Street fighter resurrection terroriser scene

Edited and with an Introduction by

Yingjin Zhang

cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 ■-

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 1999

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America

CIP data appear at the end of the book

Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage: 'Laborer's Love' and the Question of Early Chinese Cinema

ZHEN ZHANG

Chapter Two

Laogong zhi aiqing (Laborer's love, 1922) is allegedly the earliest extant complete Chinese film. A silent film with original bilingual intertitles (Chinese and English), this approximately thirty-minute short comedy is one of over a

hundred films made by two pioneers of Chinese cinema: Zhang Shichuan (the

"director") and Zheng Zhengqiu (the "screenwriter"). 1 A plebeian story about

how a carpenter turned fruit vendor wins the hand of an old doctor's daughter,

the film was among the few short comic films made by the Mingxing (Star)

Company created by Zhang and Zheng in 1922. These shorts reportedly failed to become box office hits, which subsequently impelled the company to manu­

facture more "serious long moral dramas" (changpian zhengju) in order to

make up the loss.2 It is surprising that such a noncanonica1 film, deemed "frivo­

lous or vulgar,"3 should have survived the ravages of history and stand now as

the "beginning" of Chinese cinema. It has toured around the world as the "ear­

liest extant Chinese narrative film:' placed at the beginning of retrospective shows.4 To what extent can this accidental residue or leftover of Chinese film

history help critics today to reimagine the cultural "chronotope" of early Chi­

nese cinema?5 And how can we situate the genesis of this particular cinema­

or, to be more modest and realistic, this particular film-in the discursive field of early cinema as a cultural as weU as critical category? Finally, why is the fasci­

nation with and ambivalence toward early Chinese cinema so crucially linked

to the success of the contemporary Chinese new cinema and the rise of a theo­

retical consciousness of the cinematic apparatus? I do not intend to use La­

borer's Love here as an all-purpose text to answer these large historical and theo­

retical questions, which are inevitably interrelated. The film serves rather as an

28 Z H EN Z H ANG

intersection traveled by a number of contextual meanings, which collide there; the singularity of the film text acts upon film history even though it was long relegated to oblivion. And perhaps, precisely as the film is not an "ideal" text or

a milestone in mainstream Chinese film history, when we are confronted with it, its vivid textual details and particular cultural context may actually offer us a compelling glimpse of early Chinese cinema and its complexity. In what fol­ lows, I would like to discuss this complexity with regard to the dimensions out­ lined in the questions above, and how they actively converge in Laborer's Love. While trying to be sensitive to hlstorical and textual specificity, I will also em­

ploy theoretical categories derived from significant studies on early cinema as a whole in order to raise some conceptual issues regarding the nature of early Chlnese cinema, and its situatedness in modernity, including its relationship to cinema as a global mass medium.

Early Chinese Cinema: Hybrid Text and Messy History

The topic of early Chinese cinema has been until recently either neglected or else depicted in derogatory or dismissive terms in scholarship on Chinese cinema, whlch has largely been informed by an evolutionist model of history. For instance, the official mainland publication, A History of the Development of Chinese Cinema, portrays film practice during the first two and a half decades (ca. 1905-31, which roughly coincides with the silent period), before the "left­ wing" (zuoyi) Communist group entered the film world in Shanghai, as mostly "immature" and "chaotic."6 Jay Leyda's Dianying I Electric Shadows: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China is one of the earliest works on Chinese cinema in English, and devotes a considerable portion to the Republican pe­ riod. Its attention to film reception as a vital part of film culture illustrates to some extent the excitement as well as ambivalence expressed by Chinese people in their encounter with an entirely modern medium.7 The value of Leyda's work as an ambitious exercise in film history is, however, undermined by its many empirical errors as well as its lack of a critically informed methodology. In the few other existing chronologically organized studies in English on Chinese cin­ ema, thls period is either conspicuously missing or underrepresented. Paul Clark's Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949 contains a brief sketch of the pre-Liberation period, as a prelude.8 Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, an an­ thology edited by Chris Berry, consists of a number of essays on Chinese cinema from different angles, particularly on the New Chinese Cinema that emerged in the 1980s. Again, the question of early Chinese cinema is hardly touched upon except for a tentative discussion of films of the 1930s and the late 1940s in Leo Ou-fan Lee's article on the literary roots of Chinese cinema.9

Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage 29

Until recently, before Zhang Yirnou and Chen Kaige garnered glittering prizes at Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and Tokyo, many film scholars of the West who have an eye on non-Western cinemas have been particularly enamored with Japanese cinema. A central concern fueling this passion seems to be the possi­ bility 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 Dis­ tant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema is typical of how Japan becomes the vehicle for this academic radicalism. The main aim of the study by this "distant observer" is to identify prewar Japanese cinema as the "only national cinema to derive fundamentally from a non-European culture"; hence it distinctly and "radically" differs from the "standard 'Hollywood style' of shooting and editing adopted by the industries of Europe and the US, as well as by colonized nations." 10 In other words, Japan simply becomes a convenient metaphor in his political project of challenging the hegemony of Hollywood cinema. The second related reason, according to Burch, for the "originality" or purity of the Japanese text is located in Japan's avoidance of the "colonial stage" in the late nineteenth century. On the contrary, Burch laments, the former great civilizations, such as India, China, and Egypt, colonized or infiltrated by West­ ern powers, have failed to fully develop indigenous original modes of filmic representation, and have produced no "masterpieces" as Japan has. Burch ap­ parently does not like the muddiness of hybridity, as it cannot be radically dif­ ferent from Hollywood cinema, and it complicates his clean-cut program of buttressing Western theory by means of non-Hollywood practice. Quoting some figures from Leyda's book, Burch finds early Chinese cinema precisely such a hybrid text enslaved by American cinema-from film stock and cameramen to visual style. 11 In other words, the formative period of Chinese cinema is charac­ terized by infantile dependence and mimicry.

It is, however, precisely the problematic of hybridity that provides a possible entry point to early Chinese cinema. Homi Bhabha in his seminal essay "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817'' finds hybridity encapsulated in an ambivalent staging or Enstellung of the intention and "effect" of a colonial text (in that case, the Bible). 12 Hybridity, argues Bhabha, "is not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures ... in the dialectical play of recognition." Rather, "it is always the split screen of the self and its doubling, tlie hybrid." He elaborates further:

The colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other "denied" knowledges enter upon the domi­ nant discourse and estrange the basis of authority-its rules of recognition.13

30 ZHEN ZHANG

Although the Indian experience of colonialism is arguably very different from the Chinese encounter with the West in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the concept of hybridity allows an interpretive access to early Chinese cinema, which was largely produced and consumed in the semi colonial yet highly cosmopolitan city of Shanghai in the early decades of this century. It complicates the trajectory of authority in knowledge distribution (here in the form of cin­ ema as an exemplary modem technology) and obviates any exclusive claim to modernity on the part of the West.

Seen in this light, Burch seems all too hasty in drawing his pessimistic conclu­ sion on early Chinese cinema based on some statistical figures found in Leyda's study. Lf 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 after this low ebb in the late 1920s, due to the onslaught of American sound cinema, Chinese film production failed to attract a Chinese audience. In fact, the 1920s was an enormously lively and complex period in Chinese film history, a period marked by the consolidation of the Chi­ nese film industry, the transformation from a "cinema of attractions," 14 which consisted mostly of short films, to longer narrative features in the early part of tlie decade and the difficult transition to sound at the threshold of the 1930s. Al­ though only a handful of the films from that period are still extant, over 500 films were produced in the 192os. 15 The number of registered small or large film companies around 1925 was 175, out of which 141 were in Shanghai.16 Though

many quickly went out of business, some 40 companies actually produced films, and many others were in some ways presumably involved in film distribution and exhibition.17 The wide variety of films produced in this period may be glimpsed through the titles of some box-office successes: ranging from Zhang and Zhen g's moral tale Guer jita11 ji (The orphan rescues grandfather, Mingxing, 1923), Ren Pengnian's gory crime story Yan R11ishen (Zhongguo yingxi [China Shadowplay], 1921), Hou Yao's Qifu (The abandoned wife, Changcheng [Great Wallj, 1924) advocating women's rights, to Wen Yimin's martial arts film Ho11gxia (The red heroine, Youlian, 1929) featuring a female protagonist. The success of these films reveals an interesting aspect of early Chinese cinema: the thematic and stylistic obsession with traditional arts and the propensity for theatrical adaptations along with the tendency to address certain modern issues. If the film stock and cameras used to produce these films were imported from Europe or America, and the majority of film production was concentrated in semicolonial Shanghai, these films were undoubtedly Chinese productions preoccupied with attracting an urban and to some extent also rural audience which was still largely immersed in the traditional and theatrical performative arts. Far from being thoroughly Westernized or colonized, early Chinese cinema lingered long in a

Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage 31

different mode of perception and (re)presentation while strenuously trying to accommodate an entirely new visual apparatus imported from the West.

