9 Bimonthly (magazine), 252 277; nudity in, 277, 279; objective
Mingxing Company, xiv, xix, xxii- of, 270, 271; Russian theorists
xxiii, xxiv, 36, 61. 73, 80, 89, cited in, 283; soft film, as advocates
90, 100, 102, 103, 108, 109, 122, for, 274; and Sun Yu, 289
127, 128, 133, 136, 144, 145, 151, Modern Times (film), 13
154, 183, 186. 205,208,210,242, modern vernacular, 3, 20
248,249,251,317, 322,337-38, Money Demon (Qianmo), xxii, xxv, 36
355nl7, 362n98, 389nl7, 39ln39, montage theory, 18, 297
393n61, 398nl2; acting school of, Morand. Paul, 281, 370n88
131; decline of, xxvi; sound pro- Morning Daily (newspaper), 252
ductions of, 304 Morning in the Metropolis (Dushi de zao-
Mingxing Shadowplay School, 102, cheng), 267
379n40 Morning Society (Chenshe), 74
Mingyue troupe, 408n42 Morodin (Ivan Mozhukhin), 84, 85,
Minxin Company, 308, 407n24, 408n3 7 370n93
The Mistress's Fan (Shao nainai de Moscow International Film Festival,
shanzi), 355nl 7 250, 3551121
The Mobile Safe (Huodong yinxian9), 163 Movie Fans' Weekly (magazine), 252
modeng, 262, 280 moviegoing. 86, 89, 381n8; and eating,
Modern Girl, 30, 37, 39, 84, 85, 245, 77; and intertitles, 38ln7; as social
257,258,266, 291,297;gender practice, 84; sound, arrival of, 81 1 477
role of, 288; machine age, as em- Movie Magazine, 305
blem of, 284; portrayal of, 276, Movie Monthly (Dianying zazhi), 252
277,287,288 movie theaters, xxxi, 19; luxury oL
A Modern Girl {Xiandai yi niixing), 401- 123, 124, 125; as pedagogical
2n57 space, 90: as purpose built, 69, 71;
modernism, 21; and cinema, 18; ver- space of, 157; as temples trans-
sus modernity, 9, 17 formed into, 242; use of earphones
modernists, 296, 297; and aesthetics, in, 369n86; viewing experience,
283-84; and leftist critics, xxxii; quality of, 124
and Modern Girl, 284 Movie Weekly (magazine), 121, 122,
modernity, xxxi, 10, 19, 200; and cin- 131, 305, 402n61
ema, xv, xvi, xviii. 6, 8-9, 11, 16, Mr. Democracy (Demokelaxi xian-
224, 281; and culture industry, 12; sheng), 24
and dancing, 281; evils of, 197; Mr. Science (Saiyinsi xianshen9), 24
and film culture, 21; identifica- Mulan (film), 394n67
tions, as field of, 2; international Mu/an congjun (Mulan Joins the Army),
culture of, 22; versus modernism, 227
9, 17; speed, as hallmark of. 280 Murnau, F. W., 291
modernization, 29, 239; and global- Mu Shiyin, 83, 281
ization, 2, 347, 348; and urbaniza-
tion, I Naimei Film Co., 39
Modern Screen (Xiandai dianying), xxxii, Nanguo Film and Drama Society, 194,
245, 267, 269,280,286; aesthetic 255, 256
theory of, 271; attacks on, 271; Nanjing (China), 236, 250
Index
Nanjing government: inauguration of, New Stage (Xin wutai), 96

