Organizer and Chair: Yingjin Zhang, Indiana University
Discussant: Edward M. Gunn, Jr., Cornell University
This proposed panel of four papers is a continuation, at least in terms of research interest, of the back-to-back panels on cinema and urban culture in Republican China I organized for the 1995 AAS meeting in Washington, DC. Rather than the previous focus on relatively serious topics such as film politics and film texts, this new panel will concentrate on a more accessible and more pleasurable site of urban leisure life and will examine fan magazines as a nexus between modern entertainment forms (e.g., cinema, dance hall, and pictorials) and the libidinal desire of their mass audiences. The participants include Zhen Zhang, Andrew Field, and Shelley Stephenson (panelists), three doctoral students who are currently completing their dissertations on Shanghai cinema and urban nightlife; Yingjin Zhang (chair and panelist), who has published a book and has edited a volume of essays on the city and urban culture in Republican China; and Edward Gunn (discussant), an expert of Chinese literature and culture in the 1930s-1940s. Based on ample archival materials and informed by theoretical concerns, the panel seeks to establish the links between film culture and print culture, to study the relationships between cinematic images and pictorial representations, and to explore the ways these images and representations were circulated, duplicated, and reinvented in other forms of urban entertainment.
Zhen Zhang's "Visual and Other Modern Pleasures: The Dilated Movie-going Experience in China, 1920s-1930s" starts with the "tea-house culture" of the 1920s and situates early Chinese film culture in the milieu of traditional theater and cuisine. She also investigates the role print culture played in the transition from silent to sound film and the impact of the emerging "song and dance film" on Shanghai entertainment industry (e.g., record companies and publishers of sheet music). Andrew Field's "Subject, Narrative, and Audience: Dancing Girls as Media Icons in Republican Shanghai" picks up from where Zhen Zhang leaves off and concentrates on the popularity of dancing girls and their relations with film culture in Shanghai. He traces the coverage of mosquito journals and identifies a similar discursive function served by the modern dancing girls as by their premodern counterpart-the late Qing courtesans. Yingjin Zhang's "The Corporeality of Erotic Imagination: A Study of Shanghai Pictorials and Fan Magazines of the 1930s" examines the erotic images that formed a circuit of desire in pictorials, fan magazines, and motion pictures. By way of analyzing examples of contemporary comics (manhua), photographs, and film sequences, he demonstrates that the erotic body-existing both as imagined and corporeal-constitutes a central point of fascination for urban audiences in Shanghai. Shelley Stephenson's "Towards an Informed Spectatorship: Fan Magazines in Occupation-Era Shanghai" scrutinizes what narrative strategies fan magazines employed and how they manipulated the audiences so as to remythify the "movie magic" and to construct a proper spectatorship for film industry.
This panel will add to the increasing scholarship devoted to Shanghai culture and will contribute to the advancement of our knowledge of the functioning of culture industry in modern China. Since fan magazines have long been excluded from academic scrutiny for their reputedly low taste and questionable historical value, a reassessment of their place in urban culture-or, more specifically, between film and print cultures-will reveal much about libidinal economy, erotic fantasy, and urban imagination typical of Shanghai in the Republican era.
Visual and Other Pleasures: The Dilated Movie-Going Experience in China
1920s-1930s
Zhen Zhang, University of Chicago
This paper is part of a larger project to explore Chinese silent cinema as a complex cultural and historical "assemblage" of the modern experience. Based on a close examination of a number of fan magazines, films, and literary texts produced during the period of silent cinema and the transition to sound, I will try to show how the Chinese cinematic experience in 1920s and 1930s was simultaneously embedded in and actively produced the polymorphous and gendered space of urban modernity. Such an expanded experience involved a cluster of entertainment venues beyond the confined space of the movie theater; the visual pleasure which is usually associated with film viewing was in fact imbricated in the larger sensorial and libidinal economy of a modernizing society.
After the introduction of cinema as a novel mass medium, and commodity, to China in 1896, films were for a long time exhibited in the "tea-house" milieu and entertainment centers such as "The Great World" and "The New World." These establishments also offered other popular forms of visual and aural entertainment, in addition to tea, food, cold or hot towels, and sometimes, sex. The (illustrated) film magazines that mushroomed in the twenties and the thirties constitute an entertainment for(u)m in itself, as well as a verbal and visual extension of the movie-going experience. The magazines also displayed an increasing trend in the building of luxurious film theaters in major trading ports, which, along with dance halls, cafes, department stores, and gambling and sports venues, helped to create an urban lifestyle fueled with sexual and commodity desire. The onset of sound in the filmic scene did not simply arouse intense public anxiety toward modern technology and the intrusion of American talkies, it drastically reordered the hierarchy of senses-the foregrounding of aural enjoyment led to a profusion of "song and dance" films (gewupian) in the early thirties that disrupted the maturing narrative economy of late silent film. Incidentally, theme-song records became a sought-after commodity, while popular singers (and dancers) were transfigured into a new breed of film star. Filmic and literary texts to be examined include: Pink Dream, Two Stars Under the Milky Way, Queen of Sports, and short stories by "New perceptionist" writers Liu Na'ou and Shi Zhecun.