It would, however, be erroneous to draw the conclusion that Chinese cin­ ema, being deeply in debt to indigenous forms of presentation and representa­ tion, was also "essentially" or "radically" different from the Hollywood style. Given the particular semicolonial historical context, the unevenness of devel­ opment within China, the international nature of the film medium, and the di­ verse styles of individual filmmakers, there was certainly no such thing as an "original" Chinese cinema. At the same time, to conceive early Chinese cinema in terms of total dependence and mimicry (as opposed to the "autonomy" of the Japanese case in about the same period) is even more removed from the complex cultural context to which Laborer's Love now stands as a compelling, albeit "silent," witness. Situated at a crucial point of an early Chinese cinematic venture, the short comedy has a fairly long story to tel1.

A re-visit to this "beginning" of Chinese cinema can provide some insights to a highly syncretic and urbanized Chinese film culture. However, the risk of gen­ eralization is certainly constant in such a re-vision of an obscure(d) and "cha­ otic" historical period in Chinese film history, whose earliest residue is a brief slapstick comedy. My challenge here co�cerns the status of the individual text in any theoretical and historical analysis of cultural production. Tom Gunning in his article "Film History and Film Analysis: T he Individual Film in the Course of Time" attempts to rescue film history from the tyranny of theory in film studies during the past decades (in particular, that of film theory rooted in linguistic structuralism and Lacanian/ Althusserian theory of subject positioning). Yet he also cautions against any confusion of a historical approach with a naive (mis )conception of history as a "chaos of facts drawn out in an endless chain and the endless round of predictable recycling."18 Analysis of the individual film, ar­ gues Gunning, "provides a sort of laboratory for testing the relation between his­ tory 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." Certain "transitional texts" that"contain a conflict between older and more recent modes of address" are instances that manifest the interplay and interpenetration between the "synchronic slice" and the "dia­ chronic axis" in a given textual situation. 19

My analysis of Laborer's Love as such a transitional text will be an exercise in historical textual analysis, the aim of which is to reveal the "complex transaction that takes place between text and context., so that one never simply functions as an allegory of the other."20 I will try to demonstrate how some historical data may be mobilized as part of a larger textual field, rather than being relegated to a "historical background" or prehistory of the more established narrative cin-

)2 ZHBN ZHANG

ema in various versions of the social history of Chinese film. In such a textual field, a confluence of cinematic experiences of production, exhibition, and spec­ tatorship is woven into the individual text, while the latter is seen treading the

tightrope between different aesthetic and cultural norms, transforming specta­ torial expectations. My reading of the film will thus be situated in a particular spectatorial space, the "teahouse culture"; its hybridity and transformation in the early decades of the Chinese cinematic experience are crucial to our interpre­ tation of early Chinese cinema as a product of a vibrant but also tension-ridden modem urban mass culture.

The Teahouse: From "Shadowplay" to 'Laborer's Love'

Cinema arrived in China only months after the Lumiere brothers' show in the basement of the Grand Cafe in Paris on December 28, 1895. It quickly settled into the Chinese urban space. On August 11, 1896, the first projection by some French showmen took place in the Xu Yuan teahouse in Shanghai, an entertain­ ment venue for variety shows that usually featured traditional operas, magi­ cians, firecrackers, and acrobats. The film program was integrated into the live shows and attracted a large audience. In the next few years, a number of Euro­

pean and American showmen entered the trading port, which by then was al­ ready divided into many foreign ( or Western) concessions in addition to the old city area, to exhibit films mostly in teahouses such as Tianhua, Tongqing, and Shengping.21 This peculiar mode of exhibition, that is, the coexistence of the "foreign shadowplay'' (xiyang yingxi) and indigenous popular performances in a popular entertainment venue (a sort of vaudeville), continued well beyond 1908 when a Spanish showman named Antonio Ramos built the first film the­ ater, Hongkew (Hongkou daxiyuan), a simple sheet-iron structure boasting 250 seats, at the intersection of Haining Road and Zhapu Road in central Shanghai.22

The teahouse is a significant spatial trope in Chinese urban mass culture around the turn of the century, and figures strongly in the history of early Chi­ nese cinema. It should not be perceived, as in typical exotic imagination and rep­ resentation, as a place where Chinese scholars in long gowns discourse on intel­ lectual matters over a cup of green tea. In many cases, at least for a long time in Shanghai, teahouse (chayuan) and theater-house (xiyuan) were interchange­ able terms for entertainment establishments where traditional opera pieces and other popular variety shows were offered, along with tea, snacks, and cold tow­ els. Many multifunctional gardens such as Zhang Yuan, Xi Yuan, and Yu Yuan, as well as entertainment centers like The Great World (Dashijie) and The New

World (Xinshijie), were also major venues for a wide selection of traditional and modern forms of mass entertainment, including the "foreign shadowplay."23

Teaho11se, Shadowplay, Bricolage 33

Some larger establishments such as the Qinglian Ge (Blue lotus pavilion) on Fourth Avenue (now Fuzhou Road), where Ramos made his projection debut in a rented booth, were also notorious sites for gambling, prostitution, and gangster activities.24 Even a more refined teahouse such as WenmingYaji (liter­ ally, the civilized and elegant gathering place) on Second Avenue (now Jiujiang Road), where calligraphers and painters used to gather, once featured a wax fig­

ure show and a simulated train ride/ show accompanied by landscape films.is One of the earliest illustrated Chinese newspapers, Tuhua ribao (The illus­

trated daily), which began to publish in 1908, often carried news and portrayals of the Shanghai "teahouse culture" with vivid and visual details. The seventh is­ sue of August 1908 reported and illustrated "The Noisy Shadowplays on Fourth Avenue" as a particular social phenomenon in Shanghai. The writer of the story appears to be amazed at the use of trumpets and even Chinese gongs and drums in front of the teahouse to advertise for the supposedly Western silent films. The performances depicted in other illustrations range from Peking opera and puppet plays to storytelling. Fireworks, magic shows, and "foreign shadow­ play" were reportedly the main attractions of Xi Yuan, which was brightly lit with hundreds of electric bulbs at night. The clientele 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 members were usu­ ally seated around tables; waiters with big trays carried teapots, cups, and snacks to the customers. Fanning themselves, women chatted and gossiped. The space was often depicted as a hotbed of women's freedom and sexual desire, and hence a constant subject for public anxiety. For instance, the phenomenon of summer night gardens (ye huayuan) allegedly provided a haven for romantic rendezvous, and the illicit liaisons formed in certain theater houses between female specta­ tors and actors scandalized the public.26

Significantly, before and even after the arrival of cinema in China, the tea­ house also served as a venue for the traditional shadowplay. A leather-puppet show behind a screen illuminated by gaslight where there was still no electricity, this indigenous art form has generally been considered by Chinese film histori­ ans to be the bedrock of the Chinese cinematic (un)conscious. The age of the shadowplay has been the subject of controversial speculation,27 though most accounts cite as the earliest record a Song dynasty source about Emperor Han Wudi's experience of a staged shadowplay to meet the soul of his deceased wife. While one should be mindful of the risk involved in any such attempt to fix an originary moment of a cultural category, the overlap of the puppet shadowplay and "foreign shadowplay" in the late Qing and the early Republican period nev­ ertheless deserves critical attention, if one considers cinema as at once an inter­ national and contested modern cultural practice.

34 Z H EN Z H A NG

Most existing accounts describe the two-dimensional puppet as made of donkey skin painted with vivid colors. The performance consisted of a white cloth screen dividing the spectators and the puppeteers, who narrated and sang

while manipulating the puppets. Usually there was also a Chinese orchestra ac­ companying the show.28 Although themes and styles differed according to ge­ nealogical as well as geographical particularities, the common repertoire con­ sisted of popularized versions of classical tales, vernacular stories, religious leg­

ends, and adaptations from various local operas. The shows also varied from a group of unrelated short scenarios to serialized long dramas. While some pup­ peteers relied on scripts, others resorted to memory and improvisation. Beijing alone had two major schools. One, which used scripts, dominated the eastern part of the city (Dongcheng); the other, which did not use scripts, flourished in

the western part (Xicheng).29 Leather-puppet shadowplay also flourished in Shanghai in the late Qing and early Republican periods.30 In the mid-193os, some entertainment establishments still had shadowplay as a staple program.