241 New Tide (Xinchao), 131, 159
Nanjing Treaty, 44 New Woman, 9, 156, 188, 198
Nantong (China), 131 New Woman (Xin niixing, film), 51, 264,
Nanyang (China), 87, 116, 118, 122- 266,267, 400n41; discussion of, 265
23, 132, 145,177,212,240,292, New World theater (Xin Shijie). 59, 63,
386n65, 3S7-88n3 ll7, 367n55
Nanyang Film Company, 386n65. See New York, 43
also Shao Father and Sons; Tianyi New Youth (Xin qingnian), 24, 26, 101,
Narodnik (Go to the People), 194 131, 236, 360n66
National Art Exhibition, 278 Ne iha, 388n5
national cinema (fuxing guopian), xiv Nie Er, 312, 338, 408n42; death of,
National defense cinema (guofang dian- 410n64
ying), 246, 285 Northern Expedition (Beifa), 331, 334
National Film Censorship Committee Nosferatu (film), 323
(NFCC), 235, 236, 243 Notari, Elvira, 8
Nationalists: anti-superstition cam- La nouvelle litterature (Xin wenyi), 281
paign of. 235, 250; censorship of, Nii biaoshi (a.k.a. Guandong niixia, A
251; containment of Communist Woman Bodyguard), 227
influence, 250; and cultural icono- Nii dalishi (The Great Woman). 227
clasm, 241; martial arts-magic nudity: and beauty, 279; and Modern
spirit films, outlawing of, 239; Screen, 277, 279; urban civilization,
478 I modernization project of, 245; and celebration of. 279
nation building. 395-96n81; and Nii haidao (The Female Pirate), 227
petty urbanites. 2 39 Niixia Baimeigui (The Valiant Girl White
National Survival (Minzu shengcun), 264 Rose), 200, 205, 230, 236; themes
nature, and culture, tension between, in, 231; mistaken sexual identity
203 in, 234; xia in, 233
New Camellia (Xin Chahua), 67 Niixia Hei mudan (The Female Knight-
New Culture movement, 3, 23, 101. Errant Black Peony), 227
103,236,244,348, 392n48;and Nuxia Li Feifei (The &male Knight-
left-wing cinema, 248 Errant Li Feifei), 227
New Drama (xinju) movement, 23, niixia subgenre (female knight-
160, 196, 209, 301, 338; and errant), 200, 203, 226, 227; as am-
Chunliu troupe, 336; description biguous, 233; and Cave of the Spider
of. 337; and Qiuliu troupe, 335, Spirit. 212; as empowering, 233; fe-
336; suppression of. 336 male bonding in, 232; flying, motif
New Film Culture movement, 251, of, 203, 229-30; heroines in, as
255,269, 397-98n8 portrayed, 229, 233; as protocy-
New Journey to the West (Xin Xiyouji), borg figure, 233; themes in, 232;
39ln39 women, anxiety toward, 203
New Life movement. 36, 236, 245, Nuying Miscellaneous (Wang Tao), 47
269, 369n80
New Sensationalist (xin ganjue ha) Occidental shadowplay, 86, 90, 98
movement: aesthetic of. 255; and Odeon Theater (Audi'an), 123, 377nl 7
cinema, 82-83, 86; and literature, Olympic Theater (Xialingpike). 68,
82,281,287 107
Index
One Night Glamour (Yiye haohua), The Phantom of the Opera (film), xxix,
387n66 298, 323, 332, 340, 344; grotesque
One Way Street (Benjamin), 13, 15 face in, 328, 329, 330
On Film Direction (Pudovkin), 250, 252 phenomenology, 31
On Screenwriting (Pudovkin), 250 Philippines, 12 3, 132
On the Water Margins {Shuihu zhuan), photography, 32, 152, 196; and film,
27,206,207,225 33; and self-begging picture, 168;
opera, 133, 141 as sorcery, 164; as spiritual me-
Opium Wars, xix, 44, 104, 105, 205 dium, 166, 168
Orchid in the Empty Valley (Konggu Ian), Pilnyak, Boris, 256
122, 128, 154 Pingjiang Buxiaosheng, 207, 389n20
Orphan Rescues Grandfather (Gu'er jiu Pink Dream (Fenghongse de meng), 258,
zuji), 36, 92, 127, 128, 147, 151, 266; criticism of, 260; plot of, 259
379n52, 393n59; discussion of. 145 play (youxi), notion of, 12, 13, 15; film
Ouyang Yuqian, 99, 131, 158, 410n60 as form of, 89
An Overnight Fidget (Yiye bu'an), 67 Playboy Swordsman (Fengliu jianke),
404n95
pagoda, function of. 366n41 playhouse (xiyuan), 95, 96. See also
Pang Laikwan, xvii, xviii, 87 teahouses
Pan Yuliang, 277, 278, 403n74 Plunder of Peach and Plum (film), 303,
pao. See bao 409-10n54
Parallel Tracks (Kirby), 7 The Poetic Soul and the Cold Moon
Paris, 7, 43, 94 (Lengyue shihun), 343 1 479
Paris Peace Conference, 221 Pollock, Sheldon, 21
Paris Theatre (Bali daxiyuan), 83, 346 popular theater, 23
Pathe Films, 228 Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Italy),
Pathe Shanghai, 122 18, 345
Peace after Storm ( Yuguo tianqing), 305, Porter, Edwin S., 179
406nl5 Pound, Ezra, 20
Peking opera, 56, 66, 99, 100, 134, print culture, expansion of, 70
158, 209; and Chinese cinema, 308 Projecting a Nation: Chinese Cinema Be-
Peking Theater, 123, 124, 125, 130 fore 1949 (Hu), xvii
Peony Pavilion (Tang Xianzu), 382nl 5 Propp, Vladimir, 190, 191
People's Republic of China, xvi, 251, Protazanov, Iakov, 249
303 Proust, Marcet 26
petty bourgeoisie (xiao zichanjieji), 237 public speech (yanshuo), 23
petty urbanites (xiao shimin), 23, 44, Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 249,250, 252,
54, 55, 64, 65, 87, 89, 103, 104, 283
146, 153,287, 367n57; as back- pu/uo-jino (proletarian kino) move-
bones of popular culture, 50; and ment, 243, 247
illustrated newspapers. 58; and puppet shadowplay, 96; repertoire of,
martial arts-magic spirit films, 98. See also shadowplay
237, 238, 239; and May Fourth in- puppet show, 99
tellectuals, 65; as pejorative, 65
The Phantom Bandit, 209 Qian Huafo, 96, 367n63
The Phantom Lover ( Yeban 9eshen9), Qingliange Teahouse, 59, 68
4lln74 Qing period, xxix, 3, 22, 54, 98, 218,
Index
Qing period (continued) Revenge of the Actress (Nii ling ful'hou