Subject, Narrative, Audience: Dancing Girls as Media Icons in Republican Shanghai
Andrew Field, Columbia University
This paper will focus on the subject of "dancing girls" (wunu) as media icons in the popular press, particularly in Shanghai's "mosquito" journals. Dancing girls were women who worked as professional dance partners in Shanghai's numerous nightclubs and dance halls. In some mosquito journals such as Jingbao (The Crystal), dancing girls became the preeminent pop icons of the late Republican era, surpassing even movie and opera stars in popularity as media subjects. What effected this transformation in urban pop iconicity? In an effort to answer this tricky question, the paper will focus on three aspects of this urban cultural experience: subject, narrative, and audience. Through a survey of articles concerning dancing girls, it will explore the patterns by which these women were presented and represented as subjects for mass consumption. By tracing the stories of a few popular dancing girls, it will examine how the lives of these women figured into the framework of the modern urban narrative, illustrating such patterns as social mobility, acculturation and "westernization," and decadence. At this point, I will introduce the theory that these articles were read as a form of serial fiction, which should provide an appropriate segue into the topic of audience. Who followed these women's stories, and what ends did articles on dancing girls serve? By drawing on examples from the popular press, film, and fiction from the period, I will argue that these female media icons served to advertise their respective dance halls, but also served to entertain and admonish a mass readership consisting of men and women from various class backgrounds, many of whom never attended the dance halls of Shanghai.
The Corporeality of Erotic Imagination: A Study of Shanghai Pictorials and Fan
Magazines of the 1930s
Yingjin Zhang, Indiana University
This paper is a study of erotic images that were mass circulated in pictorials, comics (manhua), and fan magazines and of their links to film culture in Republican China. It might be argued that the consistent inclusion of nude photos in The Pei-yang Pictorial News (Beiyang huabao) during the late 1920s served basically the same function of appealing to male readership as the photos of courtesans did in butterfly magazines of the same period, such as The Half-Moon Journal (Banyue). As late as the mid-1930s, the inaugural issues of The Chin-Chin Screen (Qingqing dianying) not only printed nude photos but also advertised the books of nude study produced by the magazine editor Yan Ciping and his friends. The modern artistic taste displayed in this new magazine, however, marked itself off from its butterfly forerunners, where the literati's calligraphy and red seal were inscribed on the margins of the courtesans' photos. By linking nude photos to the photos of movie stars, The Chin-Chin Screen alluded to the central position the female body occupied in the male imagination of the film world.
The erotic pleasures imaginatively derived from the film world were dramatized in several illustrations in contemporary comic magazines and pictorials, such as Oriental Puck (Duli manhua) and The Young Companion (Liangyou huabao). Printed between illustrative texts and advertisements, erotic pictures formed a circuit of desire that discursively linked everyday practice (e.g., a serialization of Zhang Guangyu's "Folk Love") and artistic representations, be they cinematic, pictorial or literary. Short articles on sensuality, sexuality, and pornography added to the flavor of visual treats, stylishly done by the top-name artists like Zhang Leping, Ye Qianyu, and Zhang Yingchao. Indeed, these popular magazines seemed to constitute a mirror image to film industry, where erotic scenes were produced in mass quantity. On rare occasions, what had not been produced in film might even be invented by photography or drawing, as evident in The Chin-Chin Screen's series of the comic star Han Langen's adventures (by photographing his look-like).
In all cases, pictorials and fan magazines gave a corporeal form to erotic imagination in Shanghai and visually pleased their male readers (by returning what they looked for) while supposedly serving a didactic purpose to warn them of the danger of the decadent urban life.
Towards an Informed Spectatorship: Fan Magazines in Occupation-Era Shanghai
Shelley Stephenson, University of Chicago
Shanghai fan magazines of the occupation period engage in a practice, to some extent carried over from the 1930s, of publishing a large number of instructional articles. Many such pieces function to de-mystify for the reader the technology of film-articles explaining the "tricks" involved in producing cinematic rainstorms, for example, or in-motion background shots from the inside of a car. Even the fan magazine's stock-in-trade-the movie star-is brought down to earth in de-glamourizing articles with such titles as "Would you really want to marry a movie star?" (the suggested answer is: no). A large number of these articles also function to create a "proper" spectatorship: readers are instructed at great length on such matters as how to watch a film, how to appreciate a screenplay, and how to critique an actor's performance.
In this paper I will explore the content and motivations behind fan magazine didacticism. What purpose did it serve occupied Shanghai's fan magazines, and the film industry, to demystify the filmic medium? At first glance it would appear to be counterintuitive, the mission of removing in the fan's mind any notion of "movie magic." I suggest, however, that it reflects, and to some extent perhaps seeks to undermine, that period's widespread awareness of the filmic medium's presumed unmediated access to the human heart.
More centrally, I will look at the "ideal" spectator which seems to be posed in these features. I will suggest ways in which the ideal may have shifted from the "Gudao" period of 1937-41, to the era of full occupation (and a fully controlled fan press) in 1941-1945. I will lastly explore the ways in which the various occupation industry offerings may or may not have fulfilled the expectations of this constructed ideal spectator.