Until the early 1930s, cinema in Chinese was called "shadowplay" (yingxi) be­ fore the term gradually changed to "electric shadows" (dianying), indicating its umbilical tie to the puppet show and other old and new theatrical arts-in par­ ticular, the modern stage drama from the West via Japan. The emphasis on "play" rather than "shadow"-in other words, the "play" as the end and "shad­ ow" as means-has, according to the film historian Zhong Dafeng, been the ker­ nel of Chinese cinematic experience.3 1 As the pioneers of Chinese cinema were deeply immersed in traditional Chinese theater while also enthusiastically es­ pousing the transplanted modern spoken drama called wenmingxi (literally, the "civilized drama"),32 the notion of"play" became, if unconsciously, the guiding principle in their film practice. That some of the earliest Chinese films are "recordings" of Peking opera performance and adaptations from wenmingxi pieces indicates not only a thematic predilection for the ready-at-hand "play;' but also attests to the shooting style that foregrounds the frontal, tableau effect of stage performance. Such a visual style is certainly congenial with the aesthetic of early cinema before Hollywood as a whole, that is, before the onset of a more narratively integrated and diegetically absorbed cinema. The persistence of the "cinema of theater people" (xiren dianying) in Cliina and its attendant stylistic strategies (including the prevalence of medium-long shot, nonperspectival spa­ tial relations) requires, however, a consideration of its cultural texture at a given historical moment.33 It has to be pointed out that this theatrical proclivity is by no means a signifier for "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 Western technology. The modern spoken drama played a sig­ nificant part in negotiating "play" and "shadow" in a hybrid urban space like Shanghai. The first successful commercial films such as Heiji yuanhun (Wronged

Teahouse, SIU1dowplay, Bricolage 35

souls in an opium den, 1916) and Yan Ruisheng (1921) were adapted from sensa­ tional wenmingxi plays. Yet an awareness of the fi.lrn camera as a visual appara­ tus, and cinema as a far more complex modern commercial practice, also im­ pelled the early filmmakers to explore the potential of the "shadowy" side of fi.lrn.

Laborer's Love is very much a product of the teahouse culture, and of a conflu­ ence of discourses and practices on shadowplay in Shanghai in the early decades of this century. The makers of the film, Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu, before they established the Mingxing company in 1921, had collaborated eight years earlier to make some Chinese films for their Yaxiya (Asia) Company, a small joint venture between two American businessmen and the two enterpris­ ing Chinese. Zhang and Zheng had been directly involved with other forms of popular culture before their accidental encounter with cinema in 1913, that is, shortly after the Chinese national revolution that abolished the Manchu imper­ ial system. A relative to the wife of an entertainment business tycoon, Zhang was for a while a sectional chief of the enormous entertainment complex New World located at the heart of the city.34 Zheng, on the other hand, was already making a name for himself in news supplements as a Peking-opera feui/letoniste, and was well connected in theater circles. The two embraced the new medium simply "out of curiosity." Zhang recalled later, "because it is about shooting shadow­ 'play,' I naturally thought of old Chinese theatrical 'plays.' "35 The two signs in front of their rather shabby "studio"-one "Asian Shadowplay Co.;' the other "Xinmin New Theater Research Society" -signify a marriage of the "Western shadow" and the "Chinese play.''36 Their first film, Nanfu nanqi (The difficult couple, 1913), a parody of feudal arranged marriage, was "scripted" by Zheng and "directed" by Zhang with all the enthusiasm of innovation. With stage ac­ tors of tl1eir acquaintance playing the roles, and a static camera running until the end of the reel, the four-reel film with a discernible narrative (but hardly a narrative structure) has nevertheless been hailed as the beginning of China's narrative cinema (see fig. 2).

After this film Zheng left the company to form his own wenmingxi troupe while Zhang continued to film a number of short subjects, mostly comedies with neither coherent narrative nor didactic concerns. A cursory survey of some of the titles reveals that it was a very different kind of cinema from what Zheng wanted to create with The Difficult Couple: Huo Wuchang (A living Wuchang), Wufu finmen (Five blessings at the threshold), Erbaiwu baixiang chenghuang­ miao (The blockhead roams round the temple of the town god),Da chenghuang (Beating the town god), and so on, all made between 1913-14. Mainstream Chi­ nese film history tends to dismiss these films as frivolous, vulgar, and in bad taste, and points to the fact that they were shown as inter1udes at drama perfor­ mances as evidence of their shoddy and nonprogressive quality. Zhang had to cease filrning when the First World War cut off the supply of fi.lrn stock from

36 Z H I! N ZHANG

2. A static camera shooting a scene in the Asia studio, courtesy of the China Film Archive.

Germany. But after a new source of film stock from the United States was se­

cured, Zhang's new film company Huanxian (Dream Fairy) and some other

companies turned out a wide range of short and long films: actualities, scenics,

comedies, educational films, films of Peking opera or adaptations of opera for

film, and detective films based on real crime cases. Most of them were all­

Chinese productions and with them Chinese cinema as a national culture in­

dustry 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.

It was also a blooming era for Chinese journalism and popular literature, which

had great impact on film production. In particular, the popular romance genre

called "mandarin ducks and butterflies" (Yuanyang hudie), which was mostly se­

rialized in literary supplements and magazines, provided ready-made stories for

the screen. Although originally derived from traditional vernacular fiction sen­

timentalizing romantic love of, usually, a poor young scholar and a beauty who

is willing to sacrifice her wealth or family name for love, the "mandarin ducks

and butterflies" literature in the early twentieth century was more diversified,

and included detective stories, muckraking reportage, martial arts romance,

and some ghost fiction.37 The popularity of this literary phenomenon reached

its heyday in the 1920s and had a definitive impact on the emergence of a narra­

tive cinema in the same period. Many popular fiction writers, seeing the poten­

tial of the new medium, also began to write "shadowplay" scripts. But the link

between popular fiction and cinema, as Zhong Dafeng points out, was largely

filtered through wenmingxi, which first adapted successful "mandarin ducks

and butterflies" literature for the stage, often with major "editorial" changes. 38

Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage 37

Such a mediation through drama enhanced theatrical effect at the expense of

narrative closure. It was in this sizzling ambience that Zhang and Zheng began their second,

now all-Chinese, collaborative venture, this time with a larger budget and greater ambition. Instead of the open-air, mud-floored tiny studio in which they filmed

The Difficult Couple in 1913, with rudimentary filmic control but an immense cu­ riosity, the new company, now named Mingxing (Star), was housed in Zhang's

former stock market company building and had a sizable staff. From the very

start, it also established the "Mingxing Shadowplay School" to train professional actors and actresses.39 The company was no longer just an amateur artisan work­

shop experimenting with rendering stage drama into "shadowplay." It was a business serious about its ability to produce profitable films. With fancy movie

houses mushrooming in the city, and under pressure to compete with foreign

films, the demand for long, integrated narratives also grew.

What was happening to Mingxing in particular and the Chinese film indus­

try in general at that time may be conceived in terms of a gradual and tension­ ridden transition from what Tom Gunning calls the "cinema of attractions" to

that of"narrative integration," characterized by changing dynamics of spectato­

rial pleasure. Gunning argues that early cinema, in "its ability to show something;' is an "exhibitionist" cinema, contrasted to the voyeuristic tendency in later nar­

rative cinema.40 The institutional ambition of Mingxing and its growing narra­

tive impulse stemmed from a similar epistemological shift in cinematic percep­

tion. An increasing awareness of the apparatus behind the "shadowplay" and its

commercial 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 drama theaters, the film in­

dustry had to consider the potential (and far larger) audiences patronizing the

more sophisticated but also less noisy and spontaneous film theaters, in addi­

tion to the audiences in the interior cities, rural areas, and overseas Chinese communities.