239, 349; debate of technology in, ji), 39
221; flying body, attitude toward, Revenge of the Filial Daughter (Xiaonii
225; New Woman in, 156 fuchou ji), 390n26
Qin9qin9 Film (Qingqin9 dianyin9), 252 Revenge on the Volcano (Huoshan
Qing Shanghai school of painting, 45 fuchouji), 405nl05
Qiu Jing, 23 Rey Chow, 4, 29, 185, 241, 385n53
Quanzhou (China), 122 Ricalton, James, 94
Queen of Sports (Tiyu huanghou), 36, Rio de Janeiro, 36
78, 81,231, 245, 290, 313; appeal A River Flows East (Yijiang chunshui
of, 80 xidn9don9/iu), 258
Qu Qiubai, 155,236,237 The Road of Life (Shenglu), 249
Qu Yuan, 409n47 Roadside Flower (film), 404nl01
Robbery on a Train (Che zhon9 dao),
Rabinovitz, Lauren, 7, 8 209
railroad films, 7 The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 27,
Ramos Amusement Company, 377nl l 217
Ramos, Antonio, 68, 95, 96, 122; as Romance of the West Chamber (film),
broker, 377n 11 186, 187, 188, 223, 235, 390n31,
Rapoport, Amos, 19 397nl02
Red Army, 243 The Romance of the Yellow River (film).
Red Beauty and Skeleton (Honsfen ku/ou), as allegory, 338, 339, 342
4ao I 119, 121, 234; horror films, as pre- romanticism, 161
cursor of, 209; martial arts films, Romeo and Juliet, ·156
as precursor of, 209; mechanical rooftop gardens. See amusement
tricks (jiguan) in, 209 gardens
The Red Heroine (Hong xia), 92, 203, Rouge Market (Zhifeng shichan9), 249
232, 233, 395n76; plot of, 229, Ruan Lingyu, 19, 77, 262, 264, 265,
230, 390n31, 393n61 266,312,314,338, 385n56
Red Magazine (Hong zazhi), 207 Russell, Bertrand, 221, 222; in China,
Ren Guan, 312 379n43
Ren Jinping, 362n98, 378n25 Russian cinema, 18
Ren Pengnian, 92, 209, 389n23 Russian fairy tales, 190
Rensheng huabao (Life Magazine), 55 Russo-Japanese war, 261
Republican period, 86
Republican revolution, 3, 38, 45, 241, Sang, Tze-lan Deborah, 404n94
334,336 Sato Haruo, 256
Republic Theater (Gonghe), 68 Scene (Dushifen9jin9xian), 83,281,282
retribution (baoying), 187; Buddhist Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 7
influences on, 184; cinematic adop- science, 220, 221; and cinema, 223;
tion of, 152, 196; and datuanyuan mass annihilation as instrument of,
(reunion), 182; modernity, ambiva- 222; and May Fourth movement,
lence toward. 186; as narrative de- 214,223; metaphysics, debate on,
vice, 196; reciprocity, cycle of, 184; 221; Western materialism vs. East-
as superstitious, 184 ern spiritualism, 223
retribution storytelling, 192. The Science of Screenwritin9, 15 5
Index
TheScienceofShadowplay (Xu Zhuodai), 192,210,250,348,349, 350; cos-

157, 161, 163-64 mopolitanism of, 52, 86-87, 256;
Screen Weekly ( Yinmu zhoubao), 252, electric shadowplay in, 118; film
267 companies in, 92, 199; film compe-
screenwriting, 154, 311; screenwrit- tition as intense, 153; film cult{ire
ers. and urban fiction, 70. See also in, xiii, xviii, xxviii, 2, 36, 43, 65,
film script 66, 69, 70, 86, 88, 148, 151, 153,
The Sea Oath (film), 119 245, 247; film exhibition venues,
Seizing a National Treasure (Duo guobao), mushrooming of, 68; film industry
191, 386n64, 387n73 in, 248, 251; filmmakers in, 283;
semiotics, 31 film prodt1ction, as center of, 87;
Sen; Jai, and unintended city, 365n30 "floating" subjects of. 45; global
serial illustrated books (lianhuan capitalism as haven for, 43; global
tuhua}, 208 modernity, laboratory of, 87; and
serialization, and mass media, 208 Hong Kong, 86, 344; housing in,
Seventh Heaven (film}, 407-8n30 50, 51, 53, 54; Japanese attack on,
shadowplay (yingxi), xxxi, 55, 103, xiv, xxvi, xxix, xxxii, 23, 242, 259;
160; advantages of, 135-36; ances- as kaleidoscopic world (huahua shi-
tral images as preserver of, 143; jie), 103; language in, 46, 365n21;
appeal of, 142; art, status of, 140; leather puppet shadowplay in, 98;
broad social base of, 144; education, left-wing cinema in, 247; leisure,
significance of, 136; as entertain- demand for, 52; leisure class in,
ment, 14 l; film spectator, figure of, 375n57; luxury theaters in, 123, I 481
137; foreign (xiyang yingxi) version 124, 125, 275, 405-6n7; and mass
of, 95; forms of. 98; function of, ct1lture, 43; mass media in, 208;
141-44; genealogy of, 133; interior metropolitan identity of, 44, 50,
acting (neixin biaoyan), focus on, 87; modernity of, 42, 43, 45; mod-
138; and intertitles, 155; leather ern spoken drama in, I 00; movie-
puppet shows in, 96, 98; minzhong going experience in, 83, 84; nitric
hua (popularization) vs. pubian xing acid, and urban lore in, 410n59;
(universal nature), 144; national nostalgia in, 347; occupation of,
character of, 141; and slide shows, xxxiii; as ·Paris of the Orient,·
133-34; soul (linghun) of, 157; 43; population growth in, 45, 46,
spectators (9uanzhon9 xinli), psy- 47, 71; printing industry in, 54,
chology of, 146; in teahouses, 98; 368n70; privacy, need for in, 71;
and technique, 139. See also electric and Republican period, xvii; Rus-
shadows; puppet shadowplay sians in, 303; Soviet films in, 249;
shadowplay story (yingxi xiaoshuo), 72 teahouse culture in, 346; urban life
Shadow of Red Tears {Hong lei ying), xxii in, xiii, 100; Yangjingbang language,
Shadow (A Thought Drama) (Ying use of in, 45, 47, 48, 49, 52, 87;
[sixiangju]), 162, 163, 169 Western architecture in, 50, 52;
Shanghai, xix, xxx, 1, 70, 96, 108, women in, 8
119,120,204,225,238,244,284, Shanghai cinema: identity of, 296;
296, 300, 345, 364-65n20, 398n9; and silent film, 19; and vernacular
amusement halls in, 58, 60; changes movement, 30, 31; and world cin-
in, 346; cinema in, 43, 49, 66, 68, ema, 350. See also Shanghai
Index
Shanghai Cinemas Company shili yangchang, 46

