Organizer: Yingjin Zhang, Indiana University, Bloomington
Chair and Discussant: Theodore Huters, University of California, Los Angeles
Sue Tuohy, Indiana University
Of the few film scholars who have written about early Chinese film music, most have called it a "hodgepodge" or have commented upon the "incongruity" of Western music accompanying Chinese images. Concentrating on films of the 1930's, this paper considers the musical portrayal of metropolitan intellectual thought. Rather than listening with ears of the 1990's, this paper listens to the film music within its contemporary context, as an extension of the period's artistic discourse.
The paper analyzes selected films to demonstrate that music cannot be ignored in an understanding of 1930's film. Rather than being a mere accompaniment to the visual, music plays a central, often framing, role. In Fisherman's Song, two songs ("Ave Maria" and Fisherman's Song, a composed "folk" song) mark major emotional scenes. In The Great Road and Street Angel, "live" music, often of local opera performed on the streets or in tea houses, puts forth ideas which could not otherwise make it past censors. The entire City Scenes is framed through the performance of a music peep show, in which still scenes of city life became animated through musical performance. And in films such as A New Year's Coin, we not only see film characters watch a variety of musical performances, but also hear their critical commentary on music of the time.
The period does not present a unified theme. This time of transition, as studios moved away from silent films, gave musicians the opportunity to compose original film music and to experiment with new musical forms and technologies. Many of these composers, some of China's most well-known, had just returned from overseas, had taken their places in China's new music conservatories, and joined progressive or left-wing associations. They experimented with Hollywood models as well as with traditional musical forms.
Musicians saw film as medium to promote their ideals for the future of Chinese music and of China, whether they be modernization, nationalization, patriotic, or popular. The sounds we hear and the musicians' critical commentary reflect their different ideals as well as the ambivalent stance taken at the time toward Western and Chinese musics. Listened to as a whole, the music of the films does not put forth a master soundtrack. Some of the songs and films may have been canonized later as leftist, but the musicians, the ideas portrayed, and the sounds themselves reflect the varied, often conflicting, thought characteristic of urban China in the 1930's.
Yingjin Zhang, Indiana University
This study will demonstrate that prostitution constitutes one of the focal points in urban landscapes in Chinese films of the 1930's. In both The Goddess (director Wu Yonggang, Lianhua Studio, 1934) and The Boatman's Daughter (director Shen Xiling, Mingxing Studio, 1935), prostitution is projected as a highly contested space where diverse urban discourses and ideologies confront and compete with each other. In this sense, those urban films which present the otherwise "unpresentable" (i.e., ill-reputed prostitutes) for the public consumption provide us with fascinating indices as to how urban imaginative functioned in Republic China.
To install a cultural/historical perspective, this study will also analyze a special forum on prostitution in Semi monthly (Banyue), a popular "butterfly" magazine of the 1920's. By framing The Boatman's Daughter in the rhetoric of the official ban on prostitution, for instance, Shen Xiling certainly strives to explore various layers of meaning associated with the thorny urban issue. His critique of the epicurean taste in the popular discourse on prostitution thus marks a further development of urban imagination than the previous ethico-moral representation as in The Goddess. What remains almost unchanged, however, is that the "ill-reputed" is always represented as "ill fated," a discursive strategy which ironically predestined the film star Ruan Lingyu, whose tragic suicide in Shanghai in 1935 returned to haunt urban audiences in both mainland China and Hong Kong in the past decade. It is therefore not merely a historical coincidence that prostitution returns in its more glamorous form in the cinematic rewriting of modern Chinese history (e.g., Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine [1993] and Stanley Kwan's Rouge [1987]).
Paul G. Pickowicz, University of California, San Diego
For decades, the classic post-war films "Eight Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moon" and "A Spring River Flows East" have been thought of as "leftist" works. In fact, the cultural politics of these "meaningful fabrications" about the war time holocaust are not so clear cut. It is time to look at texts of this sort not solely in terms of the highly polarized politics of the civil war and after, but more in terms of the complex relationship between commercial filmmakers working in the private sector and their vast urban film audience. When analyzed from this perspective, one finds that the cultural politics of these epic narratives were far from "radical" or "progressive." They were decidedly conservative. Both films argue that certain core Chinese values, especially those governing social relations within the family, were broken down during the long years of separation and dislocation. Without exception, the positive characters in both movies (war heroes and victims of Japanese oppression) were people who cherished traditional family values: respect for parents and devotion to spouse and children. Their ardent patriotism and unselfish public spiritedness were natural extensions of their old-fashioned, neo-Confucian cultural orientation. Profiteers, collaborators and other negative characters are people who have forgotten time honored family values and adopted alien ways that make them decadent, irresponsible, and greedy. They are incapable of acting patriotically, it seems, because they do not embrace "real" Chinese cultural values.
The audience for such films was not people who returned from the interior; it was comprised primarily of ordinary people who stayed behind in Shanghai and other large cities and suffered under a brutal enemy occupation. These grand narratives offered a simple and coherent explanation of why victory did not feel like victory. The films argue that the masses were deprived of an old-fashioned, family style "great reunion" after the war by unpatriotic profiteers and exploiters who had no respect for time-honored Chinese family values. The cultural values embraced by the negative characters are much more than simply untraditional. They are foreign. Every effort is made in these works to show that the people responsible for much of the war time and post-war misery of common people behave, look, and even dress in what is presented as a "Western," "bourgeois" manner. Their culture is an alien capitalist culture of merchants. The narratives seek to deny these people their essential Chineseness. Stripped of their Chinese identity, it is not the least bit surprising to see these personalities behave in ways that are incompatible with the national interest. It is inadequate, however, simply to dismiss these characterizations as so much Marxist anti-capitalism. There is something very Confucian and culturally conservative about the anti-merchant bias of the narratives. When it comes to denouncing capitalism and the bourgeoisie, there is much that Chinese Marxism of the 1930's and 1940's shared in common with the neo-conservative approaches that surfaced in urban China in the 1930's.
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