This transformation, however, was less apparent and more gradual than any

retroactive concept of it tends to suggest. The Mingxing company retained

many vestiges of the earlier cottage industry; it took nearly a decade to establish

a full-fledged studio when it produced the first Chinese sound film in 1931. In

fact, its first four productions of 1922, Laborer's Love among them, carried over

much of the spirit of Zhang's earlier "attractions." Two other comedies featured

"Chaplin" (played by a British resident of Shanghai, who worked at the New

World entertainment center): Huaji dawang you hua ji (The king of comedy

visits China), Danao guai juchang (Disturbance at a peculiar theater). Another

film, Zhang Xinsheng, was based on an actual crime story first adapted to the-

38 ZHEN ZHANG

ater, complete with gory and shocking details. 1n addition, Mingxing produced five newsreels on sports events as weU as 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: "Al­

ways pursue the current attractions and tastes, in order to bring out merry

laughter from the people" (c/1uchu wei xinqu shishang, yiji boren yican).41 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 "serious long moral dramas" (changpian zhengju), which answered

the market demand in a timely fashion. Laborer's Love, the only extant film of these early Mingxing productions, is a

peculiar film in that it combines presentational and representational impulses.

lts 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, "interiorization,"42 La­ borer's Love still shows its stubborn exaltation of theatrical or performative exte­ riority while flirting with narrativized interiority. By "interiorization," Elsaesser

refers to the shift from the diverse practice of early cinema to narrative cinema in the West in the late 1910s, and the emergence of an increasingly institutional­ ized (and isolated) spectatorship in the wake of the establishment of picture

palaces and other fixed exhibition outlets. He writes: "For the very pressure to­ wards longer narratives coming from the exhibition sector meant that the strug­ gle for control once more shifted away from the mode of presentation to the mode of representation, though defined by the new commodity-form embod­ ied in the multi-reel film, which required self-sufficient fictional narratives." In

other words, the stress on "interiority" and the segregation of audiences of the picture palaces are linked to new forms of closure and the "interiorization of the narrative instance" in film production.

The narrative trajectory of Laborer's Love is clear, but the film is less con­

cerned with the internal psychology of the characters than with their actions,

which often amounts to a show that disrupts any incipient diegetic absorption. While the film is rather skillful in cross-cutting and temporal continuity so as

to render narrative representation coherent, the emphasis on mechanical move­ ment and optical experiment often foreground the cinematic apparatus, be­ traying the sustained fascination with the medium which first brought Zhang and Zheng to cinema nearly a decade before. This obsession with movement and optical play is themalized or inscribed in the seemingly harmless story of a ro­

mance between a fruit vendor and a doctor's daughter. The story is in fact a "frivolous" commentary on the question of social mobility, implicitly mocking the feudal and patriarchal codes regulating marriage and family. 1n the following

pages, 1 will show how the film serves as a metacommentary on the teahouse

Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage 39

culture and early Chinese cinema, and its implication for a transforming cine­

matic perception.

Space, Vision, and the Bricoleur from Nanyang

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 un­ mistakable but changing milieu. The three-reel film can be divided into three

parts. The first part establishes the basic pattern for a narrative "exchange": the vendor desires the doctor's daughter and proposes a marriage. The second part describes how the vendor arrives at the idea of turning the clients of a nightclub

into the doctor's patients. The last part is simply the execution of this idea,

which leads to the predictable "happy ending." The first part, with exclusively exterior, frontal tableau shots, weaves the dy­

namics of desire between the fruit shop, the doctor's shop, and the hot-water

shop (hereafter referred to as a teashop ).43 The first shot of the film-an intro­ ductory intertitle-tells the audience that Carpenter Zheng returned from over­ seas (Nanyang, or the South Seas-referring to 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 hooligans hang out. The old doctor (played by the screenwriter Zheng Zhengqiu), clad in his long robe and very

nearsighted, 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 front, which consists of a Chinese calligraphic couplet and antique furniture, is clearly established as a stage of spectacle, framing his young daughter as object of

desire for the vendor as well as for the hooligans at the teashop. We are told the

doctor is in dire financial straits, with no patients visiting his shop. His daughter mends his gown in public, betraying the deteriorating situation of a tradition­ ally elite class.

The vendor's business, however, is booming. He gazes at the daughter doing

embroidery in her corner of the shop, and sends her fruits placed in a carpen­ ter's ink marker (as a container) with a rope, a mechanical maneuver attribut­

able to his carpentry skill. This "sending over" ( through alternating shots) links

the two "opposite" shop spaces, injecting a pleasurable movement (of desire)

into an otherwise static frontal framing. By using a string, the movement also invokes a classical Chinese motif for love and marriage, hence the other name of the film, Zhiguoyuan, literally, "fruit-throwing love connection," a title de­

rived from folklore. One of the hooligans at the teashop gets jealous and walks across the street to tease the daughter. She quickly sends back the ink marker,

40 Z H EN Z H A N G

alerting the vendor to her situation. The vendor throws an apple at the hooli­

gan. He moans and the doctor mistakes the hooligan for a patient, as all those

exchanges have escaped his nearsighted notice.

The same movement of desire in relation to vision is repeated when the doc­

tor tries to find an auspicious date in the fortune-telling calendar to pray for his

dwindling business. He takes off his spectacles and unwittingly puts them in

the ink marker, sent by the vendor for the second time. Unaware of this, the daughter sends back the box along with a handkerchief (again, a classical motif

for "expressing 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 masked in the form of the spectacles

reveals an unfocused world. The vendor's altered vision ceases to relay any

voyeuristic desire; and the smoothness of the narrative is suddenly halted: there

is nothing to see but the frame of the spectacle(s). The doctor, on the other side of the street, deprived of his visual aid, also becomes confused and disoriented.

Thus, in her unwittingly mischievous gesture, the daughter momentarily dis­

arms the visual pleasure of both men in the film, and of the spectator as well.

In the remaining half of the first part of the film, the pattern of desire moves from staging to acting out. After the "denial" of male vision, the daughter takes

the initiative of movement. 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 vendor, she asserts her role as a sub­ ject of desire rather than simply remaining 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 stiJI has to observe the time-honored patriarchal codes regarding

matrimony. The vendor brings melons and sugarcanes over to her father to make a proposal. 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. That a petty vendor with only fresh fruits as gifts goes to

propose to a doctor's daughter would have been unthinkable in a previous time,

when social hierarchy was more rigorously observed. But the poor doctor is desperate as his vision is failing him and traditional medicine seems increas­

ingly out of fashion. He will allow the marriage only if the vendor will make his business prosper. At first dejected, the vendor closes his shop and goes inside to rest.

The second part of the film shifts the narrative into a primarily interior space, coupled with more sophisticated filmic control. If the treatment of space in the

first segment remains largely theatrical, characterized by frontal framing and

presentational performances, this part, shot mostly in the vendor's bedroom and the nightclub upstairs, experiments with some particular cinematic techniques,

Teahouse, Sliadowplay, Bricolage 41

such 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 daydream of the girl and the doctor's stem face. The vendor's "interiority;' or subjectivity, is thus contained

within the narrative frame. In the next shot, the vendor looks at the table clock;

a following point-of-view shot shows the clock at 9:47. The vendor yawns and

goes to bed. This sequence is intercut with the staircase outside leading to the club. The cross-cutting thus links temporal and spatial movement, the interi'or

and exterior space.

The nightclub is the interior extension and elaboration of the open teashop (see fig. 3). Unlike its "primitive" form, which serves merely hot water, tea, and a

view of the street, the "All-Night Club" (Quanye julebu} signifies an interior­

ized spatial figure of modern urban entertainment life, particularly in the more sophisticated large film theaters that thrived on {narrative) closure. The transi­

tion from the vendor's bedroom to the interior of the club is accomplished by a mini-sequence of the mahjong game. A close-up of the mahjong table with hands mixing the tiles signals the emergence of a different space. 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. There fol­ lows a fight between two hooligans over a seat next to a girl-a session of slap­

stick-which wakes the vendor downstairs. Another point-of-view shot of the clock: 2:56 A.M. The elliptical editing here is smooth and convincing. Hearing 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 interiorized narrative and subjective space becomes subtly analogous with a cinematic space. Yet, as my analysis has noted, a number of theatrical elements persisted: the fight, in a slapstick vein, resonates with the earlier fight at the teashop; the final shot of the vendor ges­

turing 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 the sleepless night, the vendor visits the doctor's shop

and strikes a deal with the latter: the doctor will have many patients, and the vendor will marry the daughter. While customers keep ascending the staircase to the club, the vendor, resuming his carpenter identity for the time being, makes a trick staircase to replace the original one. In the next exterior shot, be fixes every step in the staircase onto his device underneath and tests its efficiency. By

42 Z H EN Z H A N G

3. The interior: a teahouse party in Laborer's Lave (1922), courtesy of the China Film

Archive.

pulling the device, he can turn it into a slide. When pushed, the slide will re­ appear as a stair. Meanwhile, a reconciliatory banquet goes on upstairs, presided over by an old man who admonishes the young playboys/hooligans against in­ fighting. He exits, onJy to become the first victim of the trick stairs. As the ban­ quet reaches its end, more people make their "fall." In this sequence, the editing aJtemates between the interior of the club and the exterior street scene, between long shots of the entire scenario of the "sliding" and medium shots of the moan­ ing victims at the bottom of the staircase. The long shots of the scene clearly re­ tain the virtuosity of a theatrical space: with the "magic" staircase diagonaJly di­ viding the screen, the vendor on the left side of and under the stair is kept "invis­ ible" 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. 44 This treat­ ment of space effects a kind of internal cutting within the same frame; the expo­

sure of cause and effect at once renders linear progression redundant. The ven­ dor's secret is truly an open one, since the audience is in on his trick (see fig. 4).