(Zhongyang yingxi gongsi), 122 shimpai geki, 99
Shanghai Fine Arts Academy, 277, shinkankaku ha (literary school), 82
322 Shi Zhecun, 83, 84, 281, 346
Shanghai modern, 44, 50, 52 The Shop Apprentice Who Lost His Lottery
Shanghai Shadowplay Company, 39, Ticket (film), 67
191 Show of Shows (film), 407n28
Shanghai Shadowplay Research Soci- Shu-mei Shih, 85
ety, 106, 108 Shu Yan, 269, 381n8, 397-98n8
Shanghai Theater (Shanghai da silent films, xxxiii, 15 3 end of. 304;
xiyuan), 131 ana grotesque face, fascination
Shanghai xianhua (Idle Talk of Shang- with during, 330; sound films, ten-
hai), 49 sion between, xxxiii; technologies
Shantou (China), 88 of, 302
Shao (Shaw) Brothers (Hong Kong), The Silly in Town God's Temple (Erbaiwu
108,210, 307,386n65,393n59 baixiang Chenghuangmiao), 67
Shao Cunren, 191 Silver Star (Yingxing), 255, 261
Shao Father and Sons, 386n65. See also Sima Qian, 206, 335, 410n58
Nanyang Film Company; Tianyi Simmel, Georg, 6, 137, 138
Shao Renrnei, 19 L 386n65 simultaneity (Gleichzeitigkeit), 36
Shao Yifu, 386n65 Sincere Company, 61
Shao Zuiwen, 191 Singapore, 12 3
482 1 Share the Burden of the National Crisis Singer, Ben, 9, 188
(Gongfu guonan), 260 The Singing Beauty (Yu meiren), 309,
Shaviro, Steven, 36ln82 406nl3; plot of, 310; and sound,
Shaw, George Bernard, 48 304,305
Shenbao (newspaper), 22, 106, 132 The Singing Girl Red Peony (Genil hong
Shen Jialun, 318 mudan), xxiv, 307, 309, 310,
Shenjiangyi Theater (Shenjiangyi dawu- 393n59;andsound, 304,305
tai), 122 Situ Huimin, 247
Shengping teahouse, 94 Sixth National Games, 80
Shen tu shi (film), 371 slide shows, 96; and shadowplay,
Shenxian Shijie (The World of Fairies), 133-34
59, 61 Sobchack, Vivian, 32
Shen Xiling, 244, 269 soft film (ruanxing dianying), 82, 247,
Shen Yanbing, 65, 159, 236, 396- 255, 271, 284; aesthetic of, 280; at-
97n95; on knight-errant craze, tacks on, 272; debate over, 245;
238, 239. See also Mao Dun versus hard film, xxxii, 244,297;
Shen Zhengya, 153, 156, 3661151 and Modern Screen, 274; and na-
Shenzhou Film Company, 133; and tional defense cinema, 285
Shenzhou style (Shenzhou pai), 144 Some Prefer Nettles (Tanizaki), 399-
Shibao (newspaper), 154, 252 400n34
Shi Dongshan, 260 Song Chiping, 410n60
Shiji (Records of the Historian), 206, song and dance film (gewu pian), 303
410n58 Song at Midnight (Yeban gesheng), xxix,
Shi Linghe, 247 xxxiii, 302, 310, 312, 318, 323, 3 31,
Index
338,342, 347,408-9n43,409n46; 147; sedentary forms of, 7; and

