Session 36: The Shadowy Theater of Chinese Cinema: Traversing the Boundaries between Twentieth-Century Chinese Cinema and Drama

Organizer: Weihong Bao, University of Chicago

Chair: Yomi Braester, University of Washington

Discussant: Haiping Yan, University of California, Los Angeles

Keywords: twentieth-century China, drama, cinema.

In the 1980s, Chinese cinema and drama marked a watershed in their intertwined histories with filmmakers declaring cinema’s aesthetic independence from "the crutch of drama." This call to restore cinematic autonomy, paralleled by historiographical attempts to dissociate the "shadow" from the "play" by film critics, was not unprecedented, nor were the considerations behind the call merely aesthetic. To traverse the demarcation between Chinese film and drama scholarship, our panel initiates the collaboration of scholars in both fields to investigate the two media’s historical symbiosis, cross-fertilization, competition, and mutual distanciation throughout the twentieth century. By examining cinematic and dramatic articulations of social space, political message, affective horizon, and modes of spectatorship, we seek to locate the commercial, political, and aesthetic conditions that differentiate the two media. We place the works in the continuum of vernacular, modernist, and avant-garde articulations of Chinese modernity.

To these ends, Weihong Bao analyzes postwar "homecoming" films (1945–49) as cinematic negotiations of the impact of Spoken Drama practice in wartime Chongqing. Yomi Braester introduces early PRC filmic adaptations of stage plays and investigates cinema’s medium-specific participation in a highly politicized public culture. Jonathan Noble shifts to explore the thematic similarities and aesthetic disjuncture between experimental theater and independent film (1997–2002) by discussing their respective modes of representation, tactics for political engagement, and spectatorship practices.

Homecoming Diaries: Inhabiting and Dis-inhabiting the Theatrical in Postwar Shanghai Cinema

Weihong Bao, University of Chicago

Postwar Shanghai cinema (1945–1949) has been acclaimed for its quasi "neo-realistic" quality, yet its arguable "neo-realism" is also constituted and punctuated by the irreducible presence of the theatrical in figural, stylistic, and spectatorial sense. This paper explores the significance of this theatrical visibility by examining a cluster of "homecoming" films featuring the returning intellectuals and cultural workers denied dwelling in the estranging city of Shanghai. I argue that the postwar displacement of the cinematic and the theatrical in a new social order of mass media is most effectively reimagined and negotiated in the housing problem prevalent in these films, evoking asymmetrical binaries of country/city, exteriority/domesticity, and utopic past/dystopic present.

The weight of the theatrical reconfigured in these films, however, needs to be better understood via a historical detour across the tortuous passage of Chinese cinematic and dramatic mutual imbrications. I pause at the significant moment when the Shanghai filmmakers’ wartime departure to the "Great Hinterland" plunged them in a radically altered dynamic between modern China’s two rival mass media. I will pay particular attention to the practice of their mutual framing, contiguous aesthetics, and shared exhibition space, and hence the transformation for both media on aesthetic as well as social-spatial levels. This retrospection will help me to understand the "neo-realism" and the shelter-seeking motif for postwar films as sites of cinematic negotiation with the recent past, a battle for disowned and repossessed homes, most eloquently rendered in the ecstasy of flying saucers in Homecoming Diaries (Zhang Junxiang, 1947).

Shadowless Cinema: Early PRC Filmic Adaptations of Stage Plays

Yomi Braester, University of Washington

Adaptations of stage plays to movies have been largely attributed, in scholarly and popular circles alike, to the literary approach that has dominated filmmaking in China. Admittedly, early PRC cinema follows the yingxi tradition, which stresses narrative rather than the spectacle. Yet instead of being considered a subset of the literary field, fiction films of the Maoist period should be understood within the context of political campaigns, as tools of propaganda equal to literature, graphic arts and documentary cinema. The essay examines two films that, although adapted from plays, were deployed and received in ways somewhat different from their stage versions. I provide a close analysis of Lao She’s Dragon Whisker Creek (1950, filmed in 1952) and Shen Ximeng’s Sentinels under the Neon Lights (1961/63, filmed in 1964). In both cases, the plays took part in political campaigns. The films that followed did not, however, simply restate the original message. Instead, they used the filmic medium to place new emphases. In calling these works "shadowless films," I allude to their ambivalent position, as modifying the yingxi paradigm and at the same time laying claim to a transparent representation that casts no subjective shadow. The essay also explores the specific historical circumstances, in which filmmakers addressed the heritage of pre-liberation revolutionary cinema and prepared the grounds for the model plays and films of the Cultural Revolution.

Experimental Theater and Independent Cinema (1997–2002): Critical Semblance and Aesthetic Disjuncture

Jonathan Noble, University of Notre Dame

The "liberalization" of the cultural fields of theatrical and cinematic production in the last several decades in China contributed to the emergence of "non-mainstream" movements and practices on stage and screen. This paper explores the thematic similarities and aesthetic disjuncture between "non-mainstream" film and theater in China from 1997 to 2002. Spearheaded by key figures such as Gao Xingjian, Lin Zhaohua, Mou Sen, and Meng Jinghui, a type of "experimental" theater developed throughout the 1990s that explored various modes of representation, narration, and performance techniques that countered the domination of theater by realism, the fourth wall, and the Stanislavsky System. During the same period, independent filmmakers in China, often associated with the "sixth generation," moved to adopt cinematic techniques characterized by a politicized cinéma vérité.

Although many "non-mainstream" films and theatrical productions seek to articulate similar social issues, they differ greatly in terms of their modes of representation and global/local paths of circulation. An analysis of the Chinese theatrical adaptation of Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1998) and the quasi-epic Che Guevara (1999) reveals their symbolic mode of representation, appropriation of "non-native" scripts, and the processes involved with localizing spectatorship. While also probing social upheaval, political alienation and subjective disaffection, the cinematic productions of Jia Zhangke’s Pickpocket (1997) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (2001), however, adopt a realist mode of representation and feature "local" scripts embedded within a politics of global spectatorship. The analysis of these cinematic and theatrical productions demonstrates their critical thematic semblance while highlighting the disjuncture constitutive of their respective political and aesthetic articulations and circulations.