This scene is also crucial to my view of the film as a celebration of sociaJ mo­ bility as well as a metacommentary on a transitionaJ cinema. On the one hand,

the film satirizes through the literal "fail" or "sliding" of the "leisure class" the

Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage 43

thriving but also often chaotic "teahouse culture" in modern urban space.45 The "fall" of his victims in tum becomes the stepping-stone leading to the vendor's climbing the social ladder.46 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 existing social hierarchy. After being "mobilized" by the carpenter-vendor's mechanical intervention, the magic stair turns static steps into a smooth slide. This play with movement, based on the erasure of the fixed repetition of steps, paradoxically precipitates the multipli­ cation 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. The excess of the vendor's (and our) "perverse" pleasure becomes as over­

whelming as the excess of movement caused by the loss of equilibrium-the downward sliding proves far more dizzying than the theatrical horizontal crossing in the first part of the film. Hence the acceleration or intensification of movement at the end of the film. The injured crowd, now the potential clientele of the doctor and thus endowed with an exchange value, swarms to the doctor's shop for treatment. Silver coins are one after another piled into the money tray

4, The exterior: the mobile ladder in IA borer's Love ( 1922), courtesy of the China Film Archive.

44 Z H E N Z H A N G

in dose-up shots, as the patients fill the shop only to receive cursory mechani­

cal treatment for their wounds. The doctor handles the bodies in a fashion sim­

ilar to the way the vendor handles the fruit and the stair. Seeing the doctor over­

loaded with work, the vendor comes over and volunteers to help, and thus liter­

ally joins 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 loss of sight

triggered by the displacement of the spectacles, only now the blurriness is satu­

rated with an overinvestment of head-spinning movement and a polymorphous

perverse pleasure rather than the male pleasure centered around the body of

the daughter.

Both instances exemplify, hyperbolically, the kind of fascination and ambiv­

alence with which the earliest generation of Chinese filmmakers regarded cin­

ema as a modern perceptual and communicative medium. The character of the

carpenter-vendor may be viewed as an on-screen representative figure of this

emerging "cinematic brico/eur,"47 a term Thomas Elsaesser employs to describe

the makers of the Weimar cinema of the 1920s, who are said to be preoccupied

with the "Edisonian imaginary:' or a realization of the technological and episte­

mological potential and risk the cinema brings. Elsaesser locates the "Edisonian

imaginary" in the "'defective' narratives of the Weimar cinema, their undecid­

ability, 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 'nor­

mal vision'."48 His overevaluation of the status of the "auteur" (though of a more

composite form than a single director) over the "spectator" in discussing the

historical and perceptual genesis of the 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 early192os by Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu. They still treated cinema as a curious, if not "Edisonian,"

imaginary, before they launched longer narrative moral dramas under the pres­

sure of an increasingly interiorized film exhibition practice and the competition of foreign cinema.

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, its hesitancy to inscribe voyeuristic-fetishist

pleasure on the body of and in the film or to embrace "an imitation of'normal vision,'" have to be understood in relation to the "undecidable" position of the

first generation of Chinese filmmakers. The carpenter-vendor in Laborer's Love

Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage 45

is in a sense 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 as well as the social status of this bricoleur remains am­ biguous throughout the film. The fruit vendor is consistently called by his pre­ vious profession, "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 carpenter-vendor and the "cinematic bricoleur.")◄9 Yet he is no longer practicing traditional artisanship, especially after his return from the "South Seas" (Nanyang).50

The allusion to Nanyang is significant, as it obliquely underscores the im­

portance of this possibly biggest market for Chinese films during that time.st

Historically, but more stereotypically, overseas Chinese of Nanyang have always been associated with commercial skills in the colonial or semicolonial South­ east Asian countries. Carpenter Zheng is presented as a worldly-wise man who returns to his hometown to become a businessman, engaging in exchange rather than production. But instead of abandoning his past altogether, he adapts his carpentry skills to vending fruit (an allusion to the tropical Nanyang,

of course). And when his desire is at stake, this skill is also utilized in courting and "bridging" a social gap between his fruit shop and the doctor's place. In other words, he "transcends" the old mechanical role of carpenter, and becomes rather the master of both production and exchange at once. And while the ven­ dor sells flawed "bodies" to the doctor in exchange for the daughter, the cine­ matic bricoleur manufactures and mobilizes an incipient narrative of desire.

This narrative economy, however, remains "defective" or complicated in two respects. The first has to do with the bricoleur's ambivalence in relation to cine­ matic 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 play. Although he is granted a couple of point-of-view shots of the

clock and two "dream-balloon" shots of his interior desire, the film is at pains to perform his secret desire and his carpentry magic in the theatrical open space. Laborer's Love is thus very much a "last echo of an early cinema," at once em­ bodying and challenging Zhang Shichuan's faith in "attractions and tastes."52

The second "defectiveness" is related to the displacement or blurring of visual pleasure discussed above. The gendered configurations of vision and desire in the film are resonant with what Miriam Hansen said about the spectatorship

in/of early cinema in relation to a gendered public sphere:

The polymorphously perverse energies that animated the cinema of attractions were not yet channeled into the regime of the keyhole, the one-way street of classical voyeurism which has led feminist theorists to describe the place of the female specta­ tor as a "locus of impossibility."53

46 Z H EN Z H A NG

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 ap­ pearance. Facing the street working on her embroidery, she is a spectator of, as well as a participant in, public life. The desire that motivates the narrative as well as gender performance is hardly a "one-way street"; 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 as a more fluid or democratized distribution of labor and social and gender relations, a mobil­ ity that thus also includes demographic and spatial movement such as 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 conventions and themes derived from traditional and modern theater, popular literature, and folklore. Momentarily flirting with the "Edisonian imaginary," Laborer's Love neverthe­ less refuses to be absorbed completely by the magic power of the apparatus. The first word and the final one are given to the human heart and hand, as indi­ cated in the calligraphic couplet hung in the doctor's shop: "A virtuous heart saves the world/ A magic hand can bring back spring" (Renxin zai jishi, miaoshou ke huichun). The cliche has been relentlessly satirized but is given new meaning at the end of the film.

The film as a whole frankly acknowledges the presence of film technology and the impact that mechanical reproduction had on traditional cultural prac­ tices (for example, Chinese medicine and calligraphy). The humorous image of the bricoleur as a versatile filmmaker, who uses his hands as much as his entre­ preneurial skills, however, represents the desire of the first generation of Chi­ nese filmmakers to reconcile art with profit, craftsmanship with technology.