criticism of, 340, 341; gender, shadowplay, 137
change in, 332; German expression- spiritualists, and photography, 168
ism, affinity with, 298, 320, 339, sports venues, and moviegoing, 78
340, 341; grotesque face in, 328, Spring Arrives in the Singing World
329, 330, 333, 343; historical allu- (Gechang chunse), 307, 309
sions in, 335, 336; phantom figure, Spring Dream on the Lakeside (Hubian
as icon, 334; plot of, 301, 319, 324, chunmeng), 256, 262, 266
325, 326, 327, 328; sensational ef- Spring Dream in the Old Capital (Gudu
fect of. 300; and shadowplay, 320, chunmeng), 404n95, 407n24
324; significance of. 41ln74; silent Sprin9 Silkworms (Chuncan), 249, 281
cinema, as tribute to, 320; sound in, Spring in the South (Nanguo zhichun),
320; theme song in, 324, 326, 328, 400n39,40ln54
335; visual style of, 339, 340, 341 Spring Tides (Chunchao), 400n39
Song at Midnight ll (Xu Yeban gesheng), Stam, Robert, 225, 394n66
343 St. Andre, James, 410n59
Song period Neo-Confucians, 27 Stimmung (mood), 320, 408-9n43
Song of Victory (Kaige}, 264 Storm over Asia ( Yaxiya fen9bao, a.k.a.
soul, 383n25; and anxiety, 196; and The Heir to Gen9his Khan), 249
Chinese theater, 158; in early Chi- storytelling (shuoshu), 23, 153; art of,
nese film, 196; electricity, as form 193; retribution (baoying), notion
of, 159 of. 152, 192
Soicl of Painting (Hua hun), 403n74 The Stran9e !(night-Errant in the Deserted I 483
sound, xiv; and acoustic dominant, Pagoda (Huangta qixia), 323-24
302; arrival of, 81, 302, 303, 311; The Stranger of Dark Night (Heiye
and Chinese film culture, xxxiii; guairen), 323
image, relationship between, 310; The Stranger on the Love Scene (Qing-
and moviegoing experience, 81 chang 9uairen), 322, 324, 329;
sound films, 251, 304, 305, 313; and stranger, figure of in, 323
cinema of attractions, 305; implica- Street Angel (Malu tianshi), 51, 81, 291
tions of, 312; musical numbers in, A String of Pearls (Yichuan zhenzhu),
307, 309; silent films, tension be- xxxi, 156,187,197,213, 384n37,
tween, xxxiii; singer, importance 386n58; circular narrative of, 182;
ofin, 318,319; speech in, 303-4; discussion of, 169-89; folktale
and synchronization, 318, 334; structure of. 190; redemptive pro-
theme songs in, 303, 312, 319 cess in, 182; retribution, theme of
Soushen hoilji (Sequel to Catching Spirits), in. 152, 186, 195, 196; structure
359n64 of, 177-78, 186; themes in, 177;
Soviet cinema, 249, 283 trick cinematography in, 175, 177
Soviet shots (Sulianjingtou), 250 Student of Prague (film), 161-62, 163,
Soviet Union, 261; and China, rela- 323,330
tionship between, 249 sublime, principle of, 333
spectatorship, xxxi, 4, 6, 9, 15, 116, Su Feng, 295
145, 238, 297, 333, 334; and fe- summer night gardens (ye huayuan), 57
males, 7; and mood (qingxu), 138, Sun Chengbi, 314
139; public sphere, involvement in, Sun Chuanfang, 217
Index
Sunrise (film), 291 plays, as venue for, 98; and story-

