Authors

Ran Wei¹;  ¹ Durham University, UK

Discussion

The interwar period of China was a time of multicultural encounter and collision. For one thing, a self-conscious and progressive cultural modernisation from within, initiated by the New Culture Movement during the 1910s and 1920s with the May Fourth demonstrations being the turning point, challenged the traditional cultural codes. At the same time, the transnational cultural circulation, resulting from the imperialist incursion and (semi-)colonisation, also impacted the local culture. Some Chinese filmmakers of the time endeavoured to engage with the new circumstances, by placing emphasis on urban and rural landscapes and by applying the device of montage to create juxtapositions and re-organise filmed reality. The reception of Soviet montage theory in China started to gain traction in China in the early 1930s. The theoretical frameworks revolving around Sergei Eisenstein’s ideas of conflict and the dialectic approach to film form, Vsevolod Pudovkin’s discussion of screen time and space, and Dziga Vertov’s concept of Kino-eye, were introduced though varied in scale. The paper will seek to illustrate some of these processes by looking closely at the city symphony sequence from Yuan Muzhi’s narrative film Scenes of City Life (1935) and the travel documentary The Man Who Has a Camera (1933) by Liu Na’ou. In his film Yuan focused on the cosmopolitan Shanghai and foregrounded the internal conflict of the semi-colonial modernity via the selected and reframed topography. Liu juxtaposed the scenes of Taiwan and Manchuria, the regions under the control of Japan, as well as the images of Tokyo with the shots from Guangzhou, the revolutionary city under the administration of Chinese Republican government, to reveal the relation between China and Japan. The paper will also evaluate the Chinese film practice against the background of relevant Soviet films, Shanghai Document (1928) directed by Yakov Bliokh and Man With a Movie Camera (1929) directed by Vertov. 

The paper will put forward two main arguments. Firstly, it will suggest that Chinese filmmakers actively deployed montage as a transformative cinematic device and they used montage to not only display the views of the cities or regions but also attempt to understand and rethink the (semi-) colonial condition (through cinematic construction). Secondly, I will argue that, through the application of montage, the Chinese film practice also revealed its own features and its own specific ways of seeing. The Soviets applied the ideological frame on the principle of the contrast between the working classes and the bourgeoisie to propagate the idea of revolutionary internationalism. On the other hand, the Chinese filmmakers, as the insiders immediately entangled in post/inter-colonial context, emphasised the tension caused by the dynamics between self and others, assimilation and resistance, participation and critical reflection.