Epilogue: Early Cinema in a New Era

In a curious way, the return of early Chinese cinema in Chinese critical discourse is concomitant with the rise of the Chinese New Cinema, and the search for a new concept of film in the context of the renewed project of Chi­

nese modernity. The Chinese New Cinema has in the past decade surprised and enthralled the world with a number of award-winning films, such as Huang

tudi (Yellow earth, 1984), Hong gaoliang (Red sorghum, 1988), Dahong denglong gaogao gua (Raise the red lantern, 1991), and Bawang bieji (Farewell my concu­ bine, 1993). Elaborate cinematography, lavish colors, exotic landscapes, state-

Teahouse, Shadowplt1y, Bricolage 47

of-the-art post-production, and the rise of Gong Li as the vedette of this new

oriental cinematic reverie have ushered Chinese cinema into the spotlight of

the international film scene. 54 The success of this new cinema is a well-known story and I will not reiterate

it here. What is of interest to the present inquiry is the status of early Chinese

cinema in the emergence of a renewed cinematic consciousness in the latest

drive for modernization. In the early eighties, as many filmmakers and actors

who were active in the thirties and forties were rehabilitated, some of their films

that had survived the perils of history were also reexhibited after decades of

wasting away in archives. But they are mainJy the "left-wing" films (zuoyi diany­

ing) such as Chuncan (Spring silkworms, 1933), Yugua11g qu (Song of the fisher­

men, 1934), Dalu (Big road, 1935), and Malu tianshi (Street angel, 1937).55 The

film industry during the Republican period as a whole remained a sensitive

subject, and relevant materials were onJy available to a few researchers. The 1982

reexhibition of some more "progressive" early films, made mostly in the Shang­

hai studios before the Communist takeover in 1949, nevertheless had consider­

able impact on the rebuilding of a national cinema after the hiatus of the Cul­

tural Revolution. 56 It also inadvertently stimulated a cultural nostalgia for a

cinematic past which was not dictated by a single ideological and formal ortho­

doxy. In their reassessment of Chinese film history, however, the filmmakers

and critics of the 1980s voiced their ambivalence toward the Chinese cinematic

tradition as a whole. Its deep roots in the theatrical and literary traditions are

singled out as the main obstacle for developing a truly modern cinema. The ad­

vocates and practitioners of the New Cinema assumed a mission to rid Chinese

cinema of the "walking stick of drama" and to aim for the "modernization of

film language."57 The Chinese critical discourse on film in the 1980s, marked by

a resuscitated interest in Bazin's film theory, signaled a shift of critical focus

from the previous preoccupation with political ( truth-)content to an "unprece­

dented self-consciousness of the cinematic medium, the belated awakening of a

cinema as cinema."58 The early phase of the post-Cultural Revolution period

saw desperate gestures made by directors old and young to catch up with the

"world" (that is, the West). This is manifest in an unreflective "cinematic" frenzy as depicted by Leo Ou-fan Lee:

Gone are the old "normal ways" of spatial realism and slow relaxed tempo. lnstead, one finds a splurge of fancy techniques: fast zooms, close-ups, split screens, fast cut­ ting, superimposed images-as if the Chinese filmmakers were determined to catch up with the technical progress of the West and to show the outside world that the Chinese are capable of performing all the advanced "tricks" with the camera.59

The failure of many films produced in this "modernization" drive, or indeed

Hollywoodification, have led film critics and filmmakers to searcli for an indige-

48 Z H EN Z H ANG

nous or "national form" (minw xingshi) for Chinese cinema. The shift to the

question of national culture and form is not unrelated to the emergence of the so-called Fifth Generation cinema, which inadvertently and ironicaUy became

an international legend. As a unified group, the Fifth Generation hardly exists. Individual directors and cinematographers differ widely in visual style and the­

matic approach. Trained by the prestigious Beijing Film Academy after the Cul­

tural Revolution, the Fifth Generation directors have little or no background in theater or literature (not to mention the entertainment business), as did the

generation of Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu. Having spent many years in the countryside as zhiqing (educated youth) during the Cultural Revolution,

their cameras (re)tumed to the peripheral rural landscape, or the "past;' as an

imaginary yet visually palpable space. The old hybrid urban Shanghai culture that fostered China's early cinema definitely did not provide the "cultural roots" for this new generation of filmmakers until very recently.

A closer look at some of the successful films of this New Cinema, however, reveals a curious kinship with early cinema that may not be visible at the outset. Although the connection to spoken drama is dearly absent, many such films are hardly pure filmic events. For one thing, many of this group of films are literary adaptations (Yellow Earth, Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, Farewell My Concubine, Hi,ozhe [To live, 1994]). The many references to traditional Chinese

performing arts and rituals in these films, such as folk song, folk dance, Peking opera, funerals or weddings, often constitute the films' most spectacular mo­

ments, which erupt into or out of the narrative economy. Zhang Yimou's To Live, which is explicitly structured around the vicissitudes of the traditional "leather puppet play" (shadowplay) in twentieth-century China, invites further pon­

dering on the intricate relationship between early cinema and contemporary cinema.60

Toward the end of the 1980s, witli the booming of mass media culture, the focus of critical debate in film criticism began to shift to the "entertainment film."61 Film historians scrambled to rearticulate an even earlier cinema before

the "left-wing" cinema, whose melodramas were thought to be too didactic and formally too much influenced by HoUywood.62 A great deal of scholarly atten­ tion was paid to "shadowplay" as an aesthetic and historical category in the study of the genesis of Chinese cinema.63 The emphasis on "plays" is also mani­ fest in studies on short comedies of"perverse pleasures," spectacular and trans­ gressive martial arts films, and films based on "mandarin ducks and butterflies" popular fiction and drama.64 Unlike previous mainstream scholarship, which has trivialized or infantilized tliis cinema by accusing it of being "vulgar" in content and "primitive" in form, Ma Junxiang's study, for example, insightfully

identifies this cinema as a "compensation" for the absence of avant-garde and genre film in the Chinese context. Ma argues that the martial arts film, which

Teahouse, Shadowplay, Bricolage 49

was a great success in domestic as well as overseas (mainly Southeast Asian)

markets, carried over the emphasis on optical techniques from the short comjcs

or "attractions," and was "avant-garde" in integrating traditional narrative art

and modern visual media to create a powerful but hardly pure "national form."65 Beyond the ontology of film, and viewing early cinema as a complex cultural

and economic practice, the noted film historian and theorist Li Shaobai cal.led

for a critical investigation of film market and spectatorship in a broad historical

framework.66 Such an approach to early Chinese cinema tends to view the cine­

matic experience it yielded a� a complex process involving internal as well as

e.xternal influences, popular as well as experimental aspirations, artistic as well

as commercial concerns. The critical value of this historical revision of a ne­ glected part of early Chinese cinema is not to be underestimated, although its tendency to rechannel early cinema into a new discourse of "national form" has

to be carefully examined. Moreover, the prevalent emphasis in this scholarship

on narrative integration as a yardstick for a "mature" cinema still betrays an

evolutionist influence and an unwitting subscription to Hollywood cinematic

codes in the (re)writing of film history.

The theoretical explorations in early cinema paralleled the resurgent interest

in martial arts and popular urban literature and film at a time when rapid mod­

errnzation has spurred an explosion of media culture in China. The urban

space once again provides a hotbed for this proliferation of mass media. Chi­

nese cinema finds itself encountering a new yet not entirely strange spectator­

ship. The "teahouse culture" seems to have returned, accompanied by new vari­ ants such as large-screen video projection theaters and karaoke bars. In Shang­

hai, while many unprofitable cinemas have been turned into "teahouses" or

nightclubs, some have rebaptized themselves with the famous names used in old Shanghai and remodeled their theaters into entertainment centers. Some

renovated luxurious viewing rooms (or mini ting) are complete with coffee ta­

bles, cocktails, and discreet loveseats ("mandarin ducks seats:' yuan yang zuo) or

family seats. Cheaper all-night shows also attract restless youth and homeless

migrant souls. Serial TV dramas and films based on the life of old Shanghai are

the latest fad in visual production. And it is not surprising that Chen Kaige,

with his Fengyue (Temptress moon, 1995) and Zhang Yimou, with his Yao a yao,

yao dao waipo qiao (Shanghai Triad, 1995), are leading the vogue once again.

Filmmakers find themselves increasingly divided not only between "serious" and "commercial" films but also between cinema and television production,

and some have even taken up advertisement work. But more ambitious film di­

rectors, including Zhang Y-rmou and Chen Kaige, are aiming to produce a sort of commercial avant-garde film with enormous (foreign) budgets, for domestic and international audiences alike, but certainly at the expense of the kind of cultural radicalism that made them famous.

G ZHEN ZHANG In a sense, Chinese cinema and media cuJture at large have finally managed

to "march into the world," leaving traumatic memories and the current un­

evenness of development "behind," while hastily leaping into a globalizing

postmodern world order. To install a contemporary perspective on the issue of

early Chinese cinema at this juncture can be helpful to the understanding of the

symptomatic crisis of perceptual consciousness brought by rapid moderniza­

tion and advanced televisual communication technologies in China today, now

inundated by pagers, mobile phones, fax machines, pirated videotapes, and

even laser or digital film disks. 67 A longer view of Chinese film history is not so

much to see early cinema as an object of nostalgia for the contemporary Chi­

nese cinema, its critics and spectators, as to shed some light on how a histori­

cally neglected film like Laborer's Love may prove to be more than a significant

textual instance, because it embodies in itself many issues that have haunted

Chinese filmmakers and critics for decades. The sustained recourse to indige­

nous art forms-in particuJar, the traditional theater-and their modes of ad­

dress, on the one hand, and a fascination with cinema as an international mass

medium on the other, constitute a dynamic cuJtural nexus that engenders the

making and reception of Chinese cinema now and decades ago. Laborer's Love

is a random and hybrid beginning that has become the inevitable starting point

for this inquiry. The brevity of this silent story and its jocular overtone have a

long echo that we are only beginning to hear.