Sun Shiyi, 264 telling, 388nl 1. See also playhouse
Sun Xiao'ou, 326, 327, 328, 332, 335, Tears of Xiaoxiang (film), 313, 314
336 Techniques of Writing Shadowplay Scripts
Sun Yu, xxii, 19, 36, 78, 80, 231, 244, (Hou Yao), 157,158,160, 161,
245, 248, 260, 269, 288, 291, 292, 179, 182
297,303,312, 349,404nl03,404- technology, 10, 11, 214; debate on, 221
5nl04, 405nl05; background of, Temple Theater (Shexi), 158
289; Blood of Passion, defense of, The Ten Commandments (film), 396n84
295-96; career of, 404n95; chop- theater, and film, 307
suey house as cinematic metaphor, theate/architecture, 4
289, 290, 294; influences on, 407- theater drama (wutaiju), 161
8n30, 408n35; Modern Screen, writ- theater houses, 68
ings in, 289; sound, experiments theme songs, 318, 319; invention of.
with, 313, 314; style of, 296; ver- 303; as new attraction, 314, 315,
nacular discourse, creation of, 296 317; and patriotism, 303, 312
Suzuki, Ishikawa, 194 Theory of Film (I<racauer), 32
The Swordswoman from the Huan9jian9 Thieves on Trial (Da Chenghuang), 67
River series, 203, 208, 228, 234, 240 Three Modern Women (San9e modeng
niixing), 261. 264, 265, 272; discus-
Taiping Rebellion, 46 sion of, 262, 263
Tales of Strange Knights-Errant in the Three Sisters (San zimei), 249
484 1 Wilderness (Jianghu qixia zhuan), Tian Han, 158, 193, 194, 198, 249,
207,208,236 255, 256, 257, 258, 264, 289, 318,
Tang Na, 272 319, 339, 387n72, 399n3 l,
Tang period, 394n67 400n36, 40ln52; conversion of,
Tong Sanzang, 217 261, 266; influences of, 409n47;
Tang-Song poetry, 27 social consciousness of, 262
Tang Xianzu, 382nl5 Tianhua teahouse, 94
Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, 193, 255, 256, Tianjin (China), 86, 88, 122, 303
26L281,399n32,399-400n34 Tianyi, 80,108,191.205, 210,251,
Tan Sitong, 220 387n66, 387n3; and Nanyang,
Tan Xinpei, 100, 143, 308, 380n57 386n65; and sound film, 307. See
Tao Qian, 359n64 also Nanyang Film Company; Shao
Taussig, Michael, 138 Father and Sons; Tianyi-Qingnian
Taylor labor system, 11, 12, 34 Tianyi-Qingnian, 387n3. See also
The Teaching Materials of the Chang- Tianyi
ming Correspondence School for Film Tiaowu shijie (The World of Danc-
(Chan9min9 hanshou yingxi xuexiao ing), 77
jiangyi), 132 Tieban honglei lu (film), 251
teahouses (chayuan), 65-66, 68, 89, Tiller girls, 34, 35, 36
94, 96, 118, 121,225, 368n65, tiyan, 31
375n54; dientele of, 56, 57; and To the Distant Observer (Burch), 91
early film culture, 52; films in, 65; Todorov, Tzvetan, and poetics of fan-
importance of, 95; and martial arts- tastic, 333
magic spirit films, 205; shadow- Tokyo (Japan), 36, 120
Index
The Tolling Bell (Zhongsheng), 307 wen, 22; and Buddhist scriptures,
Tong Gong, 387-88n3 27; Chinese intellectuals, impor-
Tongqing teahouse, 94 tance to, 31; and dialogue (yulu)
Torrent (Kuangliu), 371 form, 27; film culture, emergence,
Traces of Flower and Moon (Hua yue of, 24, 25; and unbinding feet
hen), 70 (fangjiao}, 29
Treasure House of Photographic Im- vernacular literary movement, l 94
ages of Modern Stars, 269 vernacular literature, 237, 250
Treaty of Versailles, 24 vernacular modernism, xxx, xxxii, 2,
True Love (Zhen'ai}, 75 348, 349; body perceptions of, 5; as
Tsivian, Yuri, 18, 283 cinema, 19, 32, 296; and cinema
Tuhua ribao (lllustrated Daily), 55, 57- studies, 5; and early Chinese cin-
58, 159 ema, 1, 5, 22; and gender relations,
Tuhua zhoukan (Pictorial Weekly), 55 5; of martial arts-magic spirit films,
Twin Sisters (Zimei hua), xxv, 317 239; and Shanghai silent film, 18
Twin Sisters Flowers (film), 317 vernacular movement, 23, 25, 26, 31-
Two Stars in the Milky Way (Yinghan 32, 70; and Chinese Enlightenment,
shuangxing), xiv, 88, 262, 308, 309 350; and cinema, 2; and eight do-
typography, 20 not-ism (babu zhuyi), 27; as literary
revolution (wenxue geming), 22, 24;
United Artists (UA), 120
and martial arts literature, 207;
United States, leisure class in, 180
and Shanghai cinema, 30, 31
Universal Pictures, 298
vernacular press, 23, 24; film culture, 1 485
unofficial history film (bishi pian), 210
expansion of, 72; increase of, 70
Uproar at the Lujiao Valley (Danao Lu-
vernacular space, as commercial-
jiaogou), 228, 230
ized, 71
urban culture: and cinema, 22; as cin-
vernacular theaters, 12
ematic, 86
Versailles conference, 221. See also
urbanization: and architectural envi-
Treaty of Versallles
ronment, 4; and modernization, 1
Vertov, Dziga, 283; and kino eye, 282
urban modernity, xxxii, 52; and cos-
Veyne, Paul, 350
mopolitanism, 44
Victims of Opium (Heji yuanhun), 68,
The Valiant Girl White Rose (Niixia 100,209, 374n41, 385n54;petty
Baimeigui), 198, 203, 228, 234; urbanites. appeal to, 105; signifi·
mistaken sexual identity in, 232; cance of, 104
themes in, 229; xia in, 231 Victoria Theater (Weiduoliya), 68
Vallon, Rene, 390n33 Vidor, King. 291, 296
Veblen, Thorstein, 181 Village of Four Heroes (Sijie cun), 131
verbal culture, and visual culture, 2 visual culture, 7
vernacular, 19, 2 L 22, 23; as affective Vitaphone, 313
experience, 29; and avant-garde, von Sternberg, Josef, 19, 294
20; and Baihuawen, 22
vernacular culture, xxxi, 3, 22, 44 Walsh, Michael, 120, 121
vernacular film culture, and moder- Wang Caiyun, 38, 106
nity, xxviii Wang Chenwu, 247
vernacular language, 26; and Baihua- Wang Cilong, 260
Index
Wang Guowei, 184 nese modernity, 4; and cinema, xvi,

Wang Hanlun, xxv, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 5, 18-19, 37; and cross-dressing,
127, 160, 362n98 288; and gender bias, 286, 287; in
Wang Huixian, 38 martial arts films, 200, 202, 203; in
Wang Lianyin, 106, 107 movie venues, 96; and nuxia (fe-
Wang Renmei, 244,269,290,291, male knight-errant figures), xxxii,
369n80,408n42 200, 203, 227; as public figures,
Wang Tao, 47 xxv; and public space, 8, 36; as so-
Wang Xuchang, 132, 133, 139, 144 cial subjects, 277; urban modernity,
Wang Yangming, 223 relation to, 254; vanity as destruc-
Wang Youyou, 382nl2 tivl 177-78
Wang Yuanlong, 388nl3 World Theater, 125, 127, 130
Wang Yuting, 387,-88n3 World War I, 105, 120
The War in Shanghai (Shanghai zhan- writing, democratization of, 2
zheng), 68 wu, 214; and martial arts films, 213
Way Down East (film), 385n55 Wugui lieche (Trackless Train), 82
Way Down West (film), 385n55. See also Wuhan (China), 86
Romance of the West Chamber Wu Lizhu, 388n7
Wegener. Paul, 162 Wunufuchou (Five Vengeful Girls), 227
Wei Hui, 82 Wu Suxin, 198, 200, 210, 215, 228,
Weimar Berlin, 138 229,231,304, 385n57, 390n26,
Weimar cinema, 115, 298, 323, 339, 395n74
486 1 408-9n43; mirror in, 330 wuxia, 207, 214
Welcome Danger (film), 40ln47 Wu Yanren. 374n41, 385n54
wen, as defined, 213 Wu Youru, 54
wenming, 99 Wu Zhihui, 96
Wenming yaji teahouse, 96
Wen Yimin, 92, 390n3 l xia, 209; ideal of. 207; and martial arts
Western Han dynasty, 335 films, 213; tenets of, 206; and War-
Whale, James, 343 ring States, 206. See also martial arts
White Ape (Baiyuan Laoren), 228, 230 xiake (person with a chivalric aura),
White, Pearl. 188 characteristics of, 206
White Snake, legend of, 210 Xiandai (Les contemporains), 82
Wild Flowers (Yecao xianhua), 312, 313, Xiandai dianying (Modern Screen), 82
408n37; theme song of, 314 Xiang Kairan. See Pingjiang
Wild Rose (Ye meigui), 290, 291, 292; Buxiaosheng
criticism of, 294-95; style of. 294 Xiangyu, legend of, 31 O
Wild Torrent (Kuang Jiu), 243, 249, 252, Xianshi (Sincere), 61
281 Xianu jiufuren (The Female Knight-
Williams, Alan, and cinema bricoleur, Errant Rescues the Lady), 227
375n58 Xian Xinghai, 312, 318
Willies Theater, 68 Xiaohai yuebao (Little Children's
Witte, Karsten, 36ln91 Monthly), 54
Woman and Chinese Modernity (Chow), 4 Xiao Shijie (Little World), 59
women: androgyny, flaunting of, 288; xiao shimin. See petty urbanites
body, control over, 277; and Chi- Xiaowutai Theater, 307
Index
Xiaoxin9 Tears (Xiaoxian9 Iei), 404n95 Yan Ruisheng, 105, 107

Xia Peizhen, xxi, 200, 388n7 Yan Ruishen9 (Zhongguo yin9xi), 38, 92,
Xia Yan, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 100, 105, 106, 108, 119, 121, 143,
272, 37ln3 374n43; appeal of, 107; impor-
Xihu men9xun {In Search of Dreams at tance of, 374n44
the West Lake), 400n36 Yan Shanshan, 37
Xinguang Grand Theater, 374n44 Yang Hansheng, 246,250,251,331
Xinhua Company. 298, 300, 405nl Yangjingbang language, 45, 47, 48, 51,
Xinmin troupe, 368n66 52, 66, 87; and cinema, 68; dis-
Xin Shijie. See New World theater semination of, 49; as spatial ver-
Xin wenyi {La nouvelle litterature), 82 nacular, 368n64
Xinya Company, 209 Yang Lianshen, 184
Xinxin (Sun Sun), 61 Yang Naimei, xxv, 38, 39,256
Xinxin Wutai Theater, 58, 68, 105, yangpai {foreign style), 47
368n65 Yao Gonghe, 49
Xin yinxin9 yu tiyu shijie (Silverland Yasunari Kawabata, 281
Sports World), 77 Year of Plenty (Fengnian), 249
Xinyue (New Moon) recording com- Yihua Company, 82, 40ln52
pany, 315 Yinghang studio, 308
XiYuan,96 yingxi, 98-99
xi zhon9 xi (play within a play), 307 Yingxi chunqiu (Movie Weekly), 72, 75
Xuan Jinglin, xix, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, Yingxi congbao (Shadowplay Gazet-
xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, 41. 61, 279, teer), 72 I 487
354nl3, 354nl3, 354-55nl6, Yingxi shenghuo (Movie Life), xxvi. 77,
355nl7, 355n21, 355n22 88,394n62
Xu Banmei. See Xu Zhuodai Yingxi shijie (Motion Picture World), 72
Xu Bibo, 394-95n70 Yingxi zazhi (Film Magazine), 72, 134,
Xu Chiheng. 72 314, 374n44
Xu9udu chunmeng (film), 40ln48 Ying Yunwei, 331, 409-10n54
Xu Hu. 132, 133 Yin Mingzhu (a.k.a. Pearl Yin), xxv,
Xujiahui (China), 368n67 38, 39, 191
Xu Qinfang, 200, 228, 304, 379n50, Yinsede meng (Silver Dreams), 255
394-95n70, 394-95n70,395n72 yipian gongsi. 119
Xu Su'er, 38 Yokomitsu Riichi. 281
Xu Xiacun, 257, 281. 403n83 Yong'an (Wing'an), 61
Xu Yuan teahouse, 94; Occidental Youlian Company, 208, 227, 235,
shadowplay in, 367n54 395n72; founding of, 394-95n70;
XuZhuodai, 161. 163,169,196,198, sound productions of, 304
366n5 l; background of, 382nl2; Youxibao (Leisure and Entertainment),
and double-roles, 164; drama, cin- 23, 94
ema's relationship to, 157; influ- Yuan dynasty drama, 27
ences on, 161; and trick cinematog- Yuan Meiyun, 284
raphy. 152, 161, I 63 Yuan Muzhi, 244, 331
Yuan Shikai, 336
Yan'an period, 246 Yu Dafu, 193
Yan Fu, 392n49 Yueming, 389n23
Index
Yueni.i, legend of. 395n7 l Zhao Jinxia, 38

yugong (apartment misters), 54 Zhao Shaokuang, 389n20
Yu Ji, 310 Zheng Junli, 98, 152, 244, 291, 292,
Yu Jusheng, 143 358n54
Yu Ling, 252 Zheng Xiaoqiu, 127
Yu Yuan garden, 96 Zheng Zhegu, 127
Zheng,Zhenduo, 159,236
Zeng Huantang, 131 Zheng Zhengqiu, xxiii, xxvi, 12, 66,
Zhabei, 50 90, 92, 100, 101, 102, 104, 109,
Zhang Changfu, 122 110, 115, 136, 154, 160, 254,
Zhang Dai, 400n36 258, 259, 284, 322, 349, 354nl3,
Zhang Darning, 385n56 37 ln3, 375n60; cathartic story-
Zhang Henshui, xxii telling, belief in, 147; death of,
Zhang Huichong, 191,210, 385n56, 338, 410n64; and New Drama,
386n64,387n73 336, 338; petty urbanites, relation-
Zhang Huimin, 152, 153, 187, 188, ship with, 146; philosophy of, 145,
191,195,198, 214-15; aviation, 147, 148; and theater, 337
interest in, 390n33; modernity, Zhiguoyuan (film), llO. See also Labor-
cinematic vision of, 197,210 er's Love
Zhang, Huizhang. 214 Zhong Dafeng, 99
Zhang Jinsheng, 279 Zhongguo wusheng dianying shi (History
Zhang Jizhi, 130, 131 of Chinese Silent Film), xvii
488 1 Zhang Junmai (Carson Chang), 222, Zhongtian Cinema, 374n44
223, 392n52, 392n53 Zhou Jianyun, 122, 127, 132, 133,
Zhang Meilie, 38, 75 139,248, 379n52,381n6, 387-
Zhang Qingpu, 187, 191 88n3
Zhang Shankun, 300, 405nl Zhou Shoujuan, 75, 153, 366n51
Zhang Sheng, 390n3 l Zhou Shuzhen, 262
Zhang Shewo, 378n30 Zhou Zuoren, 65, 159
Zhang Shichuan, xxiii, 12, 37, 61, 66, Zhuang Zi Tests His Wife (Zhuang Zi
90, 92, 100, 101, 102, 108, 109, shiqi), 37-38
115, 116, 122, 139, 236, 249, 354- Zhu Bajie the Pig Tours Shanghai (Zhu
55nl6, 367n55, 368n67, 37ln3, Bajie you Shanghai), 39ln39
389n21, 405nl Zhuge Liang, 217
Zhang Xinsheng (film), 108, 143 Zhu Shouju, 153
Zhang Yuan garden, 96, 367n54 Zi Luolan, 308
Zhang Zhiyun, XXV, 38 zujie, 47, 50

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AN AMOROUS HISTORY OF THE SILVER SCREEN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS • Chicago &London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago/0637

ISBN: 0-226-98237-8 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zhang, Zhen, 1962 July 8-

PART ONE THE VERNACULAR SCENE

Chapter 1 Vernacular Modernism and Cinematic Embodiment • L

PART TWO COMPETING MODERNS

Chapter 5 Screenwriting, Trick Photography, and Melodramatic

0.1 A constellation of Hbright stars" of the Mingxing Company • xx

4.3 Orphan Rescues Grandfather (1923) • 128

7 .12 Girl in Disguise: the pressure of family values • 287

SOME OF THE OLDEST and finest movie theaters in central ix

Finally, I owe my family in Shanghai a great deal for providing me a

HISTORY, for Walter Benjamin, does not unfold in a Nhomogeneous, xiii

to incorporate sound into the silent screen. The establishment of the

configured the film industry. The Nationalist government took definitive

lected areas of investigation, beyond the films themselves. As early cin-

0.2 Mingxing actress

xing productions, in particular those starring Xuan Jinglin, would read-

coincided with the decline of the Mingxing Company, which followed

What a big electric fan! It makes us realize the origin of torren-

As Gunning underscores, the sense of bewilderment and the exhilarating

For the provincial spectator, Amorous History offered a rare occasion to

treat them as artifacts and commodities that orbit in a broader media

In chapters 3 and 4 I expand on the historical and theoretical frame-

izations of these films around the theme of retribution can be understood

Chapter 8, which concludes the main body of the book, is devoted to

THE VERNACULAR SCENE

THE QUESTION OF early Chinese cinema is inexorably connected I 1

Diverging from the language-centered model of film theory that has

background for the cinema, I regard some of its features as significant

rereadings of the urban fiction by the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies

CINEMA AND MODERN LIFE

To globally contextualize the development of early Shanghai cinema, it is

world expositions to the department stores, from the amusement parks

have prompted David Bordwell to rather dismissively characterize this

to the abstract apparatus theory of a different paradigm. In Hansen's es-

The crucial issue is therefore whether there can be an imbrication

Hansen reasons that Benjamin's conception of innervation is tied to his

ogy. developmental psychology, reception aesthetics. and acting the-

A proliferation of youxi, or play and playfulness, appeared in a plethora of

/ .. As a unique technology that integrates the apparatus and the human

/ ·. Fitionlm ofassumes this task not simply by way of a behaviorist adapta-

The notion of play as a concrete form of bodily and collective inner-

volving sensuous, somatic, and tactile forms of perception; a noncoercive

realm of the sacred," 3 1 is a testimony to the appeal of a childlike, bodily

versions of a global cinematic vernacular a la Shanghaiese, with the

( wonderment and (profane) education, directly bound to the "lust of the

Gunning's conceptualization of the aesthetic of astonishment and

The .move from "modernity" to "modernism" is a deliberate one. It is

well as stars Ruan Lingyu and Li Lili-articulates the polyvalent mean-

often accompanied by aggressive marketing strategies. Through a com-

well as stars Ruan Lingyu and Li Lili-articulates the polyvalent mean-

rowed from nineteenth-century linguistics, emphasizes the interpene-

primitive technology penetrates the second nature. Hardly a timeless tra-

globalizing formulas and localizing permutations-including subversive

THE PAINFUL EXPERIENCE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

As articulated in early Shanghai cinema, vernacular modernism had dis-