168 YING JIN ZHANG

thick powder and lipstick. "The painting was never completed," Wu reminisces, "but the image of this miserable woman had been deeply imprinted in my memory."34

Instead of a painting, Wu submitted a screenplay to Lianhua Company, and the result was the silent film Goddess. Following the narrative pattern estab­ lished by Zheng Zhengqiu in A Woman in Shanghai and refashioned by Sun Yu in Daybreak, Wu presented a memorable screen image of a kind and self­ sacrificing prostitute. Using a more sophisticated film language than its prede­ cessors, Goddess portrays a Shanghai streetwalker, despised by the local com­ munity, who has a heart of gold. By concentrating largely on moral issues (such as the child's education, the mother's virtue, and the principal's integrity) and by presenti11g urban prostitution as "a problem of our entire society, a disease

of our social and economic system,"35 the film succeeds in making publicly visi­

ble an otherwise invisible mother figure, who struggles in the lowest social stra­ tum to fulfill her expected role in culturaJ reproduction. As the camera lingers lovingly and "excessively" on the female star Ruan Lingyu, the viewer is com­ pelled to "experience an innocent pleasure" and to feel the virtue of the suffer­

ing mother, "an ideal mother" in the filmic imagination.36 The newly established visibility of the "virtuous prostitute," however, is

framed in a patriarchal discourse about the self-sacrificing mother: "Goddess af­ firms a woman's self-denial," a woman whose "mission in life is to provide her son with an education."37 1n gender terms, it is evident that the objective being pursued in the film is not the articuJation of a female voice, nor the attainment

of"woman's self,"38 but rather the realization of a particular type of male fan­ tasy. This male fantasy is played out by the old school principal, a morally up­ right paternal figure who intervenes on behalf of the mother and eventually takes over her role. In a touching scene near the end of the film, the principal visits the mother in jail (after she killed the gambler who had stolen all her sav­ ings for her son's education) and promises to raise her son as his own (instead of letting the child stay in an orphanage). By assuming his new role of surrogate father, the principal secures patrilineal continuity on a symbolic level, relegat­ ing the despised mother once and for all to the realm of oblivion, and thereby marking the film as conservative (see fig. 18).39

A film full of the pathos of unrewarded virtue, Goddess participates in a male discourse on prostitution typical in Republican China, which dictates that sex­

ual dangers be contained, public disorder be reduced, and male offspring be le­

gitimately adopted. In conformity with this discourse, Goddess sees to it that the woman of ill repute is safely locked behind bars, though she is still seen pacing uneasily like a "caged animal," and that she willingly erases herself-and her motherhood-from the male narra.tive. Hence her tearful plea to the principal:

Prostit11tio11 and Ur/Jan Imagination 169

18. A virtuous prostitute in Goddess ( 1934), courtesy of the China Film Archive.

"When [my son) grows up, please tell him that his mother died long ago, so that he will never know he had a mother like me.'?n a sharp contrast to an earlier chaotic scene where the police are busy chasing the unlicensed streetwalkers at night, the final prison scene, with the camera focusing on the securely locked iron gates, reassures the audience that male control of the city has been firmly restored. With this twist in male fantasy, Goddess turns out to be one more ex­ ample of the "masculine quest to stabilize the mobility of a sexually imaged re­ ality,"40 which is the modern city of Shanghai. In a montage, Shanghai is fanta­ sized as an alluring prostitute smiling directly at the audience against a back­ ground of skyscrapers and flashing neon lights.

In spite of its focus on prostitution, Goddess is marked by its lack of an ex­ plicit display of female sexuality. A few sequences show the prostitute soliciting her clients on the street at night. One scene is especially striking in terms of its artistic quality and its possible influence by a German film: we first see a me­ dium shot of the woman's feet, which uneasily tap on the pavement until they are joined by a man's feet, and then follow a tracking shot of the man's and the woman's feet walking together along the street and disappearing in a doorway.41 As a rule, these solicitation sequences in Goddess quickly cut to the morning scenes where the mother takes good care of her lonely child in a shabby room. The only evidence betraying the mother's unpresentable trade (and her con-

170 Y I NG J IN Z HA NG

cealed sexuality) in the room are two pretty dresses she hangs on the wall, but the association of these dresses is beyond the comprehension of her innocent

child. One exception to the concealment of sexuality in the film is found in what

William Rothman sees as "an erotic bond"between the prostitute and the prin­

cipal. In his two brief encounters with the prostitute, the principal manifests an almost irresistible desire to touch her physically: he fails the first time in her room (instead he pats the boy on the head-a gesture of misplaced or displaced

desire) but succeeds the second time in the prison (when the mother is beside

herself with grief over her dilemma).42 In these two "touching" scenes, l would suggest, the principal's desire to touch the woman is more than a physical de­

sire, for it also powerfully articulates the desire of the male intellectual lo pen­ etrate the unknown world of urban prostitution (unmistakably gendered as

female) and to narrate it in a rational (that is, male) discourse. The otherwise concealed narrative desire is fully articulated when the principal, after his first

meeting with the mother, makes an eloquent speech at the school's faculty meeting in an attempt to retain the boy as a legitimate student. Unfortunately,

the principal's attempt fails, and he chooses to resign, thus distinguishing him­

self as a benevolent figure standing alone in an unsympathetic society. In his reading of Goddess, Rothman is puzzled by the film's evasion of female

sexuality: "Then why does he [ the principal] not marry her? How can it be that

this possibility is not even considered, as it could not fail to be if this were an

American film?"43 My response to Rothman's question is that, in Goddess, the Chinese concern with patrilineal continuity precludes any effort to explore the

issue of happiness in an individual's case. Individual pursuit of happiness was

still perceived as a Western concept in 1930s China, although such a concept had shaped the happy endings in Western prostitution films such as Frank Borzage's Seventh Heaven (1927) and Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932).44

The evasion or concealment of female sexuality in Goddess does bring out further questions. If one agrees that the image of a "loving prostitute exempli­ fies the renunciation of a predatory female sexuality in submission to paternal Law:'45 then Goddess may have reaffirmed this paternal law, even if uncon­ sciously, by resolutely denying a narrative space to female sexuality. To guaran­

tee the working of this paternal law, the idealized mother in Goddess is "saved" from contracting contagious disease, which was a common danger to Chinese streetwalkers at the time and which made them a species of urban predator in

the eyes of the public.46 The predatory female sexuality of the streetwalker was discussed in print media with great concern in the 1930s. Among other things, it was deemed particularly detrimental to the health of the nation, because the

venereal disease husbands contracted from prostitutes would unavoidably be passed on to wives, who would then pass it on to the next generation through

Prostit11tio11 nnd Urban lmnginntion 171

pregnancy.47 In the fictional world of Goddess, however, the audience is ensured that the potentially predatory prostitute is now safe behind bars, and that her existence will be erased from the public memory, perhaps even from that of her son. Read against the serious public concerns with the moral and medical im­ plications of urban prostitution in the 1930s, the ending of Goddess is doubly significant: at the symbolic level, it restores paternal law and reaffirms the sense of urban security; at the narrative level, it gives a seamless closure to a tragic tale

of the kind and self-sacrificing prostitute.

Female Body and Male Fantasy in 'Boatman's Daughter'

The final shot in Goddess consists of a split screen: in the lower left corner, the prostitute looks up at her son, who appears in the upper right corner, whis­ pers to her, smiles, and then fades out; she turns around with a deep sigh and a faint smile, and her image fades out, too. As mentioned earlier in the case of Daybreak, the screen image of the prostitute's smiles seems to have attracted particular attention from Chinese filmmakers. in his 1936 critical profile of Shen Xiling, Ling He points to the "troubled smile" Shen's films usuaUy bring out in the viewer-a kind of bitter smile that appears the moment one is about to burst into tears. According to Ling He, the troubled smile has become a stylistic feature of Shen's films, such as Nuxing de nahan (The protest of women, 1933), Shanghai ershisi xiaoshi (Twenty-four hours in Shanghai, 1934), Xiangchou (Homesick, 1934), and Boatman'sDaughter.48 Like Zheng Zhengqiu, Sun Yu, and Wu Yonggang, Shen wanted to expose social injustice and to show his sympathy for suffering women. In his Boatman's Daughter, a sound film about an innocent and lovable girl who is forced into prostitution, Shen includes a brothel scene in which a prostitute, after drinking a cup of wine, sings of her tragic fate: "Today, only today I Can I tolerate such suffering. / Tomorrow, yet tomorrow,/ My voice lost, I My skin decayed, / I'll be abandoned in a deserted lot, / like useless coal cinders .... "◄9

The performance of this sad song occurs near the end of Boatman's Daughter and is intercut with a chaotic scene in which a factory worker, Gao Tie, breaks

into the brothel to rescue his former sweetheart, A Ling, but is overpowered by the police. By highlighting such a dramatic-albeit futile-attempt at justice, Shen continued Chinese filmmakers' narrative effort to construct the meaning of urban prostitution. Unlike the dominance of dull urban scenes in Goddess, however, Shen's film provides many scenes where the auclience can smile hap­ pily, at least for the time being. In the opening scene of Boatman's Daughter, the natural beauty of Hangzhou's scenic West Lake is displayed to the viewer as if in a traditional scroll painting: tourists boating in the lake, the ripples shimmer-

172 Y ING J I N Z H A NG

ing in the sunshine, and the distant hills half-hidden by the morning mist. For a contemporary critic like Ling He, Shen's opening scene is as fine as the waterfall

scene in Frank Borzage's Little Man, What Now? (1934). Indeed, the opening scene of West Lake reveals Shen's penchant for usentimentality" (shengdi

mente), "emotionalism" (clamqing zhuyi), and a kind of"realist romance."so

Another good example of Shen's sentimentality is his narration of the ro­

mance between A Ling and Gao Tie according to the convention of the Chinese

fairy tale. In this traditional genre, a flower spirit or a fairy maiden would do all

the housework for the unmarried male protagonist (usually a poor scholar or a

hardworking cowherd) while he is not home, and the two usually fall in love

when they finally meet. In Boatman's Daughter, Gao has been helping A Ling

and her old father row a boat full of people across the lake in the daytime. One evening, A Ling notices Gao is clumsy with needlework. She sneaks into his room, steals his worn clothes, and secretly returns them after she has mended them. Naturally, Gao is all too happy when he catches his "fairy/spirit" in his

room and finds out that she is none other than his beloved A Ling. The two are later seen in a romantic tryst on the lake, rowing a small boat under tlte full moon. Shen's romantic fairy tale, besides being simply pleasing to his audience, also reveals tlte persistence of fantasy in Chinese narrative across time.

A different-and certainly more modern-type of male fantasy is elaborated in Boatman's Daughter. As is clear from the start of the film, A Ling's youthful body is delivered to the gaze of not only male characters in the film but also of the contemporary film audience. Voyeurism is fully at work in the film, espe­ cially in tlte modeling scene in which A Ling is hired to model for three urban playboy-artists. In a spacious modern setting, she appears completely changed, dressed fashionably and made up. Under an intense voyeuristic gaze, she first lies down on a couch, then sits up biting a flower between her lips, and finally stands still with her hands stretching upward in a gesture that reminds one artist of certain French paintings. The playboys take turns photographing and painting, and they enhance their "aesthetic" pleasure by playing Western music on the gramophone. Obviously, the playboys' epicurean taste is relished by the audience in this scene, in which the sexualized female body is objectified as an concrete embodiment of male artistic talents.

ln moral terms, the discrepancy between this modeling scene and the fairy­ ta1e romance mentioned above may be quite striking, but Shen Xiling's formal training in Western art accounts for their connection. A native of Hangzhou, Shen studied engineering at a local school before pursuing industrial design, oil painting, literature, and experimental theater in Japan. He returned to China in 1929 and participated in the drama movement. In 1931 he became an art direc­ tor for Tianyi but soon moved on to Mingxing where he started directing. Shen's familiarity with Western art is manifest in his mise-en-scene for the

Prostitution and Urbanlmaginatio11 1-73 modeling scene. In an ambience that smacks of aestheticism and decadence (both with strong French "h�h-cuJture" flavors), the modeling scene consti­tutes the first stage in which the "corrupt" moneyed society forces poor girls into prostitution: A Ling's debt-ridden father is sick, and modeling is the only way she can make quick money to pay for his medical treatment. By dwelling on A Ling's agony in a close-up shot (she is so worried about her father that tears start trick.ling down her cheeks), Boatman's Daughter condemns the West­ ernized artists from a Chinese ethico-moraJ point of view: the decadent lifestyle is thus contrasted with the traditional virtue of filial piety.

One may suspect, however, at the level of textual representation, "moral con­ demnation serves the purpose of libertine titillation,"51 for this scene offers plenty of space for male fantasy to run wild. When one of the playboys suggests that A Ling pose nude for them, as in French painting, it is evident that the same type of male fantasy experienced by the characters is being tactfully pro­ jected or relayed to the contemporary film audience as well. Indeed, what the character suggests in the film (and, by extension, what the audience would pre­ sumably have in mind) might be something like the scene of nude modeling in Chen Tiansuo's Zaisheng (Resurrection, 1933), where an artist is painting a fe­ male model in a spacious room with elaborate, Western-style decorations, and his underage son is sitting beside him and painting the houses of his imagina­ tion (see fig. 19).52

At this juncture, let us look at another-perhaps subconscious-level of sig­ nification in the modeling scene. In the process of objectifying the female body as an artistic product, the playboys are engaged in a different type of display as well: that is, to display themselves as model artists-who fully appreciate femi­ nine beauty-to the film audience. To a certain extent, the scene stages a narcis­ sistic quest for the concealed male body, which seems to be revealed only through the fetishized object of male desire-the sensuous, erotic body of a fe­ male model. It is in this sense that Baudelaire's idea of art as prostitution be­ comes relevant here, for modeling provides the male artists with a perfect occa­ sion to make public their otherwise private ( concealed or repressed) fantasy.

The connection between modeling and prostitution is established in the film narrative as a turning point of A Ling's life, but her posture, lying on the sofa, carries rich connotations in the culture of prostitution in both China and the West. ln the June 1916 issue of The Grand Magazine, for instance, a Shanghai prostitute is displayed in a photograph in the same posture, and the posture is designated as "spring sleep" (chrmshui) in the caption.53 As the magazine editor Bao Tianxiao recalls, the prostitutes were the first group of modern Chinese women who were wilJing to make their photographs available to the reading public, and some Shanghai publishers, like Di Pingzi (pen name of Di Bamcian, style Chuqing, 1872-1940 ), were quick to take advantage of the prostitutes' wilJ-

174 YINGJIN ZHANG

19. A still of the nude modeling in Resurrection (1933) (Lra11gyo11, no. 78 [July 1933]: 31).

ingness to cLisplay themselves by setting up photography studios of their own and offering free services to the city's demimo11dni11es.5-I In this sense, the pos­ ture of"spring sleep" as a public image in modern China was an outcome of the introduction of Western portrait photography and printing technology.

But the "spring sleep" posture can be traced to earlier precedents in the tra­ cLition of Western painting. Edouard Manet's controversial Olympin ( 1865) de­ liberately transformed the previously"innocent" posture in classical painting­ as in Titian's Ve1111s of Urbino (ca. 1538)-to highlight the morally troubling con­ nection between art and prostitution.ss Interestingly, such a highly provocative Western posture traveled to modern China via photography, painting, and print media. A Chinese photograph of a famous late Qing courtesan, for in­ stance, features her in a posture similar to the one in 0/ympin: both figures stare cLirectly at the viewer, though the Chinese prostitute is fully clothed in a tradi­ tional costume while lying on a Western-style sofa (see fig. 20).56 A similar pos­ ture is found in Beiynng /r11apno (The pei-yang pictorial news), which regularly carried full-bodied nudes in Western painting in its attempt to promote art and common knowledge in the 1920s and 1930s. On December 10, 1927, the pictorial published a sketch carrying its own English caption-"A study of pose for

Prostitution and Urban Imagination 175

model ... By a famous artist in Paris"-in which the female model display herself in a posture almost identical with that of the late Qing courte an men­ tioned above, except that the foreign model pose completely nude. A question printed in the Chinese caption-"Is thi po e OK?"-returns us, intertextually, to the modeling scene in Boatman's Daughter, where the playboy arti ts take pains to get A Ling's poses right: right, that i , according to the tradition of French painting (see fig